The Rudolf Steiner Archive

MY DEAR FRIENDS! Movements such as our spiritual scientific movement have always been fostered in such a way that something that was to be impressed upon the spiritual culture of the times, or on culture in general, was first cultivated on the level of some formal social organization or society. And since the conditions of human interaction are the same today as they have been throughout history, it is also necessary for us, to a certain extent, to cultivate our spiritual scientific strivings within the framework of a formal organization.

Now, it has been the experience of almost all such organizations that it is difficult, at least in actual practice, to understand the concept of the society needed to foster a particular spiritual current like this. Time and again we're presented with evidence that there are very many people who actually do not like having to join a society. They admit that they feel uncomfortable about joining such a society; they would prefer to absorb its spiritual wealth through reading or listening to lectures not bound to any organized society, or through still other means. Only this morning, for example, I received a letter to that effect.

The kinds of reasons people give for taking this position have to be taken seriously. But let me emphasize again that a spiritual movement like this one is of necessity very different in its impulses and its whole way of thinking, feeling, and doing from the thinking, feeling, and doing of the other people around it. Therefore, to introduce such a movement to humanity with no help from a formal organization would be much more difficult than to do this by means of a society whose members are preparing, through their interactions and their ongoing absorption of spiritual scientific thoughts and concepts, to be a kind of tool or instrument for disseminating our spiritual science. As a consequence, however, the concept of a society of this kind has to be taken extremely seriously, because in quite practical terms this society has to become a vehicle for the spiritual current in question.

You need only look at our own Society as an example and examine how different it is from other societies, associations, or organizations that people have called into existence. This difference will be particularly noticeable if you keep one thing in mind. Just suppose that recent events confronting us had made us entertain the thought of disbanding the Anthroposophical Society as such. Let's assume hypothetically that we wanted to dissolve the Society because of problems within it. Now, if the Anthroposophical Society were simply an organization like many others, of course it would be possible to simply dissolve it, set something else up in its place, and eliminate the disgraceful circumstances in the process.

However, our Anthroposophical Society is different in a very significant respect from other organizations or societies founded on the basis of some program with a certain number of points and statutes. That kind of society can be dissolved at any moment. If we were to dissolve the Anthroposophical Society, however, it would not be dissolved in actual fact. As the Anthroposophical Society, as a society existing on behalf of a spiritual scientific movement, we are different from other societies in that our Society is founded, not on a program of abstract and therefore unreal points, but on something very real. Our basis is a real one.

Just look at the fact that each member of the Anthroposophical Society is entitled to have access to our lecture cycles, while other people are not.¹ That's a very real basis, because dissolving the Anthroposophical Society would do so in name only; it would not do away with the fact that a certain number of people are in possession of these cycles. And it is an equally real fact that a certain number of people are carrying a specific wealth of wisdom in their heads. I cannot tell exactly how great the percentage is of people who have the things we talk about in their heads—in contrast to those who only have them in “visions”—but that's not the important thing as far as the Society is concerned. It remains a reality that a certain wealth of wisdom, a sum total of things that really exist, are present in the hearts and minds of people who have belonged to the Anthroposophical Society until now. That cannot be taken away from them even by dissolving the Society.

So the Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization, but is constructed on the basis of reality. Thus, dissolving it would have absolutely no immediate effect on its continued existence as far as reality is concerned. Our Society compares to other societies and organizations as something real compares to things that are merely thought out. We must keep this weighty difference in mind in order to understand the concept of our Society in the right way. And it is only because a large number of members have counted, more or less consciously, on our Society's solid grounding in reality, on its basis in something more than programmatic points, that we see an institute of higher learning for spiritual science being built on this hill, a building that will further enhance our connection to something real.

It would be possible for some group of dreamers to get together and decide not to wear collars and ties, to wear only sandals on their feet, and perhaps to simplify life in other ways by disregarding certain other social conventions or “prejudices,” as they might call them. (I have chosen a hypothetical example so that no one present needs to feel put on the spot.) Disbanding a group like that would not change anything significant. But we are not simply a group of dreamers; we are different in that we are fully aware of the weight and importance of our grounding in reality.

Without getting into splitting hairs, we also need to distinguish between the concept of a society such as the one in which we develop a specific spiritual teaching, and that of a club or similar organization. We have to admit that the appropriate concept of a such a society eludes many of us when we think about the conditions of our life in this Society, and we are left contemplating the concept of a club or similar organization. In that kind of organization, statutes and conditions are set up that have to be met. In a Society like ours, however, that is not enough. It is different from a club in much more than name only.

In our Society, the important thing, as I have explained several times in the last few weeks, is that the concept of the society really be taken seriously.² This means that all members must be aware that belonging to the Society involves more than simply receiving membership cards and being entitled to call themselves members of the Society. In fact, they are all organs of the Society. Because of that, something subtle and yet very specific has to live among the members, something for which each member should feel a certain responsibility. As individuals, they must be aware of both the obvious and subtler needs and well-being of other members of the Society, and experienced members must be ready and willing to use their experience in supporting those who have joined more recently. These more experienced members do not necessarily have to reveal their experience; after all, what matters is how they apply their experience in daily life.

The word “trust” often comes up in this connection. In the course of a lecture I gave a few weeks ago, I explained that we do not need to have trust in our teachings, because these teachings will try to justify our confidence in them through every single practical measure they give rise to.³ However, we do need to try to have trust in each other and to make sure that trust is justified. We must try to bring about real connections between members. It goes a long way toward developing the kind of “ideal aura” necessary in a Society such as ours if each experienced member, without snooping around like a spy or a detective—that is, without violating anyone's privacy—can really keep an eye on the ups and downs of only ten other members, and do it without having to tell them they are considered less experienced. Of course, it's impossible to legislate trust; it has to be earned. Our more experienced members need to make a concerted effort to win the trust of those who have been in the Society for only a short time.

Such things have been mentioned often in the course of our Society's years of activity, but it has never been as necessary to speak about them as it is here and now. When members of the Anthroposophical Society were scattered among the rest of the population in various cities, that was a very different state of affairs from so many of us living here on top of each other, on display for everyone else, so to speak. This situation makes it imperative that we take a long and serious look at the basic premises of how we live together in the Society.

Of course, a society such as ours will never be able to please all the people living outside it. It will never be able to prevent some of these people from indulging in all kinds of slander, ridicule, unjustified attacks, and so on. But that's not the point; what I am going to say now is independent of all that. The important thing is that the members of the Society really do everything possible in each single instance to show up the attacks as unjustified and lacking any basis in fact. To do this, we have to look at details, my friends. It's not enough to just pay attention to the major issues in our outer life. We have to be equally aware of the little things.

For instance, if some of our members are sitting among other people on the trolley on the way back to Basel at night, and they talk loudly about every little twinge in their ether body, that is not exactly a crime. If someone criticizes them for it, we might well reply, “So what? Is it all that important?” In fact, however, it is really very important because it puts the dignity and seriousness of our movement in question. Thus, even though such incidents are only trifling matters, they ought to be avoided. We ought to start reforming ourselves wherever that change can have a real effect. Above all, we have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.

We can assume that we know what we are talking about when we speak about the ether body, but the people who may be listening do not. They may be in the same situation as a maid whom some of my closer acquaintances know well. This woman worked for anthroposophists, and because she was interested in finding out what anthroposophy was all about, she attended an introductory course given by one of our members, and came home saying, “Well, I learned that I have four bodies, not just one. But I have this tiny little room and a very narrow bed, and now I don't know how all those bodies are going to fit in!” This is a true story. It took place in the house of people I know quite well. So you see, people who hear you talking about all the little twinges of your ether body will naturally think that you're talking about the ether body as if it were a physical body; thus, you are actually leading them astray and keeping them from developing any closer connection to our movement.

That's why it is important for us to learn to take the things we talk about seriously and precisely. Even if they are only minor matters in themselves, they can raise a virtual wall of prejudices around us, and that can and should be avoided. In a society like this, it is important for us to learn to speak really precisely, or else it may gradually become impossible to foster what should be fostered within this Society.

Today I feel compelled to mention a number of things that will probably seem totally superfluous to most of you, simply because the natural response is, “Well, what is that supposed to mean—we need to be precise in our way of speaking? Of course we do.” But just keep your eyes and ears open next time something happens somewhere or other, when something has been said and one person passes it on to the next. If you really pay close attention to whether or not things are being presented accurately, in many instances you will easily notice the deviation from what is strictly accurate. When something someone has heard or seen gets passed on to the next person and then to the next, and so on, what comes out can be a monstrous caricature of what actually happened or was actually said. This experience is all too common in our Society.

We have to take into account that, in a spiritual scientific movement, we can work constructively only if we get used to being exact, to really understanding things precisely. Spiritual science forces us to focus spiritually on things that have nothing to do with the outer physical world, and in order to develop the right relationship to them, we need a counterbalance of some kind. The only suitable counterbalance is to approach things on the physical plane as realistically as possible. After all, accuracy belongs to reality.

Some time ago I gave a public lecture in Munich that really startled a number of people.⁴ Its subject was the nature of evil. In that lecture, I explained that the forces at work in evil on the physical plane are in a sense nothing else but forces that have been transferred from higher planes of existence to the physical plane. Certain forces that can lead us to recognize and master the spiritual if applied up there in the spiritual world can turn to evil down here in the physical world.

The force that enables us to understand the spiritual world belongs only in the spiritual world; this same force causes all kinds of harm if it is directly and thoughtlessly transferred to the physical plane. For what is the nature of this force? It consists in making one's thinking independent of the physical plane. When this capacity is applied to the physical plane itself, it turns into deceit and dishonesty. Thus, people who were called upon to disseminate spiritual science have always seen great danger in doing so, because what is needed for understanding higher planes of existence is harmful when applied directly to the physical world.

That is why a counterbalance is needed: in order to keep our ability to understand the spiritual world suitably pure and beautiful, we must develop our feeling for truth and exactitude in the physical world as thoroughly as possible. If we do not count on exactitude on the physical plane, then in a so-called occult society certain tendencies developed through spiritual scientific practices immediately mingle inappropriately with the very lowest aspects of the physical plane.

Let's look at ordinary materialistic society in a broader sense of the word. As you know—or you may have heard about it even if you have no firsthand knowledge of it—there are certain social circles where gossip prevails. At least from hearsay, you will be aware that this gossip or tittle-tattle is going on, that it prevails in ordinary materialistic bourgeois society. The quality of this gossip is usually not very high and much can be said against it, but at least for the most part no esoteric contents get mixed up with it. But when gossip is the general rule in an occult society, esoteric ideas are the first to get drawn into it.

I hope it is possible to really talk about things like this in our circle, because it should be possible to say something within our Society without having it immediately spread abroad in places where it is then misunderstood. Our experiences in this regard, however, are also not the best, and if they continue, we will indeed have to organize our Society differently. Things that are said within the Society have to remain in the Society in the strictest sense of the word, because it really must be possible from time to time to say things that could not simply be said casually outside our Society.

Of course, in our Society we often have to talk about the karmic relationships between people. It may well be that such relationships exist—in fact, of course they exist—but if we continually get our views on karma mixed up with our ordinary everyday relationships, we are not taking the concept of truthfulness literally enough, and the result is not only nonsensical but also harmful. Truthfulness is a concept that has to be applied extremely strictly.

I can think of any number of cases in esoteric circles, both inside and outside our Society, where subjective matters that take place as a matter of course on the physical plane have been studded and embellished with esoteric truths. Let me mention one extreme example that may not happen very frequently in our Society, but it is one of the things that can be experienced. Indeed, it has happened numerous times.

Many people have learned about reincarnation, and they have also learned that Christ was alive on Earth at a certain point in time. I have experienced more than once that women who have become aware of these two spiritual facts—reincarnation and Christ's incarnation—have in all seriousness imagined that they have been chosen to give birth to the Christ and have attempted to arrange their lives to make this possible. It is unpleasant to have to mention these things and call a spade a spade, but we must do it to protect the Society, which we can do only if we don't close our eyes to the harm people can cause by applying occult truths on the physical plane.

Granted, the case I just mentioned is extreme, but it has happened not only once, but over and over again. I have described it drastically because things like this happen very frequently on a smaller scale, and it is important to notice the minor instances as well as the more blatant ones. Of course, it is a major issue if someone thinks she is going to give birth to the Christ, because the consequences can be extremely unfortunate. On a smaller scale, however, things like this are happening again and again.

Now, in ordinary bourgeois life, it happens that people fall in love, that a man falls in love with a woman. People simply call it “falling in love,” and that's the plain and simple truth. In esoteric societies men and women also fall in love; the possibility cannot be ruled out, as some of you know from experience. But in that case, what you hear about it is not as simple as, “X has fallen in love with Y.” Ordinary people just say that they're going together, which is usually a very accurate description as outward observation goes. But in esoteric societies, what you hear about it often goes something like this: “Having thoroughly examined my karma, I find that another personality has entered it, and we have realized that karma has destined us to be with each other and to intervene in the destiny of the world in a particular way.”

People fail to notice how much deception has crept in between this assertion and the simple matter of falling in love. This deception has developed in the following way: In bourgeois materialistic society, it's considered quite normal for two people to fall in love. But in an esoteric society, this is often not considered normal; instead, it is something people feel slightly ashamed of. But people do not like to feel ashamed. We don't need to go into why that is the case; there can be any number of reasons. People simply do not like to feel ashamed, so instead, they say that karma has spoken and has to be obeyed. Of course they are not acting out of pure selfishness or pure emotion—far from it; karma has to be obeyed! But if they were truthful, they would just admit that they have fallen in love, and having admitted it, they would find their way through life much more readily than by getting the truth mixed up with all kinds of karmic nonsense. The basic mischief of embellishing personal matters with esoteric truths leads to ever greater harm because it makes people lose their inner sense of limits, the limits we have to accept when we adopt a spiritual scientific philosophy.

This is not to say that we should introduce the worst principles of uncultured circles into our Society. In certain social circles, it is said that being human begins with being a baron. We must not establish our own version of this by saying that being human begins with being either a spiritual scientist or an anthroposophist—with being an “anthropop,” as others are starting to call it. We must not do that. We have to admit that even before we became spiritual scientists, we were people with certain ways of looking at things, people who would have done certain things and abstained from others.

In the very early days of our movement, I pointed out how important it is that we do not use our spiritual scientific views to sink down below our earlier level of moral standards, but that we must rise above it in all respects. That is why I said many years ago that when we entered the Society, each of us was equipped with a certain stock of moral standards and habitual ways of doing things, and that we should allow these habits to remain as they are until some clear and incontrovertible inner necessity compels us to change them. Generally, this happens only much later on. It can be extremely detrimental if, after having learned a little bit from spiritual science, we take what we have learned and use it to excuse or embellish what we do in life. You have to be perfectly clear on one point, my friends, namely that the outer circumstances of our life also come about through karma of a certain kind. And how people out in the world think and act is also a matter of karma.

Now, as you know, I prefer to talk about concrete cases because they are the most telling. For example, the following once happened to me: Not long ago, I was sitting in a barber shop—excuse me for talking about things like this, but what I'm going to tell you is not all that indiscreet or intimate. I was sitting in front of the mirror, so I could see the people as they came and went. The door opened, and in came a man who had on some kind of shoes that were nothing more than pieces of soft leather tied together; above that, he was wearing leggings and some kind of cape-like garment draped at a coquettish angle. In addition, his hair was swept back with some kind of a headband. Coincidentally, as it were, I knew the man very well.⁵

The barber let go of the razor he had just started to apply to my face and bought something from the man for five pennies. He showed it to me once the man had gone out—it was a poem he had composed himself. It was a simply terrible poem, but that man was going around the streets and stores in that get-up, selling the thing and imagining himself to be infinitely superior to all the people around him. He thought he was following some great ideal, but in reality he was only following an exaggerated and hysterical form of vanity. The basic impulse behind his conduct, his whole way of being, was nothing more than a gross exaggeration of the principle at work among the vainest and most superficial ladies.

But just consider how many among us might once have been tempted—for courtesy's sake, I will not suggest that they might still be tempted today—to say that in his own way, that man was only trying to do the right thing. True enough, but it was still absolute and total nonsense, and bound to make a mess of a person's life if he made it the principle of a lifetime. We have to realize to what extent vanity can be a motivating factor in what people do, and how difficult it is to notice it. If we take seriously what we can gain from spiritual science and accept it with respect, we have to admit that vanity is a very strong force in that man. If we do something or other out of vanity, not to mention other drives and impulses, other people are offended, though not necessarily for the reasons we might suspect. Nonetheless, there is a connection between ourselves and what other people say about us, a connection that is very easy to find if we look carefully. And we can only get beyond things like that if we develop a strict sense of exactitude as a counterbalance, an attitude we also need for understanding esoteric truths.

Although it's only a detail and no major issue, in esotericism it is extremely important to know and to observe, when people are recounting things, whether they are recounting their own observations and thus have a right to be talking about them as facts, or whether they are passing on things they heard from someone else. We must be able to tell the difference. But in hundreds of cases, people say things to others who in turn tell someone else, but in such a way that the person third in line gets the impression that they are not simply passing on something they've heard, but are talking about their own direct experience and have a right to be talking about it as if it were actual fact. This lack of precision is less important in ordinary materialistic society than it is among us. In materialistic circles, it may be pedantic to be so precise in how one speaks, but in our Society, more so than anywhere else, we need to observe such things strictly and exactly. And above all, we need to make a practice of being precise about ourselves.

If any of you need to be convinced of the implications of what I am saying, you are welcome to make the following experiment: Choose some topic—vegetarianism, for example—and observe how certain adherents of spiritual science talk about this topic in the outside world. Make a chart, and each time you hear spiritual scientists telling other people that they are vegetarians, jot down the reasons they give. It will soon become clear that on the subject of vegetarianism, adherents of spiritual science often say absolutely scandalous things to people in the outside world. When the outside world then comes to the conclusion that we are a society of fools, it should come as no great surprise.

In anthroposophical circles, I have frequently mentioned a very simple way of responding to the question of why you are a vegetarian without antagonizing people around you. If someone asks why you are a vegetarian, and you know that person would never eat horsemeat, you simply respond with the question, “Well, why don't you eat horsemeat?” Now the two of you are on the same footing, and the person who has to give a reason for not eating horsemeat will probably not come up with any highly theoretical reasons, but will say something like “The thought of it makes me sick.” Then you can say, “That's just how any meat makes me feel.” And as long as you say this in an appropriately conciliatory way, people will understand your point of view. The main thing is not to let the other person get the impression that you feel superior because of not eating meat. You might still want to add, although only if you can honestly admit it to yourself, that you are too weak to eat meat; you're handicapped when it comes to eating meat. When this question has come up, I myself have often said that a lot of things are simply easier to get through if you don't eat meat. Meat weighs people down, and if you need to use your brain in a precise way, it is simply easier to do if you don't eat meat. In the end, it all comes down to the question of what is easier and more convenient.

I have often emphasized that it is impossible to eat your way into the higher worlds, either through what you eat or through what you abstain from eating. Achieving access to spiritual worlds is a spiritual matter, and both eating and abstaining from food are physical matters. If this were not the case, people might get grotesque ideas about what would happen if they did or did not eat certain foods. It might occur to them to eat salt one week and no salt at all the next week in order to descend to the depths of the elemental world during the week when they were eating salt and come back up again in the course of the week when they were doing without. It's quite possible for people to get stupid ideas like that. In our Society, of course, people will not get ideas that are as stupid as that, but similar things might still occur to them.

But to get back to the subject of vegetarianism, if we are as modest as possible in how we discuss it in the presence of outsiders, we will find that eventually no one will hold the fact that we are vegetarians against us. On the other hand, if we consider vegetarianism to be something to our credit, the outside world will never forgive us for it. And in fact, being vegetarian is not a credit to anyone; it is simply an easy way out.

There are many other similar examples, and we really have to talk about things like this, not to preach morality, but to establish certain basic principles for our life in an esoteric society vis-à-vis the outside world. What it all comes down to is that we need to seriously consider how we relate to the outside world, and the result of our deliberations must be both a bridge and a protective wall between us and the outside, especially in the case of a society like ours. It happens again and again, for instance, that members say to people on the outside, “Dr. Steiner said this and such.” Just put yourself in the place of the person you're talking to, and imagine what it feels like!

For example, if someone says that Dr. Steiner is taking so-and-so's spiritual development in hand, how are outsiders supposed to understand that? What can they possibly imagine except a society of fools who all subordinate themselves to a single individual? That kind of thing really does happen. I cannot even pretend that it does not occur. And just imagine what it means to the outside world. We really must talk about these things from the point of view of how a society should be set up if a spiritual scientific movement like ours is to inhabit it. First and foremost, we must take this spiritual scientific movement seriously, and we must not do anything that could be detrimental to it in the eyes of the outside world.

I will go into this subject more deeply tomorrow, and you will see how intimately this all relates to certain specific impulses of spiritual science. I do not want to simply lecture you sternly; I want to explain how these things relate to the central impulses of spiritual science.

• 1. In Stuttgart on September 4, 1921, at the first Members' Assembly after World War I, Rudolf Steiner addressed the question of the lecture cycles as follows: “Actually, every member has taken on the responsibility of seeing that the cycles stay within the Society. I am not so concerned about the cycles being read outside the Society; what matters to me is that these cycles in the form in which they were printed stay among people who understand the circumstances, because lack of time kept me from correcting the proofs.” (Mitteilungen des Zentralvorstandes der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft, Stuttgart, November 1921, No. 1, p. 27). And in The Course of My Life, GA 28, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986): “I would have preferred it if the spoken word could have been left in that form, the members wanted to have the lectures printed privately, and that is why the talks now exist in print. If I had had time to make corrections, there would have been no need for the 'for members only' restriction right from the beginning.” (Chapter XXXV, Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
  
  However, since the members did not feel bound by this responsibility and Steiner's opponents in their writings often showed themselves to be better informed about the lecture cycles than the members themselves, Rudolf Steiner was obliged to lift all restrictions and declare the printed lecture cycles available to the general public at the Christmas Foundation Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in 1923.
• 2. See the explanations Steiner gave on August 21 and 22, 1915, printed in Part Two of this volume.
• 3. August 22, 1915, in Part Two of this volume, p. 144.
• 4. “The Origin of Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science,” Munich, March 29, 1914. Only incomplete notes of this lecture are extant.
• 5. Gustav Gräser, 1879–1958, who became well known as an apostle of nature in the 1920s. Cf. Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten. Erlöser der zwanziger Jahre, Berlin, 1983. (“Barefoot Prophets: Redeemers of the Twenties”) Rudolf Steiner mentioned Gräser in a letter to Marie von Sivers on January 6, 1906 (in Rudolf Steiner/Marie Steiner-von Sivers, Correspondence and Documents 1901–1925, GA 262, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), saying that Gräser had attended a lecture of Rudolf Steiner's and taken part in the discussion afterward.

We can say that the original purpose of festivals is to make human beings look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things. The Easter festival in particular can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries we in the civilized world have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has made us focus less and less upon our connection with cosmic forces and powers. We have gradually been reduced to contemplating only our relation to earthly forces and powers. Of course, given the means for acquiring knowledge recognized as legitimate today this could scarcely be otherwise. However, if in pre-Christian times or even in the early centuries of Christianity someone who was connected with a Mystery center could have experienced what we moderns call knowledge, and if he were to approach the matter with the state of mind characteristic of those earlier times, he would not at all understand how human beings can live without an awareness of their connection to extra-earthly, cosmic things.

I would now like to sketch various matters that you will find dealt with more thoroughly in this or that lecture cycle. As the present lectures are intended to acquaint us specifically with the Easter idea, I naturally cannot elaborate on every detail, but only touch upon the most important points.

If we go back to certain ancient monotheistic religious systems—for example, to the Hebrew-Judaic system, with which we are most familiar—we naturally find the veneration and worship of one deity. That deity is the one of whom we speak in our Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead, as God the Father.

Now all the religions in which the concept of the Father-God played a part had a greater or lesser awareness of his connection to the cosmic moon forces, forces that stream down to the earth from the moon; the Mystery priests were particularly aware of this connection. In our time this consciousness of our relationship to the moon has all but disappeared. Perhaps the only place it lives on is in the inspiration of poetic imagination by the forces of the moon, or in medicine in the counting of human embryonic life in ten lunar months. But older world views were clearly aware that the human being, who exists in the spiritual world as a being of spirit and soul, is permeated and strengthened by forces emanating from the moon as he descends into earthly existence.

If we want to know what shapes our living form, to know what lives in us as nutritive and respiratory processes, as overall forces of growth, we must look not to earth forces but rather to cosmic forces. For a consideration of earth forces readily reveals their relation to us. If we did not hold our bodies together with extra-earthly forces, if our bodies did not receive their form from cosmic forces, how could the earth forces alone hold them together? The moment the human body is forsaken by cosmic forces and exposed to merely terrestrial forces, it falls apart, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. Earth forces can only make us into corpses; they cannot shape us. It is to the influence of the moon that we owe the uplifting forces within us, the forces that give us a cohesive, organized form, a form that during life does not succumb to forces that seize and destroy us at our death. It is due to this that throughout our earthly lives we can resist destruction, as indeed it must be resisted.

Although in this way we may say theoretically how the form of our body is dependent upon the forces of the moon, we must also see that these forces, which guide us, so to speak, through birth into a physical existence, were revered by ancient religions as the forces of the divine Father. The ancient Hebrew initiates knew that the moon radiates those forces that lead us into our earthly life and maintain us there. Our physical being is severed from these forces only when we pass through the gate of death.

To look up lovingly to these divine Father forces, to express devotion to them in ritual and prayer, this was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these religions were more consistent than you might think. For history completely misrepresents them, basing itself, as it must, merely upon external evidence, not upon what can be observed in spiritual vision.

Religions that focused on the moon and the spiritual beings living in it were really of relatively late origin. The truly primordial religions had in addition to this a clear perception of the sun forces and even, it must be added, of the forces of Saturn. However, with this we are entering into a period of history of which no physical documents survive, one that antedates the foundation of Christianity by many thousands of years. In my Outline of Occult Science I called this period the ancient Indian—partly to have a name for it, but also because it took place in the area we now call India. The civilization following this was the ancient Persian. During these civilizations human beings still developed very differently than they did later, and this is reflected in their religious beliefs.

During the last two thousand years or more, human beings have been developing in such a way that they no longer notice a certain discontinuity in their earthly development, and indeed, the break is really hardly noticeable. Something that takes place in human beings around the thirtieth year today remains largely in the subconscious or the unconscious. However, this was not the case among people who lived eight or nine thousand years before Christ. At that time a person's development was continuous up until about the thirtieth year, when a profound metamorphosis set in, which I shall be quite direct in describing. Although what I have to say might sound somewhat strange, it nevertheless fits the relevant facts.

In those ancient times the following could happen. Let us say that before turning thirty, a man had made the acquaintance of someone much younger, say three or four years younger, who would therefore experience the thirtieth-year metamorphosis much later than the former. Suppose now that the two men had not seen each other for some time and were then reunited. It could happen, and in today's words this sounds indeed strange, that if the younger person were to address the older one, the latter might not recognize him. The metamorphosis would have completely transformed his memory.

Because in these very ancient times people around the age of thirty tended to forget all they had experienced previously, it was the custom in the small communities of the time to record events in young peoples' lives in order to inform them of their earlier experiences after they had passed through the profound transformation. And then, when such people realized they had become different persons in their thirtieth year, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their earlier experiences—yes, it really happened this way—then at the same time they were also taught that before their thirtieth year only moon forces had acted upon them, whereas now sun forces were entering into their development.

The sun forces' influence on the human being is entirely different from that of the moon forces. Of course, people today know little of sun forces, for they know only their external, physical effects. They know, for example, that because of sun forces—pardon my bluntness—they sweat, feel hot; they are also no doubt aware of sunbathing and its therapeutic uses, but this is all superficial. The average person nowadays cannot even begin to conceive of the effect that the forces spiritually connected with the sun have upon him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, acquired some knowledge of the sun forces in the dwindling Mysteries, and was murdered on his expedition to Persia because he wanted to make it official again. [Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus), A.D. 331–363. Roman emperor 361–363. ] That is how strong the powers that wanted to exterminate such knowledge in the early Christian centuries were. It is therefore not surprising that no knowledge of such matters has survived.

While the moon forces determine the human being, permeate us with an inner necessity so that we must act according to our instincts, our temperament, our emotions, in a word, our whole physical and etheric nature, the spiritual sun forces free us from this. They dissolve, so to speak, the forces of compulsion, and it is really through their agency that we become free.

In ancient times the influence of the moon and that of the sun were sharply divided. Around the age of thirty people simply became sun people, that is, free, whereas up until then they had been moon people, or unfree. Nowadays these two overlap; even in childhood the sun forces act along with the moon forces, and the moon forces continue to work on us in later years. Thus in our time necessity and freedom intermingle.

As has been said, however, this was not always the case. In the prehistoric times of which we have been speaking, the effects of the moon and the sun upon human life were sharply separated, it was considered pathological when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the new beginning in his thirtieth year. By the same token, people spoke of having been born not once, but twice. As humanity began to develop in such a way that the second or solar birth (the first was called the lunar birth) became less noticeable, certain facts, including exercises and cult rituals, began to be applied to initiates in the Mysteries. In this way the initiates experienced something that the rest of mankind no longer did. They were now the twice-born.

The term twice-born that may be found in ancient oriental writings even today no longer carries its original meaning. It would be interesting to ask every orientalist and Sanskrit scholar—I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst, you can ask him how things stand according to his professional studies—whether they think modern scholarship can explain the meaning of this expression clearly and in no uncertain terms. [Professor Hermann Beckh, 1875–1937, orientalist. From 1922 on priest in the Christian Community. ] In fact, any number of formal analyses are available, but the essential meaning remains a mystery. Only those who know it derives from such a reality as I have just described can grasp its true meaning. About such things spiritual observation does, after all, have something to say; and once it has spoken, I would challenge any unprejudiced researcher in a conventional academic discipline to prove that existing documents do not at every step bear it out. Ordinary science will confirm spiritual research, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain things transcending ordinary science must be brought to light since the study of documents cannot lead to a true understanding of human life.

Thus we look back to an ancient time when people spoke of their lunar birth as of a creation by the Father. Regarding their solar birth people understood that in the sun's spiritual rays Christ's power, the power of the Son, is active, and that it sets human beings free. Consider what it does for us. Only through its action can we make something of ourselves in earthly life. Without the liberating forces and impulses of the sun, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable determinism, and not even the determinism of fate, but merely that of nature.

People in ancient times knew this. To them, the sun was a celestial eye from which the power of Christ streamed forth. They knew that this power released them from the bondage of iron necessity into which the moon forces had placed them at birth and which would otherwise govern their entire lives. The sun forces, the Christ forces looking down upon them through the cosmic eye of the sun, enabled them to make something of themselves in inner freedom, something they could not have become merely by virtue of the moon forces. Thus in the sun forces people saw the possibility of transforming or making something of themselves here on earth.

For completeness' sake I should briefly mention that ancient people also looked to the forces of Saturn, in which they saw all that sustains us when we pass through the portal of death, that is, when we experience the third earthly metamorphosis.

After death the human being is maintained by the Saturn forces that reign at what was in ancient times considered to be the outer limit of our planetary system. These forces support us and carry us out into the spiritual world; they maintain our being's integrity when the third metamorphosis occurs. This was unquestionably the world view of ancient times.

But humanity changes, and the time came when the sun forces' effects were known only in the Mysteries. This knowledge survived longest in the Mysteries' therapeutic sections, because the same forces that give us our freedom, our ability to make something of ourselves—namely, the sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and in other earthly beings and substances, which as a result possess healing properties.

For the most part, however, human beings lost this knowledge of the sun. Although knowledge of our dependence on the moon or Father forces remained with people for a long time, consciousness of our dependence on the sun forces, or we must really say, of our emancipation through those forces, disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of nature, which seem to be the sole topic in modern philosophy, are really nothing but a completely abstract version of the moon forces.

One person who still knew the sun forces and was able to let himself be guided by them was the Christ-bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them. For, whereas in the old Mysteries the sun forces could be reached only by looking up spiritually to the sun, it was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to receive these forces in his own body as they streamed down to earth. This I explained yesterday. The essential point, however, is that in his thirtieth year a transformation occurred in Jesus of Nazareth's body. It was the same transformation everyone experienced in primeval times, except that in those times only the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual sun entered into people, whereas here the primordial sun being himself, the Christ, descended into human evolution and dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This event central to all earthly life is at the root of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will be able to understand these things in their full significance if you consider the way Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, one might say, was as yet a human affair, for it was initiation.

Basic initiation consisted of three stages. The very first requirement for initiation was to develop, through exposure to what the Mysteries had to offer, a degree of inner humility we cannot fathom today. Although today people do indeed consider themselves enormously modest with respect to knowledge, anyone who can see through them knows they are truly possessed by arrogance.

Above all, at the outset of initiation the candidate had to believe that he was not yet really human, that this was a goal yet to be achieved. Today it would be asking too much of people at any stage of life that they should not consider themselves human beings. But for initiation this was the very first requirement. The candidate had to know that it was only before descending into an earthly body that he had been a human being, that in pre-earthly existence he had been a human being of soul and spirit, which then entered a physical body provided by a natural mother, by the natural parents. It did not “clothe itself” with the body—for that is an inaccurate expression—rather it permeated itself with a physical body.

Now just how, over a long period of time, the spirit and soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—is something most people are not aware of. What everyone is aware of, what everyone perceives through the senses, is the physical world around us. When spirit and soul have completed their permeation of our physical bodies at adulthood, we can only look to the outside with our eyes, listen with our ears to what is outside us, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness outside us through our skin; in other words, we perceive only what is outside not what is inside us. We cannot look into ourselves with our eyes: the most we can do is to dissect a human corpse and imagine we are looking into ourselves. But in reality we are not.

Suppose I have a house here before me. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I take some tools and, if I am strong enough, I can demolish the house. The individual bricks then lie before me in a heap; they are all that is left of the house. This is the way things are done today; people dissect the human being, cut him up, in order to get to know him. But in this way they do not get to know him; what they get to know this way is not at all a human being. To really know ourselves we must be able, just as today we look out of our eyes, to look in through them, to listen in with our ears, and so on.

All this taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the door to the human being. Initiation started from the candidate's realization that he knew nothing about the human being, and that, having no consciousness of himself as human, he could not really claim to be one. He would first have to learn to look in through his senses, in the same way he otherwise looks out.

That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment a person learned in this way to look inside himself, he experienced how he had been in pre-earthly existence, for then he knew himself to be a being of spirit and soul.

The initiate thus learned to look in (red) instead of out (yellow), and in so doing became aware of what had entered him as pre-earthly existence through his eyes, ears, skin, and so forth (green—see diagram). Aware now that he had had such an existence, he was told that now he could begin to acquaint himself with what today we would call natural science.

When we learn about natural science today, we are taught to observe the phenomena of nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is analogous to being told upon meeting someone we have known for a long time to forget everything we have ever had in common with that person. Fancy, if you will, a married couple being told upon seeing one another after a long separation to forget everything they had ever been through together. Well, yes, I can imagine that once in a while such a thing might actually be preferable, but life could not be carried on in that way.

Such, however, are exactly the circumstances imposed upon us by our modern system of civilization. We all become acquainted with the kingdoms of nature from their spiritual aspect before we descend to earth. And while today people are encouraged to forget all they learned then about minerals, plants, and animals, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, attempted to remember it. He was shown, for example, a quartz crystal, and then everything possible was done to remind him of what he had known about quartz—or about lilies, or roses—before he descended to earth. The knowledge of nature taught in the Mysteries was essentially recognition.

After a candidate had mastered the method of recollecting things viewed in pre-earthly existence, he was admitted to the second stage, which consisted of learning the music, architecture, geometry, surveying, etc., of the time. This was because the second stage comprised everything a person could learn not only by looking inside with his eyes and listening to what is inside him with his ears, but by actually entering into himself. Here the candidate for initiation was told he was entering the Temple Grotto of Man, which was the part of himself physically permeated by the soul-spiritual forces of which he had consisted before descending to life on earth. Into this he penetrated.

The Temple Grotto, he was told, consisted of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought. There he became acquainted with everything—well, yes, when looked at externally, it is the human head, which is small, but when entered into and viewed from within, it is as big as the world. The candidate came to know himself there as spirit. That was the first chamber. In the second he acquainted himself with feeling; and in the third with willing.

In this way initiates learned how the human being is organized with respect to the organs of thinking, feeling, and willing; they acquainted themselves, that is, with what matters on earth. Knowledge of nature, on the other hand, transcends such merely earthly matters. One acquires it before one even descends to earth. After that, it is simply a question of recalling it. By contrast, no houses are built in the spiritual world with earthly architecture. Similarly, the music that exists in the spiritual world is entirely spiritual; earthly music is merely its projection into the terrestrial air. Surveying is concerned with the dimensions of the earth; both it and geometry are earthly sciences.

It was important for the novice of the second stage to realize that all talk of gaining knowledge by purely earthly means, except as it applies to geometry, architecture, and surveying, is nonsense. He realized that a genuine science of nature must consist of recalling pre-earthly knowledge; however, geometry, architecture, music, and surveying are sciences that can be learned here on earth.

The candidate thus entered into himself and came to know the cosmic human being. This consisted of three chambers, unlike the single earthly organization we encounter by approaching the human being only from the outside.

In the third stage the candidate not only delved down into himself, coming to know himself spiritually, but as spirit he came to know the body as well. Initiates in all the old Mysteries called this level of knowledge “the Portal of Death.” Here one learned what it is like to lay aside the earthly body. There was, however, a difference between actual death and the death experienced in initiation. I will explain in the following lectures why this had to be so; at the moment I only want to point out the facts.

When we die, we discard our physical bodies and are no longer bound to them. We cease to respond to, and are henceforth free from, earth forces. But while we are still connected to our physical bodies, as was the case in the initiations of old, we must achieve by inner exertion something that in death happens of itself, namely, freedom from the body; we must hold ourselves outside the body for a time. Initiation required that one attain strong inner forces of soul, by virtue of which one could remain free from the physical body.

These same forces also provided higher knowledge of matters that could neither be perceived with the senses nor thought with the intellect. They brought human beings into relation with the spiritual world, just as our physical bodies bring us into relation with the physical world. At this point a candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a human being of spirit and soul, as an initiate, while still living on earth. From that time on he experienced the earth as outside himself and could live with the sun rather than with the earth, particularly in the older Mysteries. He knew what he had from the sun, how the sun forces were active in him.

After this third stage followed then the fourth. The fourth stage had an effect that may be explained as follows: When a human being on earth eats, he recognizes, for example, that he is eating cabbage or venison. He can drink various things, and know that first these things are outside, then inside him. He breathes the air; first it is outside, then inside, then outside again. In short, he carries within him earthly forces and substances that also exist outside him. What the Mysteries made clear to the student was that before initiation he had been an earth-bearer, a bearer of cabbage, venison, pork, and so on, but that upon completing the third stage of initiation and experiencing what it is possible to experience when one frees oneself from the body he would no longer be a bearer of cabbage, pork, and veal, but rather of what the sun forces gave him.

In all the Mysteries this spiritual gift of the sun forces was called Christos. Hence the candidate who had gone through the three stages and now felt himself to be a bearer of the sun forces, just as he had been a cabbage-bearer on earth, was called a christophor, a Christ-bearer. This was the term applied to a neophyte of the fourth stage in most of the ancient Mysteries.

In the third stage the candidate had to understand certain things thoroughly, most importantly that his craving for the physical body had to cease during moments of knowledge. He had to understand that the human being, as far as the physical body is concerned, belongs to the earth, but that the earth actually only destroys the physical body and does not build it up. It was at this point that the initiate came to know the upbuilding forces that originate in the cosmos.

He also learned something else. Precisely when he became a christophor, the initiate realized that spiritual forces are at work even in the substances of the earth, albeit in a way imperceptible to earthly senses. Had our modern way of speaking, which is the only one I can use, been comprehensible to people of ancient times, the sense of what the neophyte was told might be expressed as follows: “If you wish to know and understand substance, to see how the different elements combine and separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter from the cosmos. You can only do this, however, once you have been initiated into the fourth stage. For only when you are able to perceive by means of forces of the sun-existence will you be able to study chemistry.”

Now in our time it would be thought quite absurd, wouldn't it, to require of candidates for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry that they experience sun forces in the same way that they do earthly cabbage. In the old days, however, such demands were made. Furthermore, initiates realized that all the forces of ordinary cognition alive in the body can be used only to study geometry, surveying, music, and architecture. They are useless for the study of chemistry.

Chemistry as we know it today deals only with superficial realities, and has done so ever since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine knowledge must despair at having to learn the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon descriptions, not upon an inner penetration of the subject. If people were open-minded, they would realize that something more is necessary, that a different method of cognition is required, for a true study of chemistry. That this is not realized is simply the result of the cowardice so prevalent today.

When a candidate had passed the fourth stage, he was ready to become an adept in astronomy, which was an even higher stage of initiation. The merely external study of the stars, based on calculations and the like, ancient people considered thoroughly trivial. For the stars are inhabited by spiritual beings, and these beings can be known only after physical observation and even geometry have been left behind, when one can literally live in the universe and know the spiritual nature of the stars. At this stage the candidate became one of the resurrected and could observe the forces of the moon and sun at work, particularly in their effects upon earthly humanity.

Today I have described for you from two sides how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries, not in a particular season but at a certain stage of human development. Easter, we have seen, was the inner human being's resurrection out of the physical body into the spiritual universe. Those still cognizant of ancient Mystery wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha saw that Mystery in this light. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?

In ancient times it had been possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for even earlier than that it had been a matter of course for people to experience a second birth around their thirtieth year. Memories of this had been preserved, as had the knowledge of the Mystery schools, and thus what had been experienced directly in earlier epochs was kept alive as tradition. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, this had all been lost or forgotten. Humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not the power to whom the initiates had raised themselves in becoming christophors descended into Jesus of Nazareth and remained on earth since then, enabling people to unite themselves with it through Christ Jesus.

Easter as we know it today is thus a link in the evolution of the Mysteries, and we can become aware of its true content only by reviving that evolution. In the lectures to come you will be able to get at least an idea of what the ancients experienced in initiation. A new initiate could say to himself: “Initiation has revealed to me how sun and moon, as celestial opposites, work within me. I know now that my physical form—the particular shape of my eyes, nose, indeed of my entire body, inside and out—as well as the fact that this form could grow, and continues to grow through nourishment, is a result of the moon forces. Upon them all necessity depends. But that I can come to life within my physical body as a free human being, that I can alter my character and master myself, this is due to the sun forces, to the Christ forces. These I must awaken within me if I am to achieve through my own efforts a conscious freedom over and above that given me by the sun forces through another kind of necessity.”

From all this one can understand why even today human beings calculate the date of Easter from a particular constellation of sun and moon. All that remains of the old consciousness is an interest in finding the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. That Easter is set on that Sunday indicates, as I shall elaborate tomorrow, that people see in Easter's nature and form something that must be determined from above, that is, from the cosmos.

More than this, however, is necessary. The very content of Easter must be grasped anew, and this can happen only if we examine the old Mysteries. These showed first of all what people could experience if they looked inside themselves, the portal of Man, then when they descended into themselves and came to know the remotest inner recesses of their being, the three-chambered, cosmic human being; when they liberated themselves from the body—the portal of Death; and when they moved freely in the spiritual world, they became christophors.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear at the time human freedom started to assert itself, but the time to rediscover them has arrived. The Mysteries must be found anew, and we should be fully conscious that preparations to that end must now be made.

It was with this in mind that the Christmas Conference was held. An earthly sanctuary for the re-founding of the Mysteries is urgently needed. The Anthroposophical Society, as it continues in its development, must lead the way to that re-founding. It will be partly your task, my dear friends, to help this along in the right spirit. But for that you will need to examine the three stages of human life: introspection, self-penetration, and a consciousness one has in outer reality only in death.

As a reminder of what has been said in this hour, I would like us now to carry away and meditate upon the following words:

To-day we shall begin to consider the inner activities of the soul which can gradually lead man to acquire conceptions, to acquire thoughts, about karma. These thoughts and conceptions are such that they can ultimately enable a man to perceive, in the light of karma, experiences which have a karmic cause.

Looking around our human environment, we really see in the physical world only what is caused by physical force in a physical way. And if we do see in the physical world something that is not caused by physical forces, we still become aware of it through external physical substances, through external physical objects of perception. Of course, when a man does something out of his own will, this is not caused by physical forces, by physical causes, for in many respects it comes out of the free will. But all that we perceive outwardly is exhausted in the physical phenomena of the world we thus observe. In the entire sphere of what we can thus observe, the karmic connection of an experience we ourselves pass through cannot reveal itself to us. For the whole picture of this karmic connection lies in the spiritual world, is really inscribed in what is the etheric world, in what underlies the etheric world as the astral world, or as the world of spiritual beings who inhabit this astral outer world. Nothing of all this is seen, as long as we merely direct our senses to the physical world.

All that we perceive in the physical world is perceived through our senses. These senses work without our having much to do with it. Our eyes receive impressions of light, of colour, of their own accord. We can at most—and even that is half involuntary—adjust our gaze to a certain direction; we can gaze at something or we can look away from it. Even in this there is still much of the unconscious, but at all events a fragment of consciousness. And, above all, that which the eye must do inwardly in order to see colour, the wonderfully wise, inner activity which is exercised whenever we see anything—this we could never achieve as human beings if we were supposed to achieve it consciously. That would be out of the question. All this must, to begin with, happen unconsciously, because it is much too wise for man to be able in any way to help in it.

To attain a correct point of view as regards the knowledge possessed by the human being, we must really fill our thoughts with all the wisdom-filled arrangements which exist in the world, and which are quite beyond the capacity of man. If a man thinks only of what he can achieve himself, then he really blocks all paths to knowledge. The path to knowledge really begins at the point where we realise, in all humility, all that we are incapable of doing, but which must nevertheless come to pass in cosmic existence. The eye, the ear—yes, and the other sense-organs—are, in reality, such profoundly wise instruments that men will have to study for a long time before they will be able even to have an inkling of understanding of them during earthly existence. This must be fully realised. Observation of the spiritual, however, cannot be unconscious in this sense. In earlier times of human evolution this was possible even for observation of the spiritual. There was an instinctive clairvoyance which has faded away in the course of the evolution of humanity.

From now onwards, man must consciously attain an attitude to the cosmos through which he will be able to see through into the spiritual. And we must see through into the spiritual if we are to recognise the karmic connections of any experience we may have.

Now it is necessary for the observation of karma that we at least begin by paying attention to what can happen within us to develop the faculty of observing karmic connections. We, on our part, must help a little in order to make these observations conscious. We must do more, for example, than we do for our eye in order to become conscious of colour.

My dear friends, what we must learn first of all is summed up in one word: to wait. We must be able to wait for the inner experiences.

About this “being able to wait”, I have already spoken. It was in the year 1889—I tell about this in the Story of my Life—that the inner spiritual construction of Goethe's “The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” first came before my mind's eye. And it was then, for the first time, that the perception as it were of a greater, wider connection than appears in the Fairy Tale itself presented itself to me. But I also knew at that time: I cannot yet make of this connection what I shall some day be able to make of it. And so what the Fairy Tale revealed to me at that time simply remained lying in the soul.

Then, seven years later, in the year 1896, it welled up again, but still not in such a way that it could be properly shaped; and again, about 1903, seven years later. Even then, although it came with great definition and many connections it could not yet receive its right form. Seven years later again, when I conceived my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—then only did the Fairy Tale reappear, transformed in such a way that it could be shaped and moulded plastically.

Such things, therefore, demand a real waiting, a time for ripening. We must bring our own experiences into relation with that which exists out there in the world. At a moment when only the seed of a plant is present, we obviously cannot have the plant. The seed must be brought into the right conditions for growth, and we must wait until the blossom, and finally the fruit, come out of the seed. And so it must be with the experiences through which we pass. We cannot take the line of being thrilled by an experience, simply because it happens to be there, and then forgetting it. The person who only wants his experiences when they are actually present will be doing little towards ultimate observation of the spiritual world. We must be able to wait. We must be able to let the experiences ripen within the soul.

Now the possibility exists for a comparatively quick ripening of insight into karmic connections if, for a considerable time, we endeavour patiently, and with inner activity, to picture in our consciousness, more and more clearly, an experience which would otherwise simply take its course externally, without being properly grasped, so that it fades away in the course of life. After all, this fading away is what really happens with the events of life. For what does a man do with events and experiences, as they approach him in the course of the day? He experiences them, but in reality only half observes them. You can realise how experiences are only half observed if you sit down one day in the afternoon or in the evening—and I advise you to do it—and ask yourself: ‘What did I actually experience this morning at half-past nine?’ And now try to call up such an experience in all details before your soul, recall it as if it were actually there, say at half-past seven in the evening—as if you were creating it spiritually before you. You will see how much you will find lacking, how much you failed to observe, and how difficult it is. If you take a pen or pencil to write it all down, you will soon begin to bite at the pen or the pencil, because you cannot hit upon the details—and, in time, you want to bite them out of the pencil!

Yes, but that is just the point, to take upon oneself the task of placing before the mind, in all precision, an experience one has had,—not at the moment when it is actually there, but afterwards. It must be placed before the soul as if one were going to paint it spiritually. If the experience were one in which somebody spoke, this must be made quite objectively real: the ring of the voice, the way in which the words were used, clumsily or cleverly—the picture must be made with strength and vigour. In short, we try to make a picture of what we have experienced. If we make a picture of such an experience of the day, then in the following night, the astral body, when it is outside the physical body and the etheric body, occupies itself with this picture. The astral body itself is, in reality, the bearer of the picture, and gives shape to it outside the body. The astral body takes the picture with it when it goes out on the first night. It shapes it there, outside the physical and etheric bodies.

That is the first stage (we will take these stages quite exactly): the sleeping astral body, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, shapes the picture of the experience. Where does it do this? In the external ether. It is now in the external etheric world; it does this in the external ether.

Now picture to yourself the human being: his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and the astral body is outside. We will leave aside the ego. There outside is the astral body, reshaping this picture that has been made. But the astral body does this in the external ether. In consequence of this the following happens—think of it: the astral body is there outside, shaping this picture. All this happens in the external ether which encrusts, as it were, with its own substance that which is formed as a picture within the astral body. So the external ether makes the etheric form (dotted (dark) outline) into a picture which is clearly and precisely visualised by the eye of spirit.

In the morning you return into the physical and etheric bodies and bear into them what has been made substantial by the external ether. That is to say: the sleeping astral body shapes the picture of the experience outside the physical and etheric bodies. The external ether then impregnates the picture with its own substance. You can imagine that the picture becomes stronger thereby, and that now, when the astral body returns in the morning with this stronger substantiality, it can make an impression upon the etheric body in the human being. With forces that are derived from the external ether, the astral body now stamps an impression into the etheric body.

The second stage is therefore: The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body.

There we have the events of the first day and the first night. Now we come to the second day. On the second day, while you are busying yourself with all the little things of life in full waking consciousness, there, underneath the consciousness, in the unconscious, the picture is descending into the etheric body. And in the next night, when the etheric body is undisturbed, when the astral body has gone out again, the etheric body elaborates this picture.

Thus in the second night the picture is elaborated by the man's own etheric body. There we have the second stage:—The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body; and in the next night the etheric body elaborates the picture. Thus we have: the second day and the second night.

Now if you do this, if you actually do not give up occupying yourself with the picture you formed on the preceding day—and you can continue to occupy yourself with it, for a reason which I shall immediately mention—if you do not disdain to do this, then you will find that you are living on further with the picture. What does this mean—to continue occupying yourself with it? If you really take pains to shape such a picture, vigorously, elaborating it plastically in characteristic, strong lines on the first day after you had the experience, then you have really exerted yourself spiritually. Such things cost spiritual exertion. I don't mean what I am going to say as a hint—present company is, of course, always excepted in these matters!—but after all, it must be said that the majority of men simply do not know what spiritual exertion is. Spiritual exertion, true spiritual exertion, comes about only by means of activity of soul. When you allow the world to work upon you, and let thoughts run their course without taking them in hand, then there is no spiritual exertion. We should not imagine, when something tires us, that we have exerted ourselves spiritually. Getting tired does not imply that there has been spiritual exertion. We can get tired, for instance, from reading. But if we have not ourselves been productive in some way during the reading, if we merely let the thoughts contained in the book act on us, then we are not exerting ourselves. On the contrary, a person who has really exerted himself spiritually, who has exerted himself out of the inner activity of his soul, may then take up a book, a very interesting one, and just “sleep off” his spiritual exertion in the best possible way, in the reading of it. Naturally, we can fall asleep over a book if we are tired. This getting tired is no sign at all of spiritual exertion.

A sign of spiritual exertion, however, is this: that one feels—the brain is used up. It is just as we may feel that a demand has been made on the muscle of the arm when lifting things. Ordinary thought makes no such strong claims upon the brain. The process continues, and you will even notice that when you try it for the first time, the second, the third, the tenth, you get a slight headache. It is not that you get tired or fall asleep; on the contrary, you cannot fall asleep; you get a slight headache from it. Only you must not regard this headache as something baleful; on the contrary, you must take it as actual proof of the fact that you have exerted your head.

Well, the process goes on ... it stays with you until you go to sleep. If you have really done this on the preceding day, then you will awake in the morning with the feeling: “There actually is something in me! I don't quite know what it is, but there is something in me, and it wants something from me. Yes, after all it is not a matter of indifference that I made this picture for myself yesterday. It really means something. This picture has changed. To-day it is giving me quite different feelings from those I had previously. The picture is making me have quite definite feelings.”

All this stays with you through the next day as the remaining inner experience of the picture which you made for yourself. And what you feel, and cannot get rid of through the whole of the day—this is a witness to the fact that the picture is now descending into the etheric body, as I have described to you, and that the etheric body is receiving it.

Now you will probably experience on waking after the next night—when you slip into your body after these two days—that you find this picture slightly changed, slightly transformed. You find it again ... precisely on waking the third day you find it again within you. It appears to you like a very real dream. But it has undergone a transformation. It will clothe itself in manifold pictures until it is other than it was. It will assume an appearance as if spiritual beings were now bringing you this experience. And you actually receive the impression: Yes, this experience which I had and which I subsequently formed into a picture, has actually been brought to me. If the experience happened to be with another human being, then we have the feeling after this has all happened, that actually we did not only experience it through that human being, but that it was really brought to us. Other forces, spiritual forces, have been at play. It was they who brought it to us.

The next day comes. This next day the picture is carried down from the etheric body into the physical body. The etheric body impresses this picture into the physical body, into the nerve-processes, into the blood-processes. On the third day the picture is impressed into the physical body. So the third stage is: The picture is stamped into the physical body by the etheric body.

And now comes the next night. You have been attending throughout the day to the ordinary little trifles of life, and underneath it all this important process is going on: the picture is being carried down into the physical body. All this goes on in the subconscious. When the following night comes, the picture is elaborated in the physical body. It is spiritualised in the physical body. First of all, throughout the day, the picture is brought down into the processes of the blood and nerves, but in the night it is spiritualised. Those who have vision see how this picture is now elaborated by the physical body, but it appears spiritually as an altogether changed picture. We can say: the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

1st Day and 1st Night:

When outside the physical and etheric bodies, the astral body shapes the picture of the experience. The outer ether impregnates the picture with its own substance.

2nd Day and 2nd Night:

The picture is stamped by the astral body into the etheric body. And the etheric body elaborates the picture during the next day.

3rd Day and 3rd Night:

The picture is stamped by the etheric body into the physical body. And the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

Now this is something of which you must make an absolutely correct mental picture. The physical body actually works up this picture spiritually. It spiritualises the picture. So that when all this has really been gone through, it does happen—when the human being is asleep—that his physical body works up the whole picture, but not in such a way that it remains within the physical body. Out of the physical body there arises a transformation, a greatly magnified transformation of the picture. And when you get up in the morning, this picture stands there, and in truth you hover in it; it is like a kind of cloud in which you yourself are. With this picture you get up in the morning.

So this is the third day and the third night. With this picture, which is entirely transformed, you get out of bed on the fourth day. You rise from sleep, enveloped by this cloud. And if you have actually shaped the picture with the necessary strength on the first day, and if you have paid attention to what your feeling conveyed to you on the second day, you will notice now that your will is contained in the picture as it now is. The will is contained in it! But this will is unable to express itself; it is as though fettered. Put into somewhat radical terms, it is actually as if one had planned after the manner of an incredibly daring sprinter, who might resolve to make a display of a bravado race: I will run, now I am running to Ober-Dornach, I make a picture of it already, I've got it within me. It is my will ... But in the very moment when I want to start, when the will is strongest, somebody fetters me, so that I stand there quite rigidly. The whole will has unfolded, but I cannot carry out the will. Such, approximately, is the process.

When this experience of feeling yourself in a pillory develops—for it is a feeling of being in a pillory after the third night—when you again awake in it, feeling in a pillory as it were, with the will fettered through and through, then, if you can pay attention to it, you will find that the will begins to transform itself. This will becomes sight. In itself it can do nothing, but it leads to our seeing something. It becomes an eye of the soul. And the picture, with which one rose from sleep, becomes objective. What it shows is the event of the previous earth-life, or of some previous earth-life, which had been the cause of the experience that we shaped into a picture on the first day. By means of this transformation through feeling and through will, one gets the picture of the causal event of a preceding incarnation.

When we describe these things, they appear somewhat overpowering. This is not to be wondered at, for they are utterly unfamiliar to the human being of the present time. They were not so unknown to the men of earlier culture-epochs. Only, according to the opinion of modern men who are clever, those other men—in their whole way of living—were stupid! Nevertheless, those ‘stupid’ men of the earlier culture-epochs really had these experiences, only modern man darkens everything by his intellect, which makes him clever, but not exactly wise.

As I said, the thing seems somewhat tumultuous, when one relates it. But after all, one is obliged to use such words; for since the things are utterly unknown to-day, they would not appear so striking if they were worded more mildly. They must appear striking. But the whole experience, from beginning to end, throughout the three days, as I have described it to you, must take its course in inner intimacy, in rest and peace of mind. For so-called occult experiences—and these are such—do not take their course in such a way that they can be bragged about. When one begins to brag about them, they immediately stop. They must take their course in inner repose and quietude. And it is best when, for the time being, nobody at all notices anything of the consecutive experiences except the person who is having them.

Now you must not think that the thing succeeds immediately, from the outset. One always finds, of course, that people are pleased when such things are related. This is quite comprehensible ... and it is good. How much there is that one can learn to know! And then, with a tremendous diligence people start on it. They begin ... and it doesn't succeed. Then they become disheartened. Then, perhaps, they try it again, several times. Again it does not succeed. But, in effect, if one has tried it about 49 times, or, let us say, somebody else has tried it about 69 times, then the 50th or the 70th time it does succeed. For what really matters in all these things is the acquisition of a kind of habit of soul concerning them. To begin with, one must find one's way into these things, one must acquire habits of the soul. This is something that certainly ought to be carefully observed by the Anthroposophical Society which, since the Christmas Foundation, is intended to be a complete expression of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Really a very great deal has been given within the Anthroposophical Society. It is enough to make one giddy to see standing in a row all the Lecture-Courses that have been printed. But in spite of it, people come again and again, asking one thing or the other. In the majority of cases this is not at all necessary, for if everything that is contained in the Lecture-Courses is really worked upon, then most of the questions find their own answer in a much surer way. One must have patience, really have patience. Truly, there is a great deal in anthroposophical literature that can work in the soul. We must take to heart all that has to be accomplished, and the time will be well filled with all that has to be done. But, on the other hand, in regard to many of the things which people want to know, it must be pointed out that the Lecture-Courses exist, that they have been left lying there, and after they have been given many people trouble about them only inasmuch as they want a “new” Course; they just lay the old ones aside. These things are closely connected with what I have to say to-day.

One does not reach inner continuity in following up all that germinates and ripens in the soul, if there is a desire to hurry in this way, from the new to the new; the essential point is that things must mature within the soul. We must accustom ourselves to inner, active work of the soul, work in the spirit. This is what helps us to achieve such things as I have explained to you to-day; this alone will help us to have, after the third day, the inner attitude of soul in connection with some experience we may wish to see through in the light of karma.

This must always be the mode of procedure if we are to learn to know the spiritual. To begin with, we must say to ourselves: the first moment when we approach the spiritual in thought in some way, was the first beginning; it is quite impossible to have any kind of result immediately; we must be able to wait. Suppose I have an experience to-day that is karmically caused in a preceding incarnation. I will make a diagrammatic sketch. Here I am, here is my experience, the experience of to-day (right). This is caused by the quite differently-constituted personality in the same ego in a previous earth-life (left). There it is. It has long ceased to belong to my personality, but it is stamped into the etheric world, or into the astral world, which lies behind the etheric world. Now I have to go back, to retrace the way backwards.

I told you that at first the thing appears as if some being were really bearing the experience towards me. This is so, on the second day. But after the third day it appears as if those who have brought it to me, those spiritual beings, withdraw, and I become aware of it as something of my own, which I myself, in a previous incarnation, laid down as cause. Because this is no longer within the present, because this is something I must behold in the past earth-life, I seem to be fettered. This state of being fettered ceases only when I have perceived the thing, when I have a picture of what was in the previous incarnation, and when I then look back to the event which I have not lost sight of through the three days. Then I become free, as I return, for now I can move about freely with the effect. As long as I am only within the cause, I cannot move about with the cause. Thus I go back into a previous incarnation, there become fettered as it were by the cause, and only when I now enter right into this present earth-life, is the thing resolved.

Now let us take an example: suppose somebody experiences at a certain time on a certain day that a friend says something to him that is not altogether pleasant—perhaps he had not expected it. This friend says to him something not altogether pleasant. He now ponders what he experiences in listening to what his friend says. He makes a vivid picture of what he has experienced, how he got a slight shock, and how he got vexed, perhaps he was also hurt, or the like. This is an inner working, and as such it must be brought into the picture. Now he lets the three days elapse. The second day he goes about and says to himself: ‘This picture which I made yesterday has had a strange effect upon me. The whole day long I have had within me something like an acid, as it were, something that comes from the picture and makes me feel inwardly out of sorts ...’ At the end of the whole process, after the third day, he says to himself: ‘I get up in the morning and now I have the definite feeling that the picture is fettering me.’ Then this event of the previous incarnation is made known to me. I see it before me. Then I pass over to the experience which is still quite fresh, which is still quite present. The fettering ceases, and I say to myself: ‘So this is how it was in the previous earth-life! This is what caused it; now there is the effect. With this effect I can live again ... now the thing is present again.’

This must be practised over and over again, for generally the thread is broken on the very first day, when we make the first effort. And then nothing comes.

It is particularly favourable to let things run parallel, so that we do not stop at one event, but bring a number of. events of the day into picture-form in this way. You will say: ‘Then I must live through the next day with the greatest variety of feelings.’ But this is quite possible. It is not at all harmful. Only try it; the things go quite well together. ‘And must I then be fettered so and so often after the third day?’ This does not matter either. Nothing of this matters. The things will adjust themselves in time. What belongs, from an earlier incarnation, to a later one, will find its way to it. But it will not succeed at once; it will not succeed at the first attempt; the thread breaks. We must have patience to try the thing over and over again. Then we feel something growing stronger within the soul. Then we feel that something awakens in the soul, and we say to ourselves: ‘Until now you were filled with blood. You have felt within you the pulsation of the blood and the breath. Now there is something within you besides the blood. You are filled with something.’

You can even have the feeling that you are filled with something of which you can say quite definitely that it is like a metal that has become aeriform. You actually feel something like metal, you feel it in you. It cannot be described differently; it really is so. You feel yourself permeated with metal, in your whole body. Just as one can say of certain waters, that they ‘taste metallic’, the whole body seems to ‘taste’ as if it were inwardly permeated by some delicate substance, which, in reality, is something spiritual.

You feel this when you come upon something which was, of course, always in you, but to which you only now begin to pay attention. Then, when you begin to feel this, you again take courage. For if the thread is always breaking and everything is as it was before—if you want to get hold of a karmic connection, but the thread is always breaking—you may easily lose courage. But when you detect within yourself this sense of being inwardly filled, then you get courage again. And you say to yourself: it will come right in time.

But, my dear friends, these things must be experienced in all quietude and calmness. Those who cannot experience them quietly but get excited and emotional, spread an inner mist over what really ought to happen, and nothing comes of it.

There are people to-day in the outside world who know of Anthroposophy only by hearsay. Perhaps they have read nothing at all of it, or only what opponents have written. It is really very funny now.—Many of the antagonistic writings spring out of the earth like mushrooms—they quote literature, but among the literature they quote there are none of my books at all, only the books of opponents! The authors admit that they have not really approached the original sources, that they know only the antagonistic literature. Such things exist to-day. And so there are people outside who say: “The Anthroposophists are mad.” As a matter of fact, what one can least of all afford to be in order to reach anything at all in the spiritual world is to be mad. One must not be mad in the very slightest degree if one hopes to come to anything in the spiritual world. Even the tiniest fragment of madness is a hindrance to reaching anything. This simply must be avoided. Even a slight fancifulness, slight capriciousness, must be avoided. For all this giving way to the moods of the day, the caprices of the day, forms obstacles and handicaps on the way to progress in the spiritual world. If one desires to progress in the field of Anthroposophy, there is nothing for it but to have an absolutely sane head and an absolutely sane heart. With doting sentimentality (Schwärmerei) which is already the beginning of madness, one can achieve nothing.

Things such as I have told you to-day, strange as they sound, must be experienced in the light of absolute clarity of mind, of absolute soundness of head and heart. Truly, there is nothing that can more surely save one from very slight daily madness, than Anthroposophy. All madness would [disappear] by means of Anthroposophy if people would only devote themselves to it with real intensity. If somebody were to set himself to go mad through Anthroposophy, this would certainly be an experiment with inadequate means!

I do not say this in order to make a joke, but because it must be an integral part of the mood and tenor of anthroposophical endeavour. This is the attitude that must be adopted towards the matter, as I have just explained to you, half in joke, if we want to approach it in the right way, with the right orientation. We must set out to be as sane as possible; then we approach it in the right spirit. This is the least we can strive for, and above all, strive for in respect to the little madnesses of life.

Once I was friends with a very clever professor of philosophy, now long since dead, who used to say on every occasion: “We all have some point or other on which we are a little mad!” He meant, all people are a little mad ... but he was a very clever man. I always believed there was something behind his words, that his assertion was not altogether without foundation! He did not become an Anthroposophist.

It can be said that the original purpose of festivals was to induce men to look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things; and it is the Easter Festival in particular that can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries of civilization we have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has led man farther and farther away from a clear conception of his connection with cosmic forces and powers. He has become ever more reduced to contemplating only his relation to earthly forces and powers, and it is quite true that with the means recognized today as legitimate it could not be otherwise. If someone imbued with the old Mysteries in the pre-Christian or early Christian centuries could learn of our modern knowledge, and if he approached the matter in the frame of mind prevalent in those days, he would not be able to understand how man could live without an awareness of his extra-earthly, cosmic connection.

I shall now merely sketch various matters which you will find dealt with in detail in this or that cycle. As these lectures are intended especially to acquaint you with the Easter idea there is naturally no time to elaborate all the points that I shall merely indicate.

Harking back to the various older systems of religion, we may take as an example the one with which the closest contact still persists: the Hebrew-Jewish system. In certain religious systems of Antiquity, provided they are monotheistic, we find the veneration, the worship, of a single divinity. It is the divinity we speak of in our Christian conception as the First Person of all divinity, as the Father-God.

Now, in all religions embodying the idea of this Father-God there obtained to a greater or lesser degree the connection of this Father-God with the cosmic Moon forces streaming down to Earth; and the Mystery priests in particular were fully aware of it. Nowadays little remains of this old awareness of the connection between the human being and the Moon forces but the inspiration they impart to the poetic soul; and in the realm of medicine, the counting of the ten lunar months of man's embryonic life. But in the older cosmogonies is to be found a clear consciousness of the permeation, the empowering by impulses emanating from the Moon at the time man descends to his physical existence from the spiritual world, where he had lived his pre-earthly life as a being of soul and spirit. When a man seeks that which gives him life, which lives in him as forces of digestion, of breathing and so forth—in short, all forces of growth—he must not look for these among the Earth forces but among extra-terrestrial forces. By examining the Earth forces—well, he can perceive how these act upon him; but if our body were not held together by cosmic forces, if these did not give our body its form, what could Earth forces contribute to its cohesion? The moment the cosmic forces leave the body and the latter is exposed to the terrestrial forces only, it breaks up, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. The Earth forces can only make a man into a corpse; they cannot create his form. It is to the mighty influence of the Moon that we are indebted for the forces so active in man as to lift him out of his physical limitations, to give him a cohesive organization which during life does not succumb to those forces that seize and destroy him at death; forces that combat this destruction during his entire Earth life—and this they must do.

If we know theoretically, on the one hand, that the Moon forces contain the potential human body, we must observe, on the other hand, how the old religions reverenced these forces that introduced man, so to speak, into physical existence through his birth—revered them as the Father forces, the forces of the divine Father. And the ancient Hebrew initiates were clearly aware that from the Moon emanated the forces which lead man into his Earth life, maintaining him there, and from which he severs himself, as physical man, when he passes through the portal of death.

To look up with loving soul to these divine Father forces and to relive them in the ritual and in prayer, that was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these old monotheistic religions were more consistent than you might think: such matters are utterly misrepresented in history, because history is dependent upon material documents and has no access to what can be observed in spiritual vision.

The religions that focused on the Moon and the spiritual beings abiding there are really later religions: the primordial ones embraced in addition a clear idea of the Sun forces and even—as we must add here—of the Saturn forces; but particularly of the Sun forces.

You see, this leads to a study of history for which no material documents exist, a period antedating the foundation of Christianity by many millennia; it takes us back to the epoch which, in my Occult Science, I called the Ancient Indian—in order to give it a name and because it evolved in the locality that later became India. The civilization following this was the Ancient Persian. During these civilizations the manner in which man developed was very different from what it became later; and upon this development depended his creed. We human beings have been developing, during the last two thousand years or more, in such a way that we really do not notice any break in the continuity of our earthly development, and indeed, the break is scarcely noticeable. Something that takes place in us around our thirtieth year remains largely in the subconscious, unconscious mind of present-day man. This was by no means the case among those who lived eight or nine millennia before the beginning of our era. At that time a man's development was continuous up to about the thirtieth year, but then a mighty metamorphosis set in. I must express this rather drastically, for thus the facts in the case will best be made clear.

Here is something that could happen in those ancient times: before his thirtieth year, someone had become acquainted with another who was three or four years younger, and who thus passed through the metamorphosis at a later time. Now, if these two people had not seen each other for a certain time and then met again—I am using the language of today that shows the matter in a still more radical way—it could happen that the one who had experienced the metamorphosis would fail to recognize the other when addressed by him. So great was the change that had come over his memory.

In these very old times it was the custom in the small communities such as then existed to register events in the lives of young people, because they themselves forgot it all after passing through the mighty revulsion in their thirtieth year, and had to be informed of what they had experienced previously. And then, when these people realized that in their thirtieth year they had become different beings, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their previous experiences—this was actually so—then, through the instruction they received, they became aware at the same time that before their thirtieth year it was exclusively the Moon forces that had acted upon them, and that now the Sun forces entered into the development of their earthly life.

The influence of the Sun forces on man is entirely different from that of the Moon forces; but what does present-day man know of the Sun forces? Only their external physical effect. He knows that they warm him, make him perspire; and he knows a bit about their therapeutic value—sun-baths and the like—but only in quite an external way. He cannot remotely conceive of the effect of the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun.

Julian the Apostate, last of the pagan Caesars, still knew something of these Sun forces from reminiscences of the Mysteries; and because he tried to revive this knowledge he was murdered on his expedition to Persia. That shows us how strong were the powers that were out to exterminate the knowledge of such matters in the early Christian centuries. It is therefore not surprising that today it is impossible to learn about these things.—While the Moon forces determine man, permeate him with an inner necessity so that he must act according to his instincts, his temperament, his emotions—in fact, according to his whole physico-etheric body, the Sun forces liberate him from this necessity. They melt, so to speak, these forces of necessity, and it is really through their agency that he becomes a free being.

In ancient times these two influences were sharply divided. In his thirtieth year a man simply became a Sun-man, a free man, whereas up to that time he had been a Moon-man, un-free. Nowadays these conditions overlap: even in childhood the Sun forces are active along with the Moon forces, and the latter continue to influence later life, with the result that today compulsion and freedom interact. But as has been said, this was not always the case, and in the prehistoric times with which we are dealing the effects of the Moon and of the Sun were sharply separated in life's course. It was considered pathological, abnormal, when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the turning point in his life; therefore it was said of normal people that they were born not once, but twice. And when humanity began to develop in such a way that this second or Sun-birth (the first was called the Moon-birth) became less noticeable, certain exercises, certain cult rituals—in short, certain methods were applied to those who were to be initiated in the Mysteries. These experienced what no longer existed for mankind in general, and they were then the twice-born.

The term “twice-born” which we find nowadays in oriental writings is one of mere tradition. I should really like to ask every orientalist, every Sanscrit scholar, whether our knowledge of the Orient discloses the substance of the term in a clearly definable way. I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst: you can ask him whether or not his studies in this field confirm my doubts. Quantities of formal explanations of the term are available, but the meaning of the substance is not known. Only those can understand it who know that it goes back to a reality such as I have just set forth. In such matters spiritual research alone can speak; and when it has spoken I should like to ask any unprejudiced exponent of external science whether all available documents do not bear out at every step the results of spiritual research. This will prove to be the case, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain matters antedating the science based on documents must be pointed out, for the latter cannot unlock the knowledge of human life.

So we look back to an epoch of Antiquity in which people spoke of the Moon-birth of the human being as the creation of man by the Father; and they understood that in the Sun-birth the rays of the Sun were permeated with the Christ force, the force of the Son, the liberating force. Consider: what does this Sun force effect? It enables us human beings upon Earth to make something of ourselves. Without the liberating Sun forces, without the impulses that break down compulsion, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable natural necessity—not of the necessity imposed by destiny but by Nature.

When a man imbued with the old cosmogonies looked up to the Sun he knew that this world-eye, from which the power of the Christ streamed forth, released him from bondage in that inexorable necessity into which he had been born through the Moon forces, and subject to which he would otherwise have had to develop throughout life. He knew that these Sun forces, these Christ forces raying down upon him through the cosmic eye of the Sun, enabled him to make something of himself through his inner freedom, something he had not been through the agency of the Moon forces when he entered life.—What the Sun forces gave to man was this consciousness of his ability to transform himself, to make something of himself.

For completeness' sake and parenthetically I should add that the third source to which men looked were the Saturn forces. In these they saw all that sustained the human being after passing through the portal of death; that is, when he experienced the third earthly metamorphosis.

Physical birth—Moon-birth
Second birth—Sun-birth
Third birth (physical death)—Saturn-birth

After death the human being was sustained by the forces of Saturn, which at that time was considered to lie at the extreme periphery of the Earth's planetary system. These were the forces that bore him up and out into the spiritual world, that maintained the cohesion of his being when the third metamorphosis occurred. There is no doubt that this was part of the ancient cosmogonies.

But humanity changed as a result of evolution, and the time came when only the effects of the Sun forces were known in the Mysteries. The knowledge of these survived longest in the therapeutic sections of the Mysteries, because the same forces that give man his freedom, the ability to make something of himself—namely, the Sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and other beings and things of the Earth, and in this form contain healing properties.

For the most part, however, mankind lost just this contact with the Sun. For a long time people were still aware of their dependence upon the Moon forces, the Father forces; but the consciousness of being dependent upon the Sun forces for their liberation disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of Nature—about the only ones mentioned in our philosophies—are really nothing but the Moon forces reduced to complete abstractions. But One Who still knew the Sun forces and was able to be guided by them was the Christ Bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them because it was His mission to receive them in His own body as they streamed down to Earth, whereas in the old Mysteries they could be reached only by ascending in vision to the Sun.

I explained that yesterday; but the essential point is that in the thirtieth year of His life a transmutation occurred in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; the same transformation that took place in everyone in primeval times, except that then the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual Sun entered into all men, whereas here it was the primal Being of the Sun, the Christ Himself, Who descended to enter human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what underlies the Mystery of Golgotha as the primal fruit of the whole life of the Earth.

You will now be able to understand the whole context of these matters by considering the manner in which Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, as I might put it, existed as a quite human institution in those days, for it meant initiation. Primarily this comprised three stages; but the first requirement for attaining to true enlightenment, to initiation, was that everything offered the candidate by the Mysteries should engender in him a degree of inner humility such as nowadays hardly anybody can even dimly imagine. Today people consider themselves enormously modest in respect of their achievements, even in cases where one who can see through them knows that they are veritably possessed by vanity. At the inception of an initiation, the most important realization that had to come to the neophyte was that he could not think of himself as a human being at all: that it still remained for him to become one. Today it would be asking too much of anyone to admit that at any given period of his life he was not a human being. But that was the very first requirement, and the neophyte had to meditate as follows: Before descending into an earthly body I was indeed a human being; in pre-earthly existence I was a human being of soul and spirit. In this form I then descended into the physical body, received from my mother, from my parents. I was then—not clothed in a physical body—that would be a wrong term: I was permeated by this physical body.

Of the manner in which, over a long period of time, the spirit and the soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—of all this men are completely unaware. They know nothing of it. They are conscious of perceiving with their senses, of seeing their physical surroundings with their eyes. But when soul and spirit have so far permeated a man's physical body that he considers himself a fully developed adult, where has he actually arrived? He can only see out of his eyes, listen out of his ears, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness, through his skin: he can only perceive outward, not inward. He cannot look into himself with his eyes: the most he can do is to dissect the human corpse and then imagine he is looking into himself. But in reality he is not. Supposing here is a house. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I procure some tools, and if I am strong enough I demolish the house. Then I have all the separate bricks before me; but is it not childish to imagine I am looking into the house when I am only looking at this pile of rubbish? Yet that is the way people go to work nowadays. They dissect the human being and cut him up in order to learn to know him; but in that way they do not learn to know him, for that is not at all the human being. If we would learn to know the human being we must be able to look back inward through the eyes, to listen back inward through the ears, just as today we perceive outward through the senses.

All that taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the Door to Man, the Gate to Man. The point of departure in the initiations was the candidate's realization that he could know nothing of the human being; and having no human self-consciousness, he could not even be a human being. He must first learn to look inward through his senses as previously he had only looked outward. That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment the neophyte learned this looking inward he experienced himself also in his pre-earthly existence, for then he knew that he was in his spirit-soul element.

So the neophyte learned to look inward instead of outward, and in so doing he became aware of what had entered him through eyes, ears, skin, and so forth, as prenatal existence. At this point he was told that only now could he come to understand what today we would call natural science. How do we of today go about studying natural science? We are taught to observe the phenomena of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is the same as though I had known someone very well, and I were told to forget, when

I meet him again, everything we had ever had in common. Fancy, if you can, a married couple meeting again after a separation and being obliged to forget everything in the way of their common experiences! Well, I can imagine that occasionally it might be pleasant to do so; but life could not be maintained under such conditions.

Yet those are exactly the conditions imposed upon men of our time by our system of civilization, for they did learn to know the kingdoms of Nature from their spiritual aspect before descending to Earth. And while today men are encouraged to forget all they had learned about the minerals, plants and animals before descending to Earth, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, was instructed somewhat as follows: he was shown, for example, a block of quartz; and then everything possible was done to recall to his memory what he had known, before descending to Earth, about quartz—or about the lily, or the rose, as the case may have been. Recognizing was the factor taught as natural science; and when the candidate had learned to study Nature in the light of what he had seen in his prenatal life, he was admitted to the second stage.

In the second stage he learned music and what was then architecture, geometry, surveying, etc.; for this second stage comprised everything the neophyte could perceive when he not only looked inward through his eyes and listened inward through his ears, but actually entered into himself. Then he was told that he was about to enter the human Temple Grotto, and this he came to know. It meant that which was physically permeated by the psycho-spiritual forces that constitute man before he descends to life on Earth. There he penetrated into himself. This Temple Grotto, he was told, was made up of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought, where one learned everything connected with thinking. Seen from without, the head is small; but if one enters into it and looks at it from within, it is as comprehensive as the world, and there one's spiritual activity becomes manifest. That was the first chamber. In the second chamber one learned to know feeling; and in the third, willing.

In this way the initiate learned how man is organized in respect of his organs of thinking, feeling and willing; he learned about the factors concerned in the Earth life. Knowledge of Nature has significance not only in connection with the Earth: it is acquired before one descends to Earth. Here we must remember that yonder in the spiritual world houses are not built with tellurian architecture. There is music there, but it is spiritual melos. What we know as music is projected down into our air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as we experience it, it is of this Earth It is the same when we survey: we measure the Earth; and surveying, geometry and the like are earthly sciences. It was important for the candidate for the second stage to have his attention drawn to the fact that all thought of gaining enlightenment or knowledge by earthly means alone is delusive, except in the case of geometry, architecture or surveying; that a genuine science of Nature must consist in recalling prenatal knowledge. That is what he was taught; and he came to understand that geometry, architecture, music and surveying were the sciences that can be learned here on Earth.

Thus the mystic entered into himself and came to know the human being as consisting of three chambers, as opposed to the human being of one particular incarnation, which is all one encounters by knowing him only from the outside.—And in the third stage the neophyte learned the nature of man as it was when he not only entered into himself, comprehending his spiritual self, but when his spiritual self learned about the body as well. In all the old Mysteries this was therefore the stage inevitably called the Portal of Death. There the initiate learned what he was like after laying aside the earthly body. But there was a difference between this actual death and the death of initiation. Why this had to be so I shall explain in the following lectures; at the moment I am merely emphasizing the facts.

When we actually die we discard the physical body and are no longer bound to it. It ceases to respond to Earth forces, and we are free of these. But one who is still bound to the physical body, as was the case in the initiations of old, must obtain by his own strength and efforts what comes to him automatically through death, namely, this freedom from the body; and he must sustain this condition for a certain length of time. Initiation demanded the attainment of these strong inner forces of the soul by which the latter could remain independent of the physical body; and these forces at the same time provided higher cognition of matters not to be perceived by the senses or thought by the intellect. They transported the initiate as a human being into the spiritual world, just as man is placed by his physical body into the physical world.

But at that point the candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a psycho-spiritual human being, as an initiate, while still in his Earth existence. From that time onward he saw the Earth as a star existing detached from man; and in the older Mysteries it was with the Sun in particular that he had to live, instead of with the Earth. He knew what came to him from the Sun and how the Sun forces worked in him.

The stage that followed the one I have just described, the fourth, may be explained in this way: When a man eats on this Earth he knows, this is cabbage, that is game—he drinks various things, and he knows that now these things are outside him, now inside. He breathes the air which is alternately outside and inside. He is connected with the Earth forces in such a way as to carry within him the forces and substances of the Earth that are otherwise outside him. It was made clear to the candidate that before being initiated he was an Earth-carrier, a carrier of cabbage, game, pork, and so forth. But if you have completed the third stage of initiation, so he was told, and if you receive what you are now able to receive by having freed yourself from the body, you will no longer be a carrier of cabbage, pork and veal, but you will be a bearer of what the Sun forces give you.—And this spiritual gift of the Sun forces was called in all the Mysteries christos. Hence the neophyte who had passed beyond the third stage and could now feel himself as a bearer of the Sun forces—just as on Earth he could feel himself to be a cabbage carrier—was called a christophor, a Christ bearer. In the majority of the old Mysteries that was the appellation of a neophyte of the fourth stage.

In the third stage certain things had to be thoroughly understood, in particular, that the craving for the physical body must cease if enlightenment was to enter; and the neophyte had clearly to realize that while he belonged to the Earth as far as his physical body was concerned, yet the function of the Earth was really to destroy that physical body, not to build it up. Now he came to know the constructive forces that derive from the cosmos.

And he learned something else when he became a christophor, namely, that even in the Earth's matter there are spiritual forces at work, only they are not perceptible to earthly senses. Another language was current in those times, but in modern words—and I can use only these—the sense of what was made clear to the candidate was this: if you would know the science of matter, know how different elements combine or separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter out of the cosmos. That is impossible if you are not initiated: it is necessary to have passed through the fourth stage. You must be able to see by means of the forces of the Sun existence—then you can study chemistry.

Imagine nowadays confronting a candidate for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry with the requirement that he must first be able to feel himself in the same relation to the forces of the Sun as he does to the cabbage of the Earth! It would seem quite mad.—But in the old days realities were dealt with, and people came to understand that by means of all the forces active in the body—forces employed for ordinary learning—only geometry, surveying, music and architecture can be studied. Not chemistry. Today chemistry is studied from the outside, and so it has been since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine enlightenment must despair at the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon data, not upon inner penetration of the subject. And if people were open-minded they would realize that something more is necessary, that other things must be understood if chemistry is to be studied. What stifles such impulses in man is the cowardice of modern cognition in which he has been reared.

Now the neophyte had attained to the still higher stage of astronomus. The external study of the stars, by computation and the like, was considered wholly futile: spiritual beings inhabit the stars, and these can be known only after physical observation has been surmounted—after even geometry has been overcome—so that one can live in the universe and get to know the spiritual nature of the stars. Then the neophyte became a resurrected one; then he could really see the Moon and Sun forces at work upon earthly man.

Today I have described to you from two aspects how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries—not at a given season but at a certain degree of human maturity: Easter was the arising of the psycho-spiritual man out of the physical body in the spiritual universe; and those who still knew something of Mystery wisdom saw the Mystery of Golgotha in this light when it took place. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not intervened? In olden times it was possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in still older times it was a matter of course for a man to experience his second birth in his thirtieth year or thereabouts. And later on there were at least memories, as well as the science of the Mystery schools, that kept alive in tradition what in earlier epochs had been actually experienced. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, all that had been lost or forgotten; and humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not that power, to which the initiate attained in becoming a christophor, descended into a Jesus of Nazareth and henceforth remained on Earth, so that man could be united with this power through Christ Jesus.

Undoubtedly, then, the Easter Festival as we know it is linked with a phase of the Mysteries, and we can really become conscious of the substance of our Easter only by reviving this aspect of them. You will readily understand that in this way we can at least approximate a realization of what the ancient neophyte experienced at his initiation. This will be the subject of further consideration. The neophyte could say to himself: Initiation has disclosed to me how Sun and Moon act within me in their mutual celestial relationship. For now I know that as a physical being I am constituted in a certain way. The circumstance that my eyes, my nose—my whole bodily form within and without—are shaped thus and so, that this bodily form could grow and is still growing through being nourished, all this depends upon the Moon forces, as does everything in the way of necessity. But that I can be active within my bodily nature as a free inner being, can transmute and master myself, this is due to the Sun forces, the Christ forces. These I must activate if I would, by conscious effort, build within me what otherwise they would have to bring about by compulsion.

From all this we can understand why even today we look to Sun and Moon and their relative position to determine the date of Easter. Nothing remains of all this but our calculation, When is the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the spring equinox? We place Easter on the Sunday following this first full Moon, thus indicating that in the nature and form of Easter we see something that must be determined from above, from the cosmos. I shall elaborate that tomorrow. But what must be grasped anew is the idea of Easter. This can only be done by contemplating the old Mysteries, which first of all drew attention to what was experienced by introspection—the portal of man; by the achievement of freedom—the portal of death; by moving freely in the spiritual world—becoming a christophor.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear when the time came for the development of human freedom to assert itself; but now the time has come to rediscover them. We must find and make them our own again; and we must fully realize that today efforts are necessary to this end.

With this in mind the Christmas Conference was held, for there is urgent need of a sanctuary on Earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society must lead the way in its further development to the modern Mysteries. It will be one of your tasks, my dear friends, to collaborate in this way with the right understanding. But in order to succeed you will have to reflect on human life in its three stages: that of introspection, that of self-penetration, and that of a consciousness such as results in outer reality only through death.

And to remind us of what has been said in this hour, let us carry away with us and meditate upon these words:

Stand at the portal of man's existence,
Read above its arch stones cosmic scripture.

Dwell in the deep of man's inner soul-life,
Feel within its orbit the world's beginning.

Ponder the end of man's earth-chapters,
Find thou there the turning-point of spirit.¹

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Weltbeginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

• 1. Translation by Barbara Betteridge.

You see, in the early days after the founding of Christianity, it spread first in the south, as far as Rome, and then later, from the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries onwards, it spread northwards. Now let's take a look at Europe at the time when Christianity spread, that is, at the time of the founding of Christianity, or shortly thereafter. I would like to answer the question: What did Europe or our civilization look like at the time when Christianity spread?

If we imagine Asia over there (a drawing is made), Europe is like a small appendage of Asia, like a small peninsula. You will know that Europe looks like this: here we have Scandinavia, here we have the Baltic Sea; we then come to Russia. Here we have present-day Denmark. Here we come across the north coast of Germany, here we come to the Dutch area, here to the French area. Here we come to Spain, here we come across to Italy. Now we come to the areas that we already know: we come to the Adriatic Sea, we come across to Greece; then there is the Black Sea. Here we come up against Asia Minor, and across there we would come to Africa. On the other side, here we would have England with Wales, and then here Ireland, only briefly mentioned.

Now I will try to explain to you what Europe looked like at the time when Christianity was gradually spreading across Europe. Here, Europe is closed off from Asia by the Ural Mountains. We then have the mighty river, the Volga, and if we had come to these areas, which today form southern Russia, Ukraine and so on, at the time when Christianity came from the south, we would have found the Ostrogoths there, a people who later completely disappeared from this area, moved further west and then merged with other peoples in the west. So at the time when Christianity began to spread, we have the Ostrogoths here. You will see in a moment how all these peoples began to migrate at a certain point in time. But at the time when Christianity came up from the south, these peoples in Europe were settled in this place.

If you take the Danube, then further upstream you have today's Romania and today's Hungary. In these areas – today's Hungary and today's Romania – the Visigoths were located at that time. If we go further upstream, here to today's western Hungary, north of the Danube, we have the Vandals. That was the name of these peoples back then. And where today is Moravia, Bohemia and Bavaria, the so-called Suevi were located, from whom the Swabians then emerged. If we go further up – this is where the Elbe rises and then flows into the North Sea: here, everywhere, they are all Goths. But here is the Rhine, which you know well; so that would be today's Cologne – here around the Rhine, the so-called Ripuarian Franks live. Further up, where the Rhine flows into the North Sea, the Salic Franks live. And here, as far as the Elbe, the Saxons live. The Saxons got their name from the people who were to the south. They got their name because these peoples to the south noticed that they preferred or almost exclusively ate meat, and they called them “carnivores”.

Here, in these areas, the Romans had spread: even in present-day France, in present-day Spain and so on, here too were Greco-Roman peoples everywhere. Christianity spread among them first, and then it pushed north. It can be said that Christianity came to these areas earlier than to the more western areas. Among the Goths, for example, we have an old bishop: Wulfila, which means “the little wolf.” Wulfila made a Gothic translation of the Bible very early on, in the 4th century. This Bible translation is very interesting because it differs greatly from later Bible translations. It is contained in an extraordinarily valuable book that is now in the library in Uppsala, Sweden; and it can be seen from this that Christianity spread here in the east earlier.

If you follow what I have written, you will find: So there are the Greco-Roman peoples; but in these areas, in the oldest times, there is still an ancient population everywhere, an ancient population of Europe that is very interesting. This population of Europe, which I have now marked in red on the drawing, had already been pushed back more towards the western regions by the time Christianity pushed up from south to north. For originally none of these peoples were in these regions at all, but only at the time when Christianity was spreading; they were all more in the east. All these peoples are to be imagined living on the border between Asia and Europe. And what the Slavs are today are even further inside Asia.

The question now is this: if we go back to the times before the emergence of Christianity, I would have to draw this whole map of Europe with red lines; the whole of Europe was permeated by an ancient Celtic population. And all the things that are in Europe later, that I have drawn and written down for you, actually came from Asia only later – the few centuries before, the few centuries after the founding of Christianity. And that raises the question: Yes, why do these peoples migrate all at once? These peoples began to move during a certain period of world history; they pushed their way into Europe. This happened for the following reason: if you look at present-day Siberia, it is actually a huge, barren area that is very sparsely populated. Not so long ago, namely not long before the emergence of Christianity, a few centuries before, this Siberia was still much lower land, and this lower land was relatively warm. And then it rose. A country does not have to rise very much for it to become cold in the countries that were previously warm, and the lakes dry up and it becomes desolate. So nature itself caused the people to move from east to west.

The Celtic population in Europe was a very interesting population. The migrating peoples to the west encountered the Celtic population. They were a relatively peaceful population. The Celtic population in Europe still had what could be called an original form of clairvoyance, a real original form of clairvoyance. When these people set about any kind of craft, they thought: the spirits will help them with this craft. And when someone felt that he was adept at making boots – they didn't have boots yet, but things to cover their feet – he saw in his skill the help of the spirits. And he could really perceive what was helping him from the spiritual world. These ancient Celtic people still viewed their lives in such a way that they were, in a sense, “on familiar terms” with the spiritual world. And that is why these peoples also produced very beautiful things. The Celtic population also penetrated into Italy in ancient times, bringing with them many beautiful things, which helped to soften the rough Roman way of life, which had come about through the marauding people. It was precisely through the penetration of the Celtic population that the original Roman coarseness was somewhat mitigated.

So here, in ancient times, there was Celtic population throughout Europe. In the south, there was a Roman-Greek, Romance-Greek, Latin-Greek population. And, as I said, due to the elevation of Siberia, which made Siberia barren, these peoples moved over. And at the time when Christianity pushed up from south to north, the map of Europe looked like this (pointing to the drawing).

It is very strange, gentlemen: certain peculiarities of the peoples are well preserved, other peculiarities are less well preserved. For example, one must note the following: among the peoples who moved from Asia into Europe were the Huns, who had Attila as their most powerful king. But Attila is a Gothic name! For Attila means 'little father' in Gothic. Because many of the peoples that I have written down here also recognized the Hun king Attila as their king, he was given a Gothic name. But these Huns were very different from the other peoples. And that was because all these more savage peoples who came over had originally been mountain peoples in Asia. The somewhat tamer peoples who came over, like the Goths, were more the peoples of the plains. And the wild deeds of the Huns and also later the wild deeds of the Magyars came from the fact that they were originally mountain peoples in Asia.

It so happened that the Romans, more and more independent of Christianity, extended their rule northwards, and there they came into contact with these peoples who came over from Asia. Many wars broke out between the Romans and the peoples who were here in the north. Last time I already mentioned the name of a very important Roman writer, Tacitus. He wrote a lot about Roman history, but he also wrote a very great and powerful little book called “Germania”. In it, about a hundred years after Christianity had already been founded, he gave a magnificent description of the peoples who lived up there, so that in Tacitus' description, these people come to life before you. But I have already told you the other thing: Tacitus writes as one of the most educated Romans, but he did not know more about Christianity than that it was founded as a sect in Asia by a certain Christ, who was executed by the court! So Tacitus was writing in Rome at a time when Christians were still enslaved, when they still lived in their underground catacombs, actually not even that correctly. And so there was still no Christianity among these northern people.

But these northern people also had a religion back then. And it is very interesting to see what kind of religion these northern people had. Remember again, gentlemen, how religious ideas developed among southern and eastern peoples. We have spoken of the Indians; they looked primarily at the physical body, that is, at something of the human being. The Egyptians looked at the etheric body - again something of the human being. The Babylonians and Assyrians looked at the astral body – again something of the human being. The Jews saw the I in their Yahweh – again something of the human being. Only of the Greeks – and this then passed over to the Romans – must I tell you: they saw less of the human being, they turned their gaze more to nature. And the Greeks were truly the greatest observers of nature.

But these people here in the north, they have seen nothing at all of man as such, of the inner man, even less than the Greeks. It is interesting: these people here in the north have completely forgotten the inner human being, and they do not even have memories of what could be thought about the inner human being. The Greeks and Romans at least still had memories; they were neighbors of the peoples all over the Near East, of the Egyptians, Babylonians and so on; they had memories of what these ancient peoples had thought. These Nordic peoples only looked at their surroundings, only at what was outside of people. And they did not see nature, but rather the nature spirits outside of people. The ancient Greeks saw nature; these people here in the north saw the nature spirits. That is why the most beautiful stories, fairy tales, legends and myths originated precisely among these people, because they saw the spirits everywhere. The Greeks saw the tall mountain, Mount Olympus; but the gods lived on Mount Olympus. These people up here in the north did not say, “The gods live on a mountain.” Rather, they saw the god himself in the summit of the mountain, because the summit of the mountain did not appear to them as a rock. When dawn shone on the mountain top, gilding the mountain and the morning sun rising over the mountains, these peoples did not see the mountain, but this weaving of the morning sun over the mountain; that was the divine for them. It seemed ghostly to them. It was quite natural for them to see the ghostly spread over the mountains in this way.

And the Greeks built temples for the gods. Throughout Asia Minor, temples were built for the gods. These people in the north said: we will not build temples. What does it mean to build temples? It is dark inside them; but over the mountains, there is light and brightness. And the gods, that is, the spirits, must be worshiped by going up the mountain.

Now they have thought about it: Yes, when the light shines over the mountains - it comes from the sun; but the sun is most beneficial in the middle of summer, when St. John's Day, as we call it today, approaches. Then they climbed up the mountains, made a fire and celebrated their gods not in the temple, but on the high mountains. Or they said: Yes, the sunlight and the warmth of the sun go into the earth, and in spring what the sun causes comes out of the earth again. And that is why you have to worship the sun, even when it sends its power out of the earth. They felt this particularly charitably in the forests, where many trees grow out of the way the sun's power works back from the earth. That is why they worshiped their gods in forests. Not in temples, but on mountains and in forests.

And, you see, these peoples believed in spirits for everything. The ancient Celts, who were driven out by these peoples, still saw the spirits themselves. These peoples no longer saw the spirits, but in all of nature, they regarded as divine whatever shone as light, whatever was there as warmth, whatever acted as air in the clouds. And that was the old Germanic religion, the old religion, which was then driven out by Christianity.

Christianity came to these areas in two ways. First, it pushed up into southern Russia, and into these areas that are now Romania and Hungary. That is where Wulfila translated the Bible. A Christianity emerged that was much more genuine than the Christianity that spread everywhere from Rome by the second route. From Rome, Christianity spread more as domination. And one can say: if Christianity, as it arose here in the East through Russia, in the time when there was no Slavic population, if Christianity had spread there, it would have become quite different; it would have become more inward, because it would have had much more Asian character. The Asian character is an inward one. And the Christianity that spread from Rome took on more of an external form, which then became dead in the cult because the meaning of the cult was no longer recognized. I have spoken to you about the monstrance and the Santissimum, which actually represents the sun and the moon – but that was covered up, it was no longer accepted. And so a spiritless cult has spread. This spiritless cult was then carried over to Constantinople by a spiritless Caesar; the city of Constantinople was founded. And in later times, the changed Christianity also spread to the other countries.

The Christianity that is in Wulfila's translation of the Bible, for example, has completely disappeared from Europe. For it is more the cultic Christianity, the externalities, that spread from here. And in the East, when the Slavs came, what was more cultic, which has a very little inwardness, spread even more.

Now, what I have told you about the religious beliefs of these peoples later underwent a certain change. It is always the case among people that they originally know what it is about; then they no longer know what it is about, and it remains only a memory. It remains something external. And so, from the gods that people saw, from the spirits everywhere in nature, three main deities were formed: Wotan, who was actually imagined to be something like light and air floating over everything. Wotan was worshipped, for example, when there was a heavy storm; then it was said: Wotan is in the wind, Wotan is blowing in the wind.

It was a peculiarity of these peoples that they expressed in their language what they perceived in nature. That is right, they worshipped Wotan as blowing in the wind. Do you feel when I say: Wotan blows in the wind - the three w's? It was something terrible for these people when a storm came and they imitated this stormy weather by saying: Wotan blows in the wind! - That is how we would say it today, but it was very similar in the old language.

And when summer came and people saw lightning and heard thunder during a storm, they also saw spiritual things in it. They imitated this in language, and they called the spirit that rolls in the thunder Donar: Donar roars in thunder. The fact that this was in the language shows that these people were connected to the outside world. The Greeks were not so strongly connected with the outside world. The Greeks sought this more in rhythm than in the formation of language. In these Nordic peoples, it was already in the language itself.

And when, for example, these peoples crossed over to Europe and first encountered the Celts, constant fighting and wars broke out. Warring was something that was always there in those days when Christianity was spreading. Just as the spiritual was seen in the blowing wind and the rolling thunder, so it was also seen in the storm of battle. It was the case that the people had shields and with these shields in closed rows they stormed forward in crowds. So they still stormed forward when they came into the fight with the Romans. And when the Romans threw themselves against them and these northern tribes stormed down, then the Romans heard above all a terrible shouting: a thousand throats shouted into their shields as they charged forward. And they feared much more than the Germanic swords what was charging towards them with terrible shouting. And if you were to storm in shouting something similar to what these peoples shouted into their shields, if you wanted to imitate that today, then you would have to say it sounded like: Ziu zwingt Zwist! Ziu zwingt Zwist! - Ziu was the spirit of war; they believed that he was storming ahead with them. When such a Germanic tribe stormed forward, they felt: There is a spiritual being among them that forces discord. “Zwist” is war. Ziu forces discord! - and that now rushed into the shields. And the Romans heard this muffled: Ziu forces discord! Ziu forces discord! and it rushed over the Romans' heads. As I said, they were terribly afraid of that, more than of all the bows and arrows and so on. It was really something in which the spiritual lived in the courage, in the bellicosity of these people.

You see, if these people were to rise again as they were then – of course they rise again, since people re-embody themselves, but they have forgotten the story – but if they were to rise again as they were then and saw the present population, well, they would put all the sleepyheads in their place! Because they would say: It's not right for a person to walk around as a sleepyhead! They should put on a nightcap and go to bed. They had a completely different outlook on life, they were mobile.

Then, of course, there were also times when these peoples could not wage war. But, gentlemen, when they were not waging war, they had bearskins, on which they lay, and then they drank – they drank terribly. That was the second occupation. Well, in those days it was considered a virtue; after all, it was not quite as dangerous a drink as it is today, it was a relatively harmless drink brewed from all sorts of herbs. Beer developed from it later, but very differently, of course. But these peoples drank it in large quantities. They only felt like humans when this mead, this beer-like, sweetish drink, went sweetly through their whole body. Sometimes you still come across people in whom you can see how something like this lives in them when they feel a bit like descendants of these ancient Germans. Once I met a German poet in Weimar who drank almost as much as the ancient Germans! But of course he drank beer. The ancient Germans drank this mead-like drink. We got to talking, and I said to him: Yes, it's actually impossible for someone to be so thirsty! - And he said: Yes, thirst – when I'm thirsty, I drink water; but when I'm not thirsty, I drink beer. When I drink beer, I don't drink it for thirst, I drink it for fun! And so it was with these Teutons: they became merry and energetic when the mead-like sweet liquid ran through their limbs as they lay on their bearskins.

The third main occupation was hunting. And agriculture was actually practised rather incidentally by the subjugated peoples of that time. When such a people spread out, it was the case that others were subjugated; they then had to do the farming. These were unfree people. And when war came, they had to join; they had to carry the weapons and so on. Of course, in those days there was a great difference between the free population and the unfree. The free population, who waged war, hunted, and drank on the bearskins, came together to order matters. And when they came together, they discussed matters of a judicial or administrative nature and so on, everything that was necessary. Nothing was written down, because they could not write in those days. Everything was only discussed orally. And there were no cities; people lived scattered in villages. They always formed a kind of community of a hundred and a hundred villages, so about a hundred villages together. They then belonged together; they were called a hundred-ship. And in turn, large associations of hundred-ships were then a district. And the hundred-ships had their assemblies, the districts had their assemblies. For those people who were allowed to come together, for the free, there was actually quite a bit of democracy in this respect. And what was held there was not called an imperial council, not a parliament – these are words that came later. It was called a thing because a specific day was set for the meeting, and anything that was not given a specific name was called a thing. You can still hear it today when you hear English people talking about something and they can't think of the name straight away, they always say: thing = thing. The word “thing” has already been discredited today. I once got into trouble because of that. I was once commissioned to draft a resolution that had been written, and I put “thing” into this resolution; and the chairman at the time, who was a very famous astronomer, held it against me terribly because it is such a terrible word in our time; you cannot use it where serious people come together! But in the old days it was called a thing. People didn't say they were going to the Reichstag, they said they were going to the Tageding. And if someone talked, they were said to be vertageding the matter. And you see, the word 'defend' was formed from the word 'vertagedingen'. This is how words are formed later: defend originated from vertagedingen. Today, the word “defender” is only used in the context of court. Here in Switzerland, we don't say “defender”, but “ Fürsprech”, but everywhere else they say “defender”. This is how these people lived with their gods and spirits among themselves. And then the southern peoples brought Christianity to these people.

But again, in the West, Christianity arose in two ways. It was partly brought up directly from Rome; but there was another line in which Christianity spread, and that was this: from Asia, more across the very southern areas here, where the Latin-Roman element has not gained much influence, across Spain to Ireland. And in Ireland, in the first centuries of Christianity, there was a very pure way of spreading Christianity. And this way of spreading Christianity in Ireland also spread to Wales. And from there, Christian missionaries also moved into Europe. They brought Christianity with them, in part; in part, it came up from Rome.

You see, gentlemen, I told you that in the monasteries, for example, and even at the first universities, much of the old science was still available, so that with Christianity the old science was connected. What has been preserved of the ancient wisdom of the stars, which later disappeared completely in Europe, actually all came from Ireland. From Rome, basically, only the cult spread. And only later, when Central Europe turned to the gospel, did the gospel join the cult. But much of what came from Ireland lived among the people. You see, in Europe, Christianity has gradually become completely absorbed into secular rule. And the good elements of Christianity that were present up here, where the Gothic Bible translation by Wulfila was created, and those that came over from Ireland, have actually more or less completely disappeared later on. They were still present in many ways in the Middle Ages, but then more or less completely disappeared. You see, from Rome, they actually proceeded very cleverly. In these peoples, who I have written down here for you and who were originally pushed by nature itself to migrate from Asia to Europe – they could not stay there because the land had become barren – but a certain wanderlust took hold. And it is strange what happens there.

Take the Elbe, for example. Up here on the Elbe lived a people in the time just after the advent of Christianity: they were the Lombards. They lived to the northeast of the Saxons, on the Elbe. Soon after, two centuries later, we find these same Lombards down there on the Po, in Italy! So the Lombards migrated over here. We find the Goths, the Ostrogoths, here on the Black Sea at a time when Christianity had not yet arrived but had already been established. Soon after, a few centuries later, we find them here, where the Vandals and the Visigoths used to be. The Visigoths migrated further west. We find the Visigoths here in Spain after some time. We find the Vandals here on the Danube. A few centuries later, the Vandals were no longer in Europe at all, but over there in Africa, opposite Italy. These peoples were now migrating. And just as Christianity was spreading, these peoples were migrating; they were pushing more and more to the west. The Slavs came much later.

And what happened in the West? The Romans had already achieved world domination when Christianity emerged. The Romans actually behaved extremely shrewdly. At the time when these peoples came over to the west and pushed against the Romans, the Romans were actually already quite emaciated, weak, rather ghastly fellows, and they couldn't really do much other than shake and tremble with their lower legs when this: Ziu forces discord! rolled into the shields from up there. Then they trembled like aspen leaves. But in their heads they were smart, proud, arrogant, haughty.

Now, these peoples were necessarily different. There was, of course, a big difference: these people down there had their lands, their fields, were settled, had something behind them. These peoples up there didn't care much about location; they migrated. And so it came about that the Romans often took in these peoples who were storming south. They gave them land, for the Romans had land in abundance everywhere. They gave them land. And so it came about that these peoples changed from hunting and war to agriculture, to farming. But how did it happen when the Romans gave them land? Yes, these Germanic peoples now had the land; they could dig up the fields. They could do that, but the Romans did the administration! In this way, the Romans gradually made themselves rulers. And this rule was strongest here in the west. In the area that was later populated by Germans, the people resisted for a long time. But people like the Goths, they moved into Italy, came together with the people from there, and became dependent. Yes, the Roman-Latin population was clever. What did they do? Well, they said: If we carry the sword, it is no longer right. They had become emaciated guys. What did they do? They made warriors out of the people who came in! When the Romans wanted to wage war, they waged it with the Germans, so they were the warriors! They were given their fields, but in return they had to go to war. Those who had remained at the top as Germanic people were at war with their own former warriors! The Romans waged war against them under the leadership of the Germanic people! And so, in the early days when Christianity spread, the wars that were actually waged by the southern population, the Roman population, were waged with the help of the Germanic people themselves, who had been absorbed by them. At most, only the leaders of the Roman armies were Romans. The mass of the soldiers were actually Germanic peoples who had become Roman. And now the task was to introduce the religious element from Rome in a way that would appeal to these people. In these earliest times, people were much more attached to their religion than they were later. And so, for example, the following came about. You see, these people saw light and air everywhere in nature as the spiritual. They felt it hard when the snow came in October, November, when the snow covered the earth and then actually all spiritual had to disappear. On the other hand, they particularly revered the time when our Christmas falls today. Then they felt: Now the sun is coming again. It was the winter solstice. The sun turned back to the people. And so a spiritualized nature was still very much what they assumed in these peoples.

The Romans, who had already adopted Christianity in their system of government, left this solstice festival to the Germans. But they said: We do not celebrate the solstice here, but the birth of Christ. And so the Germans were only able to continue celebrating their festival at the same time as they had previously done so, with a different meaning.

Now, the ancient Germans saw some kind of spirit under every significant tree, one might say. The Romans made a saint out of a spirit! And so they basically re-baptized everything that was contained in the old pagan religion. This went largely unnoticed by the people, and in this form, Christianity was actually spread among the Germanic peoples. Festivities such as those celebrating the return of the sun and so on were observed precisely because the ancient Germans loved celebrating with the gods in the open air, in the mountains and forests.

So we can say that in more recent times, since the founding of Christianity, it has been cunning that has been most prevalent in Rome. And basically, Europe has been ruled by cunning for many centuries – by Roman cunning. It has gone so far that the Romans have always preserved the old Latin language in schools, and the vernacular was actually only spoken among the people. When the Romans introduced Christianity and science, they did not speak in the vernacular – that did not come until the 18th century – but they presented science everywhere in Latin. For a long time, Romanism was also noticeable in its original form.

But now, what happened in the West, through Spain, France and into England? You see, there Romanism really remained alive. That is why the language in which Romanism lives on came into being. Here, in Central Europe, the Germanic element was more dominant. That is where the Germanic languages originated. Over here, the Romance element triumphed; that is where the Romance languages came into being. But in terms of their origin, all these people who were there, both those who migrated to Spain and those who migrated to Italy, are actually Germanic. I have written down the Ripuarian Franks and the Salian Franks, who later moved over there – they were all Germanic tribes that settled in France. And the Romance language spread like a cloud over these Franks who moved into France, and became French or Spanish. The old Latin lives on in a modified form.

Only further east, from the Rhine onwards, did the people as a people say to themselves: Well, the scholars in there in the schools, with their wigs, they can speak Latin, and those who want to become priests can listen to them; but the people have kept the language. And that is how the antagonism arose that still troubles Europe today, this antagonism between Central Europe and Western Europe.

From the east, the Slavs gradually came. I had to tell you: these peoples come over to the west, where some of them disappear, some of them also adopt another language, and so on. Then the Slavs came, settled in the east of Europe, and in some places advanced quite far. Here, for example, the old Germanic element mixed with the Slavic element; for certain reasons, which I will explain to you next time, the Slavs in the east over there got the name “Russians”; on the other hand, those who now moved into these areas, they disappeared among the Germanic peoples. A blood mixture remained. And that is how the Borussians came into being, those who are the vanguard of the Russians. Borussians then became “Prussians”! That is just the transformed word. There is a lot of Slavic blood in it. While the Slavs themselves, when they remain behind, are more passive, more of a quiet population, when they absorb other blood, they become combative! This belligerence, which was present in ancient Germanic peoples, then passed over to them. And so what was in Prussia became a rather belligerent population; and what migrated to the west, the Czech population, actually became a rather belligerent population as well.

And so Europe stirred itself up, I would say. And into this porridge Christianity was added. Well, we will continue with that next time.

[ 1 ] Dr. Steiner: As I shall be away next week I wanted to speak to you to-day about the Easter Festival. Or have you some other question of importance at the moment?

[ 2 ] Questioner: I had a question but it has nothing to do with the Easter Festival.

An article in a recent Parisian newspaper stated that it is possible to be taught to read and to see with the skin. Would Dr. Steiner say something about this? I was very astonished by it.

[ 3 ] Dr. Steiner: A great deal of caution is necessary when information about a matter of this kind comes from a newspaper and careful investigation is called for. The article says that certain people ... the man really means everyone ... can be trained to see with the skin, to read with certain parts of the skin.

[ 4 ] Now this has been known for a long time. It is possible to train certain people to read with some part of their skin. But let me say at once that such a thing is really not so very astonishing. Human beings do not by any means learn everything that they could learn; they do not develop all their powers. Many faculties could be developed quite quickly by setting to work in earnest. Children, for example, could all be trained to read with their finger-tips by making them touch and feel letters on a piece of paper. In the blank spaces between the letters the paper is quite different to the touch. If you were to make letters which stand out a little from the paper it would be quite easy to read them! Letters made of wood could be read by touch with the eyes shut. It is only a matter of refining this faculty, making it more delicate.

[ 5 ] When I was a boy I trained myself to do something rather unusual, namely, to hold a pencil between the big toe and the next toe and write with it. All these things that one does not generally learn can be learnt and then certain faculties will develop. These faculties can become so delicate and sensitive that the result is quite astonishing. But it really need not be so; what has happened is that the power of touch has been greatly enhanced, and every part of the body has this power. Just as we become aware of a jab from a nail, so we can become aware of the tiny roughnesses caused by letters on paper.

[ 6 ] This, however, does not quite cover the case you mentioned, for the man claims that he can develop in everyone the faculty of being able to read with the skin. From the statement as it stands, the details could not all be put to the test and it would be better to wait for scientific confirmation before believing that if a page of a book were placed, say, over your stomach, you would eventually be able to read it. One must be able to discriminate whether it is a matter of a delicate and highly sensitive faculty of touch or whether there is something bogus about it—and this cannot be discovered from the newspaper report. I myself was not at all astonished at the statement because I can well imagine that such a thing might be possible; but what did astonish me was the stupid comment of the journalists, who said that if such a thing were really true, then it must have been discovered a long time ago.—I ask you, how can anyone say about the telephone, for example: If this is really true, then it must have been known for a very long time! This kind of comment astonished me far more than the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon itself is not so very astonishing because a human being can do a great deal towards developing his organs of feeling and touch. Seeing with the eyes is not everything. The fingers, for example, can be developed into most delicate organs of perception. And so reliable scientific investigation would be necessary in order to prove whether or not, after years of training, the man can make every part of the body able to see. I have read reports in German, English and French newspapers and I find it impossible to gather from them whether the man in question is a lunatic, a humbug or a serious scientist.

Now let us think about the Easter Festival in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. As you know, Easter is a movable festival—every year it is celebrated on a different date. Why is the date variable? Because it is determined, not by terrestrial but by celestial conditions. It is fixed by asking: When does spring begin? March 21st is always the beginning of spring and the Easter Festival takes place after this. Then there is a period of waiting until the Moon comes to the full, then another pause until the following Sunday, and Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the beginning of spring. The first full Moon can be on 22nd March, in which case Easter is very early; or the first full Moon can be a whole twenty-nine days after 21st March. If, for example, there is a full Moon on 19th March, spring has not yet begun and then after some twenty-eight days the Moon is again full; the Easter Festival in that year will fall on the next Sunday—quite late in April.

[ 7 ] Now why has the Easter Festival been fixed according to conditions in the heavens? This is connected with what I have been telling you. In earlier times men knew that the Moon and the Sun have an influence upon everything that exists on the Earth.

[ 8 ] Think of a growing plant. (Sketch on the blackboard.) If you want to grow a plant, you take a tiny seed and lay it in the soil. The whole plant, the whole life of the plant is compressed into this tiny seed. What comes out of this seed? First, the root. The life expands into the root. [ 9 ] But then it contracts again and grows, still in a state of contraction, into a stem. Then it expands and the leaves come and then the blossom. Then there is again contraction into the seed and the seed waits until the following year. In the plant, therefore, we see a process of expansion—contraction; expansion—contraction.

[ 10 ] Whenever the plant expands, it is the Sun which draws out the leaf or the blossom; whenever the plant contracts (in the seed or the stem) the contraction is due to the forces of the Moon. Between the leaves, the Moon is working. So that when we take a plant with spreading leaves and root, we can say, beginning with the seed: Moon—then Sun—again Moon—again Sun—again Moon, and so forth ... with the Moon at the end of the process. In every plant we see Sun forces and Moon forces working in alternation. In a field of growing plants we behold the deeds of Sun and Moon. I told you that the fashioning and shaping of the physical human being when he comes into the world, is dependent on the Moon; ¹ inner forces which make it possible for him to transform his own character, come from the Sun. I told you this when we were speaking about the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 11 ] In earlier times these things were known but they have all been forgotten. Men asked themselves: When is there present in spring the influence that does most to promote the thriving and growth of vegetation? It is when the influences of Sun and Moon together are at their strongest. This is the case when the rays of the first full Moon after the beginning of spring shine down upon the Earth, adding strength to the rays of the Sun. The influences of Sun and Moon are mutually enhanced when the springtime Sun at its strongest works in conjunction with the Moon which is also at its strongest when its cycle of four weeks has been completed. The time for Easter, therefore, is the Sunday—the day dedicated to the Sun—after the first full Moon of spring. The date of the Easter Festival was based on knowledge relating to the winter solstice and the subsequent beginning of spring.

[ 12 ] Now the Easter Festival did not begin in the Christian era before the rise of Christianity there was an old pagan festival—the Adonis Festival as it was called. What was this Adonis Festival? It was instituted by the Mysteries—those places for the cultivation of art, learning and religion which I have described to you recently. And Adonis was personified in a kind of effigy or image, representing the spirit-and-soul in man. It was known, furthermore, that man's life of spirit-and-soul is united with the whole universe. The ancient pagan peoples took account of spiritual conditions and celebrated this Adonis Festival in the autumn. The old Easter Festival—which in a certain way resembled our own—fell in the autumn.²

The Adonis Festival was celebrated in the following way.—[ 13 ] The image of the eternal, immortal part of man was submerged in a pond, or in the sea if the place happened to be near the coast, and left there for three days, to the accompaniment of songs of mourning and lamentation. The submerging of the image was the occasion of solemnities resembling those which might be associated with the death of a member of a very united family. It was essentially a ceremony which had to do with Death, and it always took place on the day of the week we now call Friday. The name “Karfreitag” originated when the custom found its way into the Germanic regions of Middle Europe. “Kar” comes from “Chara” (Old High German) meaning mourning. It was therefore the Friday of sadness or mourning.

[ 14 ] So little is known of these things to-day that in England this Friday is called “Good” Friday, whereas in olden time it was the Friday of Death, the Friday of mourning and lamentation. It was a festival connected with Death, dedicated to Adonis. And in places where there was no water, an artificial pond was contrived into which the image or effigy was plunged and taken out after three days, i.e., after the Sunday.

[ 15 ] The image was taken out of the water amid songs of jubilation and rejoicing. For three days, therefore, the people were filled with deep sorrow and after these three days with ecstatic joy. And the theme of their songs of jubilation was always: “The God has come to us again!”

[ 16 ] What did this Festival signify?—I must emphasise again that originally it was celebrated in the autumn. [ 17 ] On other occasions I have told you that when the human being dies, the physical body is laid aside. Those who have been bereaved mourn in their own way for the dead with solemnities not unlike those which accompanied the submerging of the Adonis image. But there is something else as well. For a period of three days after death, the human being looks back upon his earthly life. His physical body has been laid aside but his ether-body is still with him. The ether-body expands and expands and finally dissolves into the universe. The human being then lives on in the astral body and the “I.”

[ 18 ] The purpose of those who instituted the Adonis Festival was to make men realise that the human being does not only die but after three days comes to life again in the spiritual world. And in order that this might be brought every year to men's consciousness, the Adonis Festival was instituted. In the autumn it was said: Lo, nature is dying; the trees lose their leaves, the earth is covered with snow; winds are cold and biting; the earth loses her fertility and looks just as the physical human being looks in death. We must wait until spring for the earth to come to life again, whereas the human being comes to life again in soul and spirit after three days. Of this men must be made conscious! ... A festival of Death was therefore followed immediately by a festival of Resurrection!—But this festival took place in the autumn—the season when it is easy to realise the contrast between man and nature. Nature is about to consolidate her life; she will lie dead through the whole winter. But in contrast to nature, man lives on after death in the spiritual world. When nature sheds her leaves, is covered with snow, when cold winds blow, then is the time to make man conscious: You are different from nature, inasmuch as when you die, after three days you live again!

[ 19 ] It was a most beautiful festival, celebrated through long ages of antiquity. Men gathered together at the places of the Mysteries for the period of this festival, joining in the songs of mourning; and then, on the third day, the consciousness came to them that every soul, every “I” and every astral body come to life again in the spiritual world three days after death. Their attention was turned away from the physical world and their hearts and minds were drawn to the spiritual world. The very season of the year played a part, for in those days the festival did not take place in the spring when the people who lived on the land were occupied with other tasks. The old Easter Festival, the Adonis Festival, was celebrated when the fruit had been harvested and the grape picking was over, when winter was approaching. It was the appropriate season for an awakening in the Spirit, and so the Adonis Festival was celebrated. The name varied in different territories but the festival was celebrated in all ancient religions. For all ancient religions spoke in this way of the immortality of the human soul.

[ 20 ] Now in the first centuries of the Christian era itself, the Easter Festival was not celebrated at the time it is celebrated to-day; not until the third or fourth century did it become customary to celebrate Easter in the spring. But by that time men had lost all understanding of the spiritual world; they had eyes only for nature, concerned themselves only with nature. And so they said: It is not possible to celebrate resurrection in the autumn, when nothing comes to life!—They no longer knew that the human being comes to life again in the spiritual world, and so they said: In the autumn there is no resurrection; the snow covers everything. Whereas in the spring, all things burst into life. Spring, therefore, is the proper time for the Easter Festival.—This kind of thinking was already an outcome of materialism, although it was a materialism which still looked up to the heavens and fixed the Easter Festival according to Sun and Moon. By the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, materialism was already in evidence but at least it still looked out into the universe; it was not the “earth-worm” materialism which has eyes only for the Earth and has been described as such because the earthworms live under the soil and only come up when it rains. And so it is with the men of modern times; they look simply at what is on the Earth. When the Easter Festival began to be celebrated in the spring, even materialism still believed that the myriad stars have an influence upon human beings. But from the fifteenth century onwards, that too was forgotten. At the time when the Easter Festival was transferred to the spring, certain attempts were being made by the Christians to sweep away the ancient truths.—I mentioned this when we were speaking about the Mystery of Golgotha.—By the eighth or ninth centuries, men had not the remotest inkling that Christ's Coming was in any way connected with the Sun.

[ 21 ] In the fourth century there were two Emperors, one a little later than the other. The first was Constantine, the founder of Constantinople and an extremely vain man. He ordered a certain treasure that had once been brought from Troy to Rome to be transferred to Constantinople and buried in the ground under a pillar which had upon it a statue of Apollo, the old pagan god; then he sent to the East for wood said to have been taken from the Cross of Christ, and caused a wreath to be carved, with rays springing from it. But in the figure crowned with this wooden wreath, people were expected to behold Constantine! And so from then onwards, veneration was paid to Constantine, standing there on the pillar that had been erected over the precious Roman treasure. By external measures, you see, he brought it about that men ceased to know anything about cosmic secrets, about the fact that Christ is connected with the Sun.

[ 22 ] The other Emperor, Julian, had received instruction in the Mysteries which still survived, although under very difficult conditions. Later on they were exterminated altogether by the Emperor Justinian but for centuries already their existence had been highly precarious. They were not wanted; Christianity was their bitter enemy. Julian the Emperor, however, had received instruction in the Mysteries and he knew: There is not only one Sun, but there are three Suns³—This announcement caused an uproar, for it was a secret of the Mysteries.

[ 23 ] When you look at the Sun you see a whitish-yellowish orb or body—it is the physical Sun. But this Sun has a soul: it is the second Sun. And then there is the third Sun: the spiritual Sun. Like man, the Sun has body, soul and spirit. Julian spoke of three Suns and maintained that in Christianity men should be taught: Christ came from the Sun and then, as Sun Being, entered into the man Jesus.

[ 24 ] Now the Churches did not wish this knowledge to be in the possession of men. The Churches did not want the real facts about Christ Jesus to come to light, but only such knowledge as was authorised by them. Julian the Emperor was treacherously murdered on a journey to Asia, in order that the world might be rid of him. That is why Julian is always known as the Apostate, the heretic: Julian the Heretic! He desired that the connection between Christianity and the ancient truths should be maintained, for he thought: It will be easier for Christianity to make progress if it contains the truths of the ancient wisdom than if men are allowed to believe only what the priests tell them. So you see, at the time when the Easter Festival was transferred to the spring, knowledge that this festival is connected with resurrection still survived. Although knowledge of the resurrection of man had been lost, the resurrection of nature continued to be celebrated in a festival. But even that has been forgotten in places where Easter is still celebrated without any inkling of what it really signifies; and to-day people have come to the point of asking: Why need Sun and Moon have anything to do with the date of Easter? If Easter were always to fall on the first Sunday in April, book-keeping would be greatly simplified! The suggestion, therefore, is that the date should be determined by commercial considerations! ... As a matter of fact, the people who clamour for this are more honest than the others who insist that conditions in the heavens shall still be the determining factor, without having the slightest notion of what this means. Those who say from their own point of view that conditions in the heavens need not be taken into account are really the more honest. But the sad thing is that people can only be honest about this because they know nothing of the real connections. What we have to do to-day is to emphasise that the Spiritual must always be the decisive factor!

[ 25 ] And so in olden times men waited for the last full Moon after the beginning of autumn and celebrated the Adonis Festival on the preceding Sunday. Sun and Moon were taken into account but it was known that conditions are quite different, indeed the reverse, when snow will soon be falling from the heavens. The old Easter Festival, the Adonis Festival, always took place between the end of September and the end of October. This was the best time to be reminded of the resurrection of man, because at that season of the year there was no question of a resurrection in nature. This early festival, therefore, was known to be connected with Death and also with Resurrection ... but this knowledge too has been lost.

[ 26 ] It is important to be reminded of the ancient significance of these festivals, for we have again to find the way to the Spirit. We must not celebrate Christmas and Easter thoughtlessly but realise that such festivals have deep meaning.

[ 27 ] Now the world cannot be turned topsy-turvy; nobody would wish the Easter Festival to be transferred to the autumn. But it is good to be reminded that when a man dies, he lays aside his physical body and looks back upon his earthly life; then he lays aside the ether-body and comes to life again in the spiritual world as a being of spirit-and-soul. Such knowledge can greatly deepen our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Mystery of Golgotha presents in external reality what was always presented in an image at the Adonis Festival. The men of antiquity had an image; Christians have the actual, historical event. But in the historical event there are certain points of resemblance with the imagery used in olden times. At the Adonis Festival the image of Adonis was submerged and raised after three days. It was a true Easter Festival.—But then, what had once been presented as an image, came to pass as an actual happening. The Christ was in Jesus. He died and rose to life again. And at Easter now, this is all that is remembered.

[ 28 ] In a way, there is a good side to this. For why was an image always set before the people at the Adonis Festival? It was because they needed something that their senses could perceive. Although they still looked at the universe in a spiritual way, in the material world they needed an image. But when Christ had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha there was to be no image; men were called upon to remember purely in the Spirit what had happened at that time. The Easter Festival was to be an essentially spiritual celebration. Men must no longer make a pagan image but perform the act of remembrance entirely within the life of soul. It was thought—and Mysteries still existed in the days of Christ Jesus—that the Easter Festival would in this way be spiritualised.

Think once again of the old Adonis Festival. It is impossible in present-day Europe to realise what such festivals meant to the ancient pagan peoples. You yourselves would say: This is only an image—and those at least who had been initiated in the Mysteries would have regarded it as such. But every year the statue of the god was displayed to large numbers of the people and then submerged. This gave rise to what is known as fetishism. A statue of such a kind was a fetish, an idol, a god; worship of such an object was called fetishism—and that of course is undesirable. And yet in a certain respect, an element of the same tendency has remained in Christianity, for the Monstrance with the Sanctissimum, the Sacred Host, is worshipped in Catholicism as the Real Christ. It is said that the Bread and the Wine are transformed, in the physical sense too, into the Body and Blood of Christ. This is a survival, not of enlightened pagan wisdom which beheld the Spiritual behind every sense-phenomenon, but of the fetish-worship in which the statue was taken to be the god himself.

[ 29 ] Nowadays—unless examples have occurred in one's own experience—it is almost impossible to picture the intensity with which people believed in these images of the god I myself once knew a very clever professor—all such men are clever, only modern science does not lead them to the Spiritual. The man was a Russian and he made a journey from Japan across Siberia. In the middle of Siberia he became aware of a deep uneasiness, he felt lonely and forsaken. And what did he do? Something that none of you, nor indeed any Westerner, would ever think of doing. But although this man was very learned, he was half-Asiatic. He made a figure of a god out of wood, took it with him on his further travels and prayed to it fervently. When I knew him his nerves were in a terrible state; the illness had come from worshipping his wooden god. It is difficult for you to conceive what it means to worship an idol of this kind!

[ 30 ] Now the Mysteries still existing at the time of the founding of Christianity were deeply concerned as to how men might be led to the Spiritual. And so what in earlier epochs had been presented before their eyes in the Adonis Festival was now to be revived in remembrance only, by prayer. [ 31 ] This was the intention ... but instead of becoming spiritual, everything became materialistic; it was all externalised, made formal. By the third and fourth centuries A.D. all kinds of emotions were aroused in the people on “Kar” Friday; the priests offered up prayers; and at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the hour at which Christ is said to have died, the bells stopped ringing. Everything was still. And then, outwardly again, just as in the old Adonis Festival, the Crucifix, a figure of Christ on the Cross, was buried; at a later period it was covered with a veil. After three days came Easter—the festival of Resurrection. But the manner and form of the celebration are the same, fundamentally, as in the old Adonis Festival. The form of the celebration indicates that little by little the souls of men were coming under the authority of Rome.

In many districts, for example in the place where my youth was spent—whether it happens here I do not know—it is customary on the Friday before Easter for the boys to gather around the Church with rattles and musical toys, singing the words:

[ 32 ] Wir rätschen, wir rätschen am Dom.
Die Glocken ziehen nach Rom.⁴

[ 33 ] Everything, you see, pointed towards Rome, especially at the time of the Easter Festival.

[ 34 ] Men of the present age must emerge from materialism into a life of spiritual knowledge; they must learn to understand things in a spiritual way, above all such things as the Easter Festival. Every year at the Easter Festival we can remind ourselves that the day of mourning, the Chara, commemorates the departure of the human being from the physical world; for three days after death he is still looking back on the physical world; then he lays aside his ether-body as a second corpse; but then in his astral body and “I,” he rises to life again in the spiritual world. This, too, is part of the act of remembrance, although it would be barbarous to expect songs of jubilation three days after a death has occurred. And yet we can be reminded of these songs of jubilation when we think of the immortality of the human soul and of how, after three days, the soul comes to live again in the spiritual world.

[ 35 ] There is a connection between the Easter Festival and every human death. At every human death our attitude should be that although mourning is inevitable, the Easter Festival is near, when we shall remember that every soul after death rises to life again in the spiritual world.—You know, of course, of the festival which commemorates the death of all human beings: it is called the Festival of All Souls and is still celebrated in the autumn. When the knowledge of its connection with the Easter Festival had been lost, the Day of All Saints, All Saints' Day, was placed before it in the calendar. But All Souls' Day should, in reality, be celebrated as the day of the Dead and the Easter Festival as the day of Resurrection. They belong together although they are separated now by the span of nearly half a year! From the calendar as it now stands it is often impossible to understand what really lies behind these festivals.

[ 36 ] But remember: everything on Earth is in reality directed by the Heavens. People are surprised if it ever snows at Easter because that is the time for the plants to be sprouting, not for snow. They are surprised because they feel that the Easter Festival is intended to commemorate the resurrection, the immortality of the human soul.

[ 37 ] This attitude and knowledge make the whole Easter Festival into a deep, heart-felt experience, reminding those who celebrate it of something that is connected with man himself and with his life as the seasons of the year run their course. The only kind of connection with the yearly seasons to which any thought is given to-day is that in the winter one puts on a winter coat and in the summer a summer coat, that one sweats in the summer and shivers in the winter—all purely material considerations. What is not known is that with the coming of spring, spiritual forces are actively at work drawing forth the plants from the Earth and that with the coming of autumn, spiritual forces are again in operation as forces of destruction. When this is understood men will see life and being in the whole of nature. Much of what is said about nature to-day is nonsense. People see a plant, tear it out of the soil and set about studying botany ... because they know nothing about the essentials. If I were to tear out a hair and proceed to describe it, this would be nonsense, because the hair cannot arise of itself; it must be growing on a human being or an animal. Nothing that you might apply to any part of a lifeless stone will make a hair grow from it. For a hair to grow, life must be at the source. The plants are like the hair of the Earth, because the Earth is a living being. And just as man needs the air in order to live, so does the Earth need the stars with their spirituality; the Earth breathes in the spiritual forces of the stars in order to live. Man moves over the Earth and the Earth moves through the Cosmos, lives in. the Cosmos. The Earth is a living being.

[ 38 ] This remembrance at least can still come to us at the Easter Festival—the remembrance that the Earth herself is a living Being. When the Earth brings forth the plants she is young, just as the child is young when the soft hair grows. The old man loses his hair just as in autumn the Earth loses the plants. It is only that the Earth's life runs its course in a different rhythm: youth in the spring, age in the autumn; youth again, age again—whereas in man the periods are much longer. Everything in the universe is alive. In thinking of the Easter Festival and with the spectacle of newly awakening nature before us, we can say: Death is not ever-present; beings have to pass through death but life is the essential reality. Life is everywhere victorious over death. The Easter Festival is there to remind us of this victory and to give us strength. If men gain this kind of strength it will enable them to set about the improvement of external conditions with insight and intelligence—not in the way that is usual at the present time. First and foremost we need Spiritual Science in order again to ally ourselves with the spiritual world—which is a world of life, not of death.

[ 39 ] In this sense I hope that the Easter Festival will be as full of beauty in your souls as are the spring flowers growing out of the Earth.—After Easter we shall meet together again and speak about scientific matters.

[ 40 ] At the Easter Festival, then, let us feel: Men can go to their work with fresh courage and with joy. Even if in these days there are not many opportunities of finding joy in daily work, perhaps here it is different! In any case I wanted to say these things to you to-day and to wish you a beautiful Easter in the sense of the knowledge born from Spiritual Science.

• 1. See the previous lecture.
• 2. Dr. Steiner spoke in similar terms in four lectures given at Dornach, 19th–24th April, 1924.
• 3. See the lecture: The Threefold Sun and the Risen Christ. Given in London, 24th April, 1922.
• 4. Approximate translation: We shake our rattles around the church ... but the bells draw us to Rome.

I should like first to say a few words about the verse I wrote on the blackboard yesterday at the end of the lecture. It begins:

If we want really to understand the being of man for the purposes of treatment, we must be absolutely clear about the fact that we cannot take into consideration only what binds the human being to the earth, for that is of importance only in the very first years of childhood, up to the time of the change of teeth, and then no longer. After the change of teeth we have to consider those forces which really organize the human being away from the earth. For this purpose he has his etheric body and the etheric body is essentially different from the physical body. The physical body is heavy, the etheric body is not. The physical body strives towards the earth, the etheric body away from the earth in all directions, in all directions of cosmic space. You include the universe when you study the physical body and the etheric body of man. The physical body is inwardly connected with the earth, the etheric body with everything that lies in the perceptible universe around the earth. So that you can think of all the forces which work upon the physical body as being forces which draw the human being to the earth, and all those forces which work upon the etheric body as forces which draw the human being away from the earth.

These forces exist and work in the human being. Therefore one cannot really say that the human being takes in some substance which was first outside and is then within him. It is not so. These centrifugal forces are working within the human being and because of this the substance immediately falls within the realm of the whole universe, of the whole visible universe.

Then, in regard to the astral body of man, you must picture to yourselves that it really comes from the realm of the spaceless; it merely assumes the form of spatial activity.

And when you come to the ego, you really can make no picture at all. The ego works neither from above nor from below; it works in such a way that one simply cannot make a diagram of it. The ego works only through the flow of time, through the continuity of time. What proceeds from the ego organization of man cannot be put into a picture. It is a reality at every point; it neither streams in nor streams out, it works in the purely qualitative sense.

When we look out into the worlds of the ether it is as if, with our etheric body, we were always losing ourselves in these worlds, but all the time the astral is streaming in towards us—the astral that is also not spatial but works as if it came towards us from the periphery of the universe. And now suppose that we have to do with vegetable protein in food. In the first place, vegetable protein has heaviness; in the second place, as protein, it strives towards the cosmos. When you introduce vegetable protein into the human organism the other two kinds of forces immediately begin to work on it—the forces which work in from all directions and those forces which as the forces of the astral work in from beyond space, as it were, upon this protein. And now suppose everything that might work in this way upon the human being were only capable of making him into a round, spherical body. You find the form which the working of these forces produce—the forces streaming outwards from and into the earth—you find this form in the bird's egg. These forces take shape in the egg. Why is it that not merely an egg-like form but a form with definite configuration is produced from an egg? If only those forces were at work of which I have just told you, all that could happen would be a completion of the egg shape. The bird would be complete when the egg is complete. But a bird has a very definite shape and has it because, in the first place, the moon circles round the earth. What I am saying about the bird also applies to the human being. If it were a case of the moon alone circling around the earth, no bird would arise, but what would happen would be this—that the egg shell would get soft and fall away and a spherical being would emerge, a spherical being consisting essentially of protein. Now the moon does not only circle around the earth, but there are all kinds of different constellations in space. The moon is always passing these constellations, and as it passes them it modifies the forces which proceed from them. Picture to yourselves that the moon is passing the Pleiades. The egg is then exposed to the forces which are the result of the in-streaming of the Pleiades and this in-streaming is modified by the moon. From the Pleiades there streams a force which is modified by the moon which is standing in front of them and exercising its influence, and as a result of this there arises the head of the bird. Therefore we can say that the bird's head is formed from the cosmos by cooperation between the planet moon and the fixed stars which are arranged in a special way in the Pleiades. The moon passes on and, let us say, it now stands in front of the constellation of Libra whose forces are again modified by the position of the moon. Here we have a different set of forces and besides this, the moon which was full moon when it stood in front of the Pleiades, has now, in front of Libra, become New Moon. The moon in connection with the constellation of Libra works differently from when it is working from a position in front of the Pleiades and the effect upon the egg is the formation of the bird's tail. The rest lies in between. So, if you want to study the form of the bird you must study how the moon passes by the cosmic constellations.

What is a person who has knowledge of earthly conditions able to say about the form of man, or, for that matter, of any living being? He can only say: Yes, of course, the Eagle has a definite form, the vulture has a definite form, the kangaroo has a definite form, and so on. Why have they these particular forms? If you remain at a standstill within the earthly world, as science does, there is only one answer: The animal has inherited its form from its ancestors. Thought can find no other answer. This answer is just like the logic of the saying: Penury comes from poverty. But this is no explanation at all. You must go further back. Those ancestors received it from their ancestors, and so you go on, in a vicious circle. We must study the cosmic forces and constellations of the stars if we are to have any understanding of the form of a living being.

But this is not all that I have to say. If only these things happened, very beautifully developed beings would be produced but they would all of them be like jellyfish, as the human being actually was in far past epochs of the earth. In the Atlantean epoch the human being was a kind of jellyfish. This was because the only substance he could absorb was in a plastic, fluid state, and out of this he was able to build up his physical body. The reason he was able to incorporate into himself potassium, sodium, and the other substances is because the other planets of our system, as well as the moon, pass through Libra, Aries, Taurus and so on, and they member into us those things that enable us to have the true form of man. In the formation of the human head, the influence of the moon is also united with the forces that go out from Mercury and Venus and the constellations into which they enter with the other planets. If these other constellations were not combined with the moon constellations, we should all be born as hydrocephalics. Organic metal is incorporated into us because the constellations of Mercury and Venus are working in conjunction with the moon constellation. We should get a terrible form of rickets, not only bow legs but legs that would be elastic, and our arms would be jelly-like structures if the planets that are more oriented to Saturn were not to combine with the moon constellation and if Saturn himself were not to work together with Jupiter and Mars. It is the sun which brings about the rhythmical balances between these two categories of planets.
The first two lines of the verse, therefore, should help you to understand how the human being is actually formed out of the cosmos. We shall not really progress until astronomy—but in the sense I have just indicated—is introduced into our medical science. Most of what is said about these things does not signify much. There is a muddle because things that happen in the human being are ascribed either to external, earthly circumstances, or to heredity. But when one comes down to details, the result is nil, because it is forgotten that the origin of the human form must be understood by a knowledge of the starry heavens in their qualitative aspect, in their inner aspect. The most important planet in the process of the formation of the human being is the moon. The moon must cooperate everywhere; the other planets modify the influence of the moon. The moon is the most important.

The verse continues:

Behold all that moves thee in Air
And thou wilt experience man's ensoulment.

Schau, was luftig dich bewegt,
Du erlebest Menschenbeseelung.

Now everything that works in the human etheric body, forms and shapes the human being. But the human being would be an automaton imbued with life, even if his form were as it is today, if only those forces which I have described to you were to work upon him. But the surroundings work upon him, all that lives and weave in the element of air around us. The ether and also the astrality of the cosmos weaves in the air. And just as externally our spatial form is developed under the influence of the moon in connection with the heavens, so we are inwardly ensouled because the sun is working together with the heavens. When the sun is standing in Leo, for example, it influences the cosmic forces (note well that we are not here speaking of the sun's own forces). It is then working, in the air, upon what affects us through our breathing and blood circulation, and is continually changing. The air changes as the sun passes on its course. Thereby the form becomes ensouled, so that we can really say: The constellations of the sun in the cosmos work in the airy element in the surroundings of the earth and this enables us to be beings of soul.

The verse continues:

Behold what is changed in the Earthly
And thou wilt discern the spiritualizing of man.

Schau, was irdisch sich wandelt:
Du erfassest Menschendurchgeistung.

By this metamorphosis is meant the gradual passing of the human physical body into the corpse. By the side of these words we write the sign of Saturn. Why? Now the Saturn forces work not only in the place where Saturn stands in the heavens. So far as space is concerned, Saturn is far away from the earth and the direct influences of this planet upon the human being from outside do not amount to very much. But Saturn has forces which are sucked, with tremendous strength, into the earth. The Saturn forces are sucked with tremendous strength into the earth and when we look beyond the earth, we really do not find these forces to any extent. But when we look at the earth herself, at what is on the surface and towards the interior of the earth, it is a different matter altogether. Suppose you see a snail crawling over the ground. The snail passes on but it leaves its slime behind it. The slime remains and you can follow the whole path taken by the snail. So it is with Saturn. He passes on, but wherever he has shone upon the earth he leaves his traces behind him—very, very definite traces If in much earlier epochs of earth evolution these traces had not remained as forces in the earth, we should have no lead. Lead originates from the primal substance, from the Saturn forces that are working in the earth, that were sucked in by the earth. In ancient times, when conditions were different, the lead forces came into being in the earth. These Saturn forces still have their afterworkings in the human being and it is an influence quite different from that of sun and moon.

We should not be beings of spirit, but beings of body and soul only, if these Saturn forces were not present. You can take this as a focus for thought, my dear friends. Nothing is without reason and purpose in the universe. Just ask yourselves: During what period of time has Saturn had opportunity to impregnate his forces into the earth from all directions? He has done this in the course of thirty years—the thirty years during which he circles around the sun and earth. This period is the time which the human being takes from his birth to the point where a certain phase of his life is concluded. When the human being has lived on the earth for thirty years, he reaches a certain point—a point which does not, of course, coincide exactly with the precise line taken by Saturn in the heavens—but during this period Saturn has impregnated the earth from every direction. When the human being is thirty years old, a second impregnation begins. Thus the influence of Saturn upon the whole earth is connected with the human being, and it is ultimately due to this fact that we have a body in which processes of demolition take place.

In the human organism there are not up-building forces alone. If it were so we should be without consciousness. Our vitality has to be damped down in a certain way. The destructive forces must always be there. The development of our organism not only advances but retrogresses and in this retrogression the unfolding of spiritual life takes place. Spiritual life does not proceed from life, but as life retro gresses the spiritual life finds a place in what, figuratively speaking, has been left empty. This process is due to the forces that arise in the earth as a result of impregnation by the Saturn forces. Therefore I placed the sign of Saturn by the side of the third couplet.

Now these Saturn forces by themselves would make little old and wizened people by the age of thirty. At the age of thirty we should begin to walk on crutches. Fichte was willing to respect the human being up to the age of thirty, but he once said that all thirty-year-olds ought to be done away with, for thereafter they are no longer able to cope with the world, they are weak cripples. The state of things Fichte was getting at, however, would irrevocably happen if Saturn were the only planet whose forces could unfold in the earth. But the Saturn forces are modified by the forces of Jupiter and of Mars. Because of these forces the demolition process up to the age of thirty is not so complete. Something still continues and we have to thank Mars and Jupiter for the fact that we are not old men at the age of thirty. If we want to understand why existence is still possible for the human being at the age of forty-five, we must look out into the cosmos.

Moon and Saturn, therefore, are the heavenly bodies which stand nearest to and farthest from us in the planetary system. The planetary system as it is today is really an inorganic structure because as far as Saturn [Translator's note: In the German, the text gives Jupiter, but the sense appears to indicate Saturn.] it came out of what was once a single cosmic body, whereas Uranus and Neptune came from beyond and joined themselves to it. As antiquity did not discover Uranus and Neptune, Saturn was taken to be the outermost planet and it is still justifiable today to go as far as Saturn. Astrologers still have an inkling of these things for they connect Uranus and Neptune only with those human qualities which transcend the personal, make a man a genius, go beyond the individual personal element—where he is concerned with things that no longer have to do with his personal development. All astrological statements are to this effect. Uranus and Neptune only come into play when a man becomes a genius or strives to transcend the human element, when his organization has the tendency to expand or decay too strongly. Uranus and Neptune are planets who have behaved like tramps in the universe and were then held captive by the planetary system belonging to our earth. The near and the far heavenly bodies regulate what is in the human being—the moon regulates his form, Saturn—working from the earth—the formless spiritual, inasmuch as Saturn breaks down form, dissolves it inwardly all the time. And the sun brings about rhythm between the two.

These things must be known. Primeval knowledge was aware that the same forces which correspond with our third couplet:

Behold what is changed in the Earthly
And thou wilt discern the spiritualizing of man,

are the same complex of forces which once expressed itself in the formation of lead. So that we can say: The forces which split up the physical organism in order that the spiritual may find a place, are also present in lead. Forces of disintegration have brought lead into existence. If we introduce lead into the human organism, splittings take place. If there is too little demolition going on within the human being and he needs certain processes of disintegration, we must give him lead in some form. Vice versa, if the condition is such that formative power is lacking, so that the human organism is becoming too “spongy” as it were, ancient knowledge teaches that the forces of the moon which in olden times streamed in to form the substance of silver, must be brought into play. The forces of silver can bring sponginess to form, they give support to the moon forces. The whole planetary system is connected with substances that are remedial:

Saturn = Lead
Jupiter = Tin
Mars = Iron
Sun = Gold
Venus = Copper
Mercury = Quicksilver
Moon = Silver.

These correspondences are treated with unbelievable superficiality nowadays, whereas in reality they are based upon most minute investigations which were carried on in the Ancient Mysteries. Such knowledge had been well and truly tested. Thorough investigation was made of Saturn's constellation when, for example, the forces of disintegration were insufficiently active in an organism and the vitality, the connective forces too strong, so that in his whole constitution the human being was suffering from a condition of organic stupor (for stupor need not necessarily affect only the sensory activity). It was observed that such a condition set in after a certain constellation of Saturn had taken place. Whereas Saturn had formerly worked strongly upon the human being, it was observed that he got into this condition when Saturn had set and could no longer completely unfold its forces. In such a case, lead was given as a remedy. Indications which are still to be found in dilettante books today are actually true, because, not knowing their origin, people have not been able to spoil them. If things had been different, speculation would have taken place and then we should most certainly have erroneous indications. They remain correct because men have lost the knowledge of their origin. They remain through tradition. Human thinking cannot spoil these truths.

What works from out of the earth upon the human being is, in reality, the force of Saturn which has been held fast, sucked in by the earth.

Just think what tremendous consequences these things have in the realm of human knowledge. You simply cannot connect the human being as studied by modern natural science with the moral life. The moral life hovers somewhere in the realm of abstraction. Especially in Protestantism which to the greatest extent of all has lost connection with the spiritual, with the cosmos; everything moral is segregated off, remains mere belief. The reality is that the human being is a creature who is cared for and fostered from out of the cosmos and the moral forces stream into him together with his astrality. Realization of this fact enables you to think of man as being inwardly united with the moral world. In true medicine you are led back to what makes man into a moral being, into a being who in his very organism can experience the moral and no longer merely heeds it as an external commandment.

This is what I wanted to say and I think you can take it away with you as a guide in many things. You can, of course, get the data from somewhere else. But how these data are circumstanced within the human organism—this you can only realize from such things as have now been said. You can read in any medical vade mecum that lead has this or that effect. You will understand why it has such effect if you really assimilate what has been said here. Because these things are drawn from the spiritual world they make far less claim upon the memory than upon man's physical power of assimilation. What a person learns lies in the realm of his own option, but what he experiences otherwise and what is impressed of itself into his memory, is actually there. You will notice something strange about what you assimilate in this way. If you do not constantly live with it in meditation you will soon sweat it off, so to speak. The peculiarity of spiritual truths is that they cannot, properly speaking, become memorized truths. You cannot retain in your organism what you ate a week previously. A ruminant can retain food, but only for a short time. In the ruminant there is organic imitation—a rudiment in the physical body of what otherwise lies entirely in the etheric body, namely, the memory. So far as spiritual truths are concerned, they must be experienced over and over again until they become habit—not retained as memory pictures but become habit. The essence of meditation is that we make an appeal to what, in reality, is present only in earliest childhood. In that period of life we have no picture memory and so our earliest experiences are forgotten. They live in a memory which functions through habit. And it is this form of memory that we must return to when we want inwardly to digest spiritual truths; otherwise we very quickly sweat them off.

Because you want to receive esoteric truths, an appeal must be made to your faculties of meditation and of inner assimilation; otherwise you will not be able to make use of what is given you. If you activate these faculties you will develop that delicate sensitivity which leads you, not instinctively but intuitively to perceive how a plant or stone may work in the human organism—things that are still expressed abstractly in the so-called Doctrine of Signatures. You will be developing not only your physical body but your etheric body too and what I have called memory through habit will give you a more delicate faculty of perception for what is contained in the physical environment and the faculty to behold the world as one to whom the questions about diseases of the lung, heart, etc., come from the human organism and the answers as to the remedial plants, minerals, etc., from the environment.

Question: Many of us want to have a far-reaching understanding of the position in which we find ourselves. We feel inwardly that Anthroposophical truths are something radical and that tremendous things depend upon their practical realization. How can that which we feel so deeply, be realized, and how can we reach an understanding of our own destiny and tasks for the future? We feel that we shall only be able to act truly if we get to understand our own karma in its wide connections and at the same time unfold the courage not to run away from it but to fulfill it in practice in the right way.

I think I hear something between the lines of what you have said and realize in what direction your feelings tend. You must enlarge your question if this is not so. The question you have put, touches, of course, something that must be known today. Especially just recently, there has been a great deal of talk about the end of Kali Yuga among circles of young people, more among the youth than among the old. The reason for this is that at the end of the nineteenth century a new age did indeed dawn in humanity. To begin with, the old life continues. When you have a ball and push it, it rolls and when you take your hand away it still goes on rolling. Similarly, what human beings experienced up to the end of the nineteenth century goes on rolling for the time being. But because the forces are no longer behind it, it is assuming worse forms than it took in the age that has passed away. But side by side with the continuance of the old time, an Age of Light is really dawning in the world, in concealment. An Age of Light is shining into the world and its first rays must be caught by Anthroposophy.

At the present time, of course, I am speaking much more radically about certain karmic relationships than I did before the Christmas Foundation. You will realize this from other lectures which I am giving now. Those who can be at the lecture this evening will find that certain human connections are actually spoken of. But for all that I cannot enter quite concretely into matters which would be beloved by sensationalism. Strict laws must invariably be observed in these things and I know that a certain desire—not necessarily born of a lust for sensation—might be satisfied if one could reveal to every individual his previous earthly life. But one cannot go as far as that. On the other hand certain points of view which may be significant, can be mentioned.

Taking human life in general today, we have, if I may put it so, two kinds of human beings. This is due to the fact that at certain times the spiritual evolution of humanity was different from what it was in other times. There was a wavelike movement, but the waves flowed not only one behind the other, but side by side with each other. For example, at a certain time the evolution of Western Christianity became more superficial, was externalized. It was not possible for human beings to get at the essence of what Christianity had to offer them. A reaction took place among the Kathares. And so there were living, side by side, men who lived very external lives and men who wanted to deepen themselves inwardly. Something similar happened, when, under the influence of Comenius and even earlier than that, the Moravian Brotherhoods were founded far into Hungary and Poland. All the time there were living together men whose souls were striving strongly for spirituality and men who were driven to externalization, simply by the karma of civilization. The fact that one person comes into the one group and another person into another, is connected with earlier karmic conditions. In modern times a great point is how far a man in his earlier incarnation belonged to the one or the other of these groups. Let us suppose, then, that a man is born today who lived in a phase of Christianity which was quite externalized. Such a man will be an entirely different person from one who, let us say, belonged to the Bohemian Moravian Brothers. In what does the difference consist?

We can only discover the essential characteristic of the conclusion of Kali Yuga when we go into the concrete circumstances—otherwise it all remains so much historical construction. The Age of Darkness lasted until the year 1899 when the Age of Light began. This mere fact does not tell us very much. We must enter into the concrete, spiritual facts. Men who are born at the end of Kali Yuga and who have strongly spiritual aspirations—this must not make for conceit, you must receive it simply into your store of knowledge—such men are, speaking in the widest sense, those who have been born from among the heretics, from among those who strove for inner deepening. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were brought down to the earth human beings who had not lived within the general stream of a Christianity that was being externalized, but in such sects which inserted themselves in this general stream and were striving for greater inwardness. What is the result?

Now when we are passing through the time between death and a new birth we learn, in a spiritual way, to know the Human All, just as here on earth we can study the World All that is outside the human being—the universe. The Human All is equally great and equally detailed, for the human being has within him just as much as the cosmos. We can study this with our forces of will when they have been transformed. We acquire an exact knowledge of the human being. Now there is a difference between the two groups of which I have just spoken. Those men who had entered more into externalization were not able, in their passage between death and a new birth, to enter into the spiritual world in the right way. In the spiritual world they passed thoughtlessly by the essentials of human nature. They were reborn and especially those people who were born in the second third of the nineteenth century were men of the kind who were thus externalized in their previous life. They brought into their earthly life no understanding of the human being and his nature. They regarded the body as an instrument for eating, drinking, walking, standing, sitting, but they were not interested in the human being in his reality because they had no interest of this kind in their life between death and a new birth. These were the people who were satisfied with materialism, because they felt no need for knowledge of the human being. The materialists who only want to have knowledge of matter understand the human being least of all.

It may be said with a peaceful conscience that those who are sitting here are reborn heretics (you must not ascribe this to yourselves as a virtue) heretics who experienced a strong urge between death and rebirth to fathom the nature of the human being and thus, subconsciously, to make the human being into a tremendous riddle. This comes to light in the urge to learn more than materialistic medicine has to offer and so, as you have said, an inner fulfillment of karma is certainly indicated. You must not take these things lightly, for if you were to do so you would fall into misunderstandings. You would not reach what you want to reach because you have had certain definite experiences between death and rebirth. And the result of not finding in earthly life that for which one has striven for centuries is not so that it merely makes one superficial. The Age has passed when people who have received between death and rebirth the truths concerning man can become superficial without being punished for it. At the present time young people are certainly not in a position to lead superficial lives and go Scot-free because they ruin themselves inwardly, ruin themselves organically.

The bad thing is not that people today are materialistic in their thoughts, that they chatter about monism and the like. That is not the really bad thing and they will easily get over it. What a man speaks is not of such great significance, but what then goes back into his feeling and will—this weaves in his organs, and if people do not deepen themselves spiritually they will not be able to sleep properly. That is the essential thing. If people undergo no such deepening today what will the consequence be? The consequence will be that hardly will the years 1940-1950 have come, and over greater and greater areas there will be widespread epidemics of sleeplessness. Such people will no longer be capable of working for civilization.

Therefore your karma leaves you no choice: either you leave it unheeded, as was possible before the end of Kali Yuga, or you must heed it. You must really take in all seriousness what I have now told you about the configuration of your karma. This, of course, remains a generalized description, but you can certainly find it useful if you frequently ponder the particular circumstances of your own life. You will discover something remarkable when you think about these special circumstances. The Youth Movement theorizes too much and consequently one hears too much of the same theories. If the young people would really study what youth today is experiencing—it is in truth very different from what the former generation experienced—the Youth Movement would at one bound take on a very different form. We are striving to give our Youth Movement here a concrete form so that it does not remain in the realm of abstraction.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question?

Questioner: A few lectures ago, the great cosmic world was mentioned; I would like to ask about comets with a large tail. What does that mean?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, gentlemen, we have to remember what I have said just recently. I will repeat some of what we said a few lectures ago.

When we look at the human being, we have to say: Two things are necessary for his whole life, namely for his spiritual development. Firstly, that carbon dioxide rises to the head. After all, humans constantly excrete carbon within themselves. Actually, one can say: Man, insofar as he is a solid body, is made of carbon. So humans constantly excrete carbon from themselves. Now, this carbon would eventually become so in us that we would all become black pillars. We would become black pillars if this carbon were to remain. We need it to live, but we have to constantly convert it again so that it becomes something else. This is done by the oxygen. Now, in the end, we exhale the oxygen with the carbon as carbonic acid. There is carbonic acid in our exhaled air. But you need this carbonic acid. It can also be found, for example, in mineral water, and the bubbles inside contain carbonic acid. This carbonic acid, which is not exhaled, constantly rises to the human head, and we need it so that we are not stupid, so that we can think; otherwise marsh gas, which consists of carbon and hydrogen, would rise to the human head. So for thinking we need carbonic acid.

Now, I have already hinted at what we need for our will, for our volition. So let's start with walking, moving our hands, moving our arms – that's actually where this volition begins: we always have to form a compound of carbon and nitrogen and then break it down again. But this cyanide or prussic acid must constantly, so to speak, enter our limbs. It then combines with potassium in the limbs. Potassium cyanide is formed, but this is also immediately broken down again. In order for us to be able to live at all, there must be a constant process of poisoning and detoxification within us. That is the secret of human life: carbonic acid on the one hand, potassium chloride, which is connected to potassium, on the other. With every movement, with every finger, a little cyanic acid is formed, and the thing is then that we dissolve the thing again immediately by moving our fingers. So that must also be there in man.

But everything that must be there in man must also be there in the universe, must somehow be present in the universe. It is now the case that comets have always been examined again. And with comets in particular, I would say, a kind of little story has taken place in the anthroposophical movement. I once gave lectures in Paris and, purely out of inner knowledge, said that there must be some cyanic acid in comets, that cyanic acid is present in comets. Until then, scientists had not yet noticed that cyanic acid is present in comets. But then, shortly afterwards, a comet came along. It was the one you are talking about. And it was precisely on this comet that it was discovered, using the more sophisticated instruments that were available at the time, that the comet material really does contain cyanic acid! So that one can point to this when people always ask: Has anthroposophy predicted anything? Yes, this discovery of cyanic acid in comets, for example, was clearly predicted. It was the same with many other things, but in the case of the comet it was quite obvious. Well, today there is no doubt, even in the natural sciences, that in the atmosphere of a comet, in the comet's air - after all, a comet is actually made of very fine material, it is actually only ether, only air - there is cyanic acid.

Yes, what does that mean, gentlemen? It means that the same thing that we constantly have to produce in our bodies is also present outside in the comet's atmosphere. Now imagine how often I have said here that the egg is formed from the whole universe - so humans, animals and plants are also formed from the whole universe, in that they are formed from the egg. I would like to explain this to you using the example of the human being, so that you can see exactly what these comets actually mean in the whole universe.

Let us start with something historical, which may seem strange to some, but you will see that what you want is best explained by it. Centuries before Christianity was founded, there were ancient people in present-day Greece, the Greeks. The ancient Greeks achieved so much for intellectual life that even today our high school students still have to learn Greek because it is believed that if you learn Greek today, you will become a particularly clever person. Well, the Greeks really did achieve an extraordinary amount for intellectual life. Today, people do not learn Indian or Egyptian, but Greek. By doing so, people want to express that the Greeks have achieved a great deal for intellectual life. The simple fact that we cultivate Greek with our high school students shows this. The Greeks themselves only did Greek with their children, even though they achieved so much for intellectual life.

Now there were two main tribes in Greece that were of particular importance, but which were very different from each other: one was the inhabitants of Sparta, the other the inhabitants of Athens. Sparta and Athens were the two most important cities in Greece. In addition, there were a few others that were also important, but not as important as Sparta and Athens. The inhabitants of these two cities were therefore very different from each other. I will ignore the other differences today, but they were different in that they spoke quite differently. The Spartans always sat quietly together and spoke little. They did not like to talk. But when they did talk, they wanted what they said to have a certain meaning; it should have power over people. But because man cannot always say something meaningful when he babbles, they remained silent when they had nothing significant to say, and always spoke in short sentences. These short sentences were famous throughout the ancient world. People talked about the short sentences of the Spartan people, and those that became famous were often tremendous sayings of wisdom.

It was different with the Athenians. They loved beautiful speech; they loved it when it was spoken beautifully. The Spartans: short, measured, calm in their speech. The Athenians wanted to speak beautifully. They learned rhetoric by speaking beautifully. They did indeed prattle more; not as much as we do today, but they did prattle more than the Spartans.

What was the difference between the Athenian who talked a lot and the Spartan who talked less but meaningfully and powerfully? It was based on education. The art of education is of course little studied today. But what I am saying is based on education. The Spartan boys in particular were educated quite differently from the Athenian boys. The Spartan boys had to do a lot more gymnastics: dance, wrestling, all kinds of gymnastic arts. And oratory, the actual gymnastics of the tongue, was not practiced at all by the Spartans. They let speaking come naturally.

Everything that lies in language is formed through the rest of the human body's movements. You can observe it correctly: if a person has slow, measured movements that are truly gymnastic, then they will also speak properly. In particular, if a person walks with proper steps, then they will also speak properly. Of course, it depends on the child's age. If a person gets gout in old age, it doesn't matter anymore; they have already learned to speak. It depends on the time when one learns to speak. But the Spartans attached great importance to practicing a lot of gymnastics, and they supported this gymnastics by rubbing the children's bodies with oil and smearing them with sand; then they let them do gymnastics. The Athenians also did gymnastics – gymnastics were done throughout Greece – but much less, and they let the older boys do tongue gymnastics, oratory. The Spartans did not do that.

Now, this has a very specific consequence. You see, when those little Spartan boys did their gymnastics with their bodies oiled and rubbed with sand, they had to develop a great deal of inner warmth – develop a great deal of inner warmth. And when the Athenians did their gymnastics, it was something very special for the Athenians. If it had been a day like today and the boys had not wanted to do their gymnastics outdoors with the Spartans, well, that would have been it! The gymnasts, the educators, would have treated those boys properly! When the Athenians had a day like today, so stormy, they gathered their boys more in the interior of the rooms and let them do oratory. But they called them out when the sun shone brightly, when everything sparkled. Then the Athenian boys had to do their gymnastic exercises outside. For the Athenians thought somewhat differently from the Spartans. The Spartans thought: All the movements that boys make must be done from the inner body; it may be stormy and hailing and raging and windy outside, it does not matter. They said to themselves: It must come from within.

The Athenian said differently. He said: We live by the sun, and when the sun wakes us up to move, then we want to move; when the sun is not there, we do not want to move. So said the Athenian, and therefore the Athenians looked at the external solar heat. The Spartans looked at the inner warmth of the sun, the warmth of the sun that man had already processed, and the Athenians looked at the outer sun, which shines beautifully on the skin - the skin is not rubbed with sand, at least not as much as it is by the Spartans, but the skin is supposed to be worked by the sun. That was the difference. And when schoolbooks today speak of the difference between the Athenians and Spartans, the only impression you get is that there must have been something wonderful about why the Spartans were quiet, measured in their speech, and also hardy, while the Athenians practiced the art of oratory, which was then further developed by the Romans. People today cannot practice history and natural science at the same time. History speaks for itself, and science speaks for itself. But if I tell you that the Spartans rubbed their boys with oil and sand and then let them practice their Spartan arts in all weathers, and the Athenians did not rub their boys with so much sand and oil and otherwise practiced their oratory inside the palestra, then you know how this difference between the neighboring Spartans and Athenians was actually brought about by natural facts.

So let us say that when we have the earth (it is drawn) and the sun here: if you look at the sun as it shines and there is the Athenian, then the Athenian emerges; and if you look not so much at the sun as at what the sun has already done in man, and you look at the more inner warmth, then the Spartan emerges from that. You see, there you have history and natural history combined. That's how it is.

Now we can say: When a person ensures that he develops a great deal of warmth within himself, his speech becomes short and measured. Why? Because he turns more to the universe with his whole mind. But if a person allows himself to be illuminated by the sun like the Athenian, then he turns less to the universe with his mind; then he turns more inward with his mind, outward with warmth; the Spartan: inward with warmth, outward with mind. And from reason, the Spartan has learned the language of the universe; it is wise, it has been developed within him. The Athenian has not learned the language of the universe, but only the movement of the universe, because he has abandoned himself to gymnastics in the warmth of the sun.

When we look at what remains of the Spartans today, we say to ourselves: Oh, these Spartans have rendered the wisdom of the world in their short sentences. The Athenians began to express more of the mind that is within man in their beautiful turns of phrase. What the Spartans had in their language has been lost to humanity for the most part; it disappeared in Greece with the Spartans. Man can no longer live with the language of the universe today. But what the Athenians began to do: beautifully winding sentences - it became particularly great in Rome with the art of fine speech. And the Romans at least still spoke beautifully. In the Middle Ages, too, people still learned to speak beautifully. Today, however, people speak terrible sentences. You only have to look at it in detail – well, you could take any other city, but in Vienna, for example, the elections have been going on for weeks: yes, they are not beautifully spoken, but terribly, a whole flood of speeches, but not beautifully! And that is what has gradually become of what was still cultivated by the Athenians, albeit beautifully. It comes from within man. The universe, truly, does not make speeches – but man does! The Spartans did not make speeches; the Spartans expressed in their short sentences how the universe speaks. They looked up at the stars and thought: Man, he runs around in the world and is a busybody. The star moves slowly, so that it does not move slowly now, quickly now, but always evenly. Then the saying arose that has remained for all time: haste with Weile - and so on. The star still reaches its goal! And so the Spartans in particular have learned a great deal from what is out there in space.

And now we can move on to something that I have already noticed in your case: we can move from warmth to light. I would just like to say the following about warmth. Consider that if a person needs to develop a great deal of warmth, then he should become a strong person. And if a person has the opportunity to be in the sun a lot, then he should become a person who talks a lot. Now you only need to take a quick look at geography: go to Italy, where people are more exposed to the sun, and you will see what a chatty people they are! And go to the north, where people are more exposed to the cold: yes, you may despair sometimes – people do not talk because, when you always have to develop inner warmth, it drives away the inner urge to talk. Even here with us it seems almost strange when someone comes from the north; he stands there to speak – yes, he stands there but doesn't speak yet. Not so when an Italian agitator steps onto the rostrum, he speaks even before he gets up there, he is already talking down below. Then it continues, then it just gushes! When a Nordic person, who needs to generate a lot of warmth because there is no external warmth, is supposed to speak: a Nordic person like that, he stands there - you get desperate because he doesn't even start; he wants to say something, but he doesn't even start. It's true: inner warmth drives away the desire to speak, while external warmth fuels the desire to speak. Of course, all this can be transformed by art. The Spartans developed this speaking calm not through art but through their own racial character, even though they were neighbors of the Athenians because they mixed a lot with people coming from the north. Among the Athenians, for example, there were many who came from hot climates and intermarried with the Athenians; this is how they developed their flow of speech. So there we see how even the oratorical person is connected to the sun and warmth. Now let's move on to light.

All we need to do is remember something I have already told you. Think of a mammal. A mammal develops the germ for a new mammal internally. The germ is carried internally by the mother animal; everything happens internally. Take the butterfly, on the other hand. I told you: the butterfly lays the egg, the caterpillar crawls out of the egg, the caterpillar pupates itself into a cocoon, and the sunlight drives the multicolored butterfly out of the cocoon. On the other hand, look at the mammal (it is being drawn), this mammal develops the new animal hidden in its uterus. Here we have two contrasts again, wonderful contrasts. Look at the egg: it is uncovered. When the caterpillar crawls out, the light is already coming. The caterpillar, I told you, goes to the light, spins its cocoon, the shell that it becomes a pupa, after the light, and the light in turn causes the butterfly. And the light does not rest and does not rest, gives the butterfly its colors. The colors are caused by the light; the light treats the butterfly.

Take, on the other hand, the cow, the dog. Yes, the little cub inside the maternal uterus cannot have the external light; it is closed off in darkness from the outside. So it must develop inside, in the darkness.

But nothing that lives can develop in darkness. It is simply nonsense to believe that something can develop in darkness. But what is the story here? I will give you a comparison. One can indeed hope that once the Earth becomes very poor in coal, direct solar heat will be able to be used for heating through some kind of transformation; but today that is just not yet possible, that one uses the heat of the sun directly for heating. Perhaps it will not take much longer before one comes up with how it can be done; but today we use coal, for example. Yes, gentlemen, coal is nothing more than solar heat, only solar heat that flowed to Earth many, many thousands of years ago, was trapped in the wood and stored as coal. When we heat, we bring out the solar heat that accumulated in the earth thousands and thousands of years ago.

Do not think that only coal behaves towards the sun as I have just described! Other beings, too, behave towards the sun as I have just described, and that includes all living beings. If you look at a mammal, you have to say: every little young animal has a mother, who in turn has a mother, and so on. They have always absorbed the warmth of the sun; it is still inside the animal itself, it is inherited. And just as we bring the warmth of the sun out of the coal, so the small child in the maternal womb now takes the sunlight, which is stored there, from within. — Now you have the difference between what arises in the dog or in the cow and what arises in the butterfly. The butterfly goes straight into the outer sunlight with its egg, allowing it to be completely transformed by the outer sunlight until it becomes the colorful butterfly. The dog or the cow are just as colorful on the inside, but you cannot see it. Just as the warmth of the sun is not perceived in coal – it must first be coaxed out – so too, with the higher contemplation of dog and cow, one must first coax out what light is stored up within. There is light stored up within! The butterfly is colorful on the outside; sunlight has worked from the outside. Yes, in the dog or the cow, I would say, invisible light is everywhere inside.

What I have described to you, people today could easily determine with our perfect instruments, prove it in their laboratories, if they wanted to. They should just make a laboratory, completely dark, totally dark, and then they should compare in this laboratory a newly laid egg and a cow or dog germ in its early state, then you would see that the dimming that can occur in the dark room shows this difference that I am describing. And if one were to photograph what one does not see with one's eyes - the eyes are not sensitive enough for that - one would be able to prove that the butterfly egg has the spectrum yellow and the dog and cow egg has the spectrum blue in the photograph. These things, which one can see spiritually - one does not need the external when one can see them spiritually - will still be proved with the most perfect instruments.

Now we can say: the butterfly is formed in the external sunlight, the cow or the dog is formed from the sunlight that is stored internally. Thus we have come to know the difference between warmth, which works externally, which makes a person talkative, the light that works externally, which causes the many colors in the butterfly, and the warmth within, which makes a person silent and measured – the light within a being that gives birth to living young, which must receive the light internally. And now we can move on from there to the subject of our question.

There are also things that a person needs inside, but which he must not develop in excess inside, because otherwise he would die from them. And that includes prussic acid, which is also known as hydrogen cyanide. If a person were to continually produce hydrogen cyanide throughout the day, beyond the little bit that is already there, well, that wouldn't work, that would be too much. A person does produce a little prussic acid in himself, but very little. But he also needs some from outside; he absorbs it with what he inhales. It is not much, but a person does not need more.

Now, gentlemen, this potassium cyanide is not present in ordinary air. If comets did not appear from time to time, this potassium cyanide would not be present in the air. Comets and then these meteors, shooting stars, which, as you know, fly through the air in such great numbers, especially in midsummer, bring down this potassium cyanide. And man actually draws his strength from it. Therefore, people who have become weak in their muscles should be sent into the air, which has not only become fresh from the earth, but has become fresh from the whole universe, which has experienced meteorite influences. And it is the case that people who suffer from what used to be called consumption, for example, who become weak in their muscles and for whom this weakness is particularly pronounced towards spring, are sent in the fall to breathe this air that has been refreshed by the universe. In spring there is nothing that can be done; that is why such people most easily die in spring. You have to take precautions, because you can't really do anything for such people until the fall. When the meteor forces deposit their cyanide with the small amounts of potassium cyanide that come in from the universe during the summer, these people should then, when August ends and fall comes, with their weak limbs, come to areas where summer has deposited its best, namely potassium cyanide. Then their limbs become strong again. So for people you notice this happening to, the next year will be very bad for them, because they become weak, and you should actually take precautions in the spring, when you can't do much with external things. You should say to yourself: When spring comes, I will give such people, depending on how weak they have become, the juice of certain plants, for example the juice of blackthorn. If you store the blackthorn juice – you know the tart, acidic plant – and bring it into the mouth of a person who becomes weak in spring, you can sustain them throughout spring and summer. Why? Well, you see, when you give a person the juice of blackthorn, this blackthorn juice forms all kinds of salts. These go to the head and take the carbonic acid with them. So we tilt the head to help this person through spring and summer. And in the fall we have to take him to an area where he is able to take the other thing, which has to go more to the limbs. Carbonic acid goes to the head; we insert it after the head by introducing blackthorn. If we have been fortunate enough to have brought a person through the summer in this way, we can take him to a suitable area in the fall. He should stay for two or three weeks in such air, which we know has just received meteorical influences. Then it is the case that the person, having been strengthened during the spring and summer, really does regain the strength of his limbs.

Yes, gentlemen, there you have the two effects side by side. There you have the earthly effect, which is actually a lunar effect, the earthly effect in the blackthorn juice, and there you have the cosmic effect in what the comets, and when there is no comet, the shooting stars have left behind – it is the same with them, only small; but there are many – which has an effect from the universe. Just as you basically have nothing earthly in the butterfly with its transformation, but light from the universe, just as you have warmth from the universe, from the sun, in the protected eggs, so you also have human warmth within you, which you must develop inwardly in your substance and which stimulates exactly the opposite of the external warmth.

Thus we can see everywhere how there is an alternation in man, but also how there is an alternation in the whole universe: sometimes things must come from the outside of the universe, sometimes from within the earth or from within man. Now you will say: Yes, certain things are regular; but they cannot alone bring about what they are supposed to bring about. Day and night change regularly; they bring about the one thing that comes from the earth. Now, comets appear more or less irregularly; shooting stars too. And that is also the case. There is no such regularity with shooting stars as with the rest. If an astronomer wants to observe a solar eclipse, he can find the exact time when it begins – that can be calculated –; it belongs to the regular, but does not work from the sun. So he can still go to supper beforehand and still get to the solar eclipse. If he wants to observe the meteoritic swarming of shooting stars at the right time, he has to watch the whole night, otherwise he cannot find them. That is the difference between what comes irregularly from the universe to Earth and what is regular.

Now you can raise an interesting question. You can say: The comets that are connected with the cyan - which is connected with our will in our human being - these comets appear irregularly; one comes soon, then it is long absent. - It always also gives rise to superstition in people; but precisely that which does not always appear makes them superstitious when it comes. In the sunrise and sunset, only the formerly prepared human minds have seen the divine; later, superstitious minds have then dreamed up all sorts of things about comets. You may now ask: Why is it not the case with comets that, just as the sun appears at certain hours of the year in the morning, a comet also appears? Well, if that were the case, if comets could regularly appear and disappear with their tails just as regularly as the sun and moon rise and set, then we humans would have no freedom; then everything else in us would be as regular as sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. And what is connected with this regularity in the universe is also a natural necessity in us. We must eat and drink with a certain regularity, and sleep with a certain regularity. If the comets rose and set with the same regularity as the sun and moon, we could not begin to move arbitrarily, but would have to wait: we would be in a state of rigor; the comet would appear, and we could leave! If it disappeared again, we would fall into a state of rigor again. We would have no freedom. These so-called wandering stars are what give man his freedom from the universe. And so we can say: that which is necessary in man, hunger, thirst in their course, sleep, waking and so on, comes from the regular phenomena; and that which is arbitrary in man, which is freedom, comes from the comet-like phenomena and this gives man the strength for the power that works in his muscles.

In recent times, people have completely forgotten how to look at what is free in a person. People no longer have any sense of freedom. That is why, in more recent times, people have become obsessed with what is only necessity. Now people express their attitudes in their festivals. For example, they have festivals for necessity: Christmas, Easter; but they have dropped the autumn festival, the Michaelmas festival, because it is connected with freedom, with the inner strength of the human being. And so, actually, people study at most the material side of the comets. The other, they say: Yes, you can not know about that. - And on the one hand, you see today that people shy away from freedom; on the other hand, you see that they have no real mind, no reason to study the irregularities in space. If they were not there, then you would have no freedom. So we can say: the Athenians took up what was inside people. That made them talkative. On the one hand, materialism has become terribly talkative. But this also makes it insensitive, dull to everything that can be used to strengthen one's resistance to meteorite influences. That is why Michaelmas is at most a farmers' festival, and the other festivals are something that is related to necessities, although they are no longer as respected as they were in ancient times because people have forgotten the connection with the spiritual world altogether.

In this way, everything becomes transparent. When people understand again how beneficial the influence of the comet is, they will probably remember that they like to celebrate some kind of festival in the fall to have a kind of freedom celebration. That belongs in the fall: a kind of Michaelmas festival, a freedom celebration. People today let this pass because they have no understanding of it at all; they have no understanding of freedom in nature outside, and therefore also no understanding of freedom in man. You see, the honorable Lady Moon and the majestic Lord Sun, they sit on their thrones, they want to have everything measured because they have no right sense for freedom in the universe, in the cosmos. Of course, it must also be. But the comets are the freedom heroes in the universe; they therefore also have within them the substance that is connected with activity in humans, with free activity, with arbitrariness, with the activity of the will. And so we can say: When we look up at the sun, we have in it that which always plays rhythmic games within us, the heart and breathing. If we look at a comet, then we should actually write a poem about freedom every time a comet appears, because it is connected with our freedom! We can say: Man is free because in the universe, freedom also reigns for these enthusiasts in the universe, the comets. And just as the sun mainly owes its nature to the acid character, so the comet owes its nature to the cyanic character.

You see, gentlemen, that's where you come to the nature of comets, and that is an extraordinarily significant connection, as you can see that suddenly there is something in the whole universe that is alive, but that lives in a way that is similar to us humans. So you can also say: the Spartans had more sense for the non-withdrawal from the sun, and that is why they appreciated everything that was connected with the universe - this did not arise from external arbitrariness. And Lykurgos, the lawmaker of Sparta, had iron money made. In the schoolbooks you will find: Lykurgos had iron money made so that the Spartans should remain fine Spartans. That is nonsense. In truth, Lykurgos was instructed by those who still knew these things in Sparta; they told him that comets contain cyanide of iron, and so he had iron minted in Sparta as a symbol of the comets for the money. That was something that arose from wisdom; while other nations were changing over to gold coinage, which expresses that which is more in the sun, the image of the solar life in us.

Thus it is that one sees that in the customs of ancient peoples there is still something more of what they knew of the universe.

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

Spiritual science must become an instrument of mutual understanding, whereby we learn to understand each other, as it were, across all of humanity and into the soul. And this learning to understand each other, even into the soul, must permeate us as an anthroposophical attitude, so to speak, and live in us, otherwise the occult truths that flow into humanity through spiritual science will not be easily understood by us either. In this respect, spiritual science can, because it is, so to speak, the key to understanding the innermost, bring about peace and harmony across the earth. How can it do that?

Let us illustrate this with a concrete example. Take, for example, the relationship between two people who have different religious beliefs across the earth, let us say Christianity and Buddhism. What we can say with reference to Christians and Buddhists, who provide us only with classical examples, we could of course also say for the world views of two people living side by side in Europe; for what applies on a large scale will also apply on a small scale through spiritual knowledge. If we take the Christian and the Buddhist as they are in the traditional orthodox creeds, how do they relate to each other? Well, in such a way that the Christian actually believes that the Buddhist can only be saved if he accepts Christianity in the form that he has. And so we see the missionary activities of Christians among Buddhists; they take their particular confession there. And the orthodox Buddhist behaves in a very similar way. Suppose both became anthroposophists. How would a Christian, as an anthroposophical Christian, relate to a Buddhist? Well, let us say that he hears what is one of the most important things in Buddhism and what, basically, is only properly understood by someone who lives within Buddhism itself. Today, there are two ways of learning about the content of the various religious beliefs: from people who study comparative religion and from those who learn about the content of the various religious beliefs in a spiritual-scientific way. If we consider those who practice comparative religion, we must say that they are extraordinarily hardworking and active people who endeavor to cultivate the scholarly comparison of different religious beliefs. But when they compare these religious beliefs, something very special comes to light; then what they are looking for, even if they do not admit it, is actually only the untruthfulness of the various religious beliefs. These people are looking for what is not true, what was accepted by the various religious beliefs in childlike times; that is, they are looking for untruth. The person who studies this as a spiritual scientist seeks the main core in the individual religious beliefs; he seeks what is contained in a single nuance, but still as a perceptional nuance, in this or that religious belief. He seeks, therefore, what is true in the individual religious beliefs, not what is false.

In this respect, things can go strangely. Isn't it true that no one who knows the facts will have anything but the greatest respect for Max Müller, perhaps the greatest scholar of comparative religion or the greatest authority on religious studies. He, too, did not give much more than what one might call: the untruth of the oriental creeds. But he believed that he was giving everything with it. And then H. P. Blavatsky appeared and spoke quite differently. She spoke in such a way that one saw in her: she knows the main core of the oriental creeds.

What did Max Müller say? His judgment is somewhat grotesque and shows that a scholar does not necessarily need to be well-versed in logic. He thought that people follow Blavatsky, who only gives them a completely false representation of oriental religions, while she does not take into account the true representation of them, which, for example, he, Max Müller, gives. And he used the following comparison: Yes, when people are walking down the street and see a real pig grunting, they are not particularly surprised, but when they see a person grunting like a pig, it causes a stir. He wanted to compare what is naturally given in the oriental religious systems, namely his kind of religious comparison, with the pig that grunts naturally – I am not making the comparison! - and wanted to compare what H. P. Blavatsky has given with a person who grunts like that. Well, I won't even talk about the tastelessness of the comparison; because it doesn't seem very logical to me: I would be a little surprised if I met a person who could grunt deceptively. But I would not, really not, use the other comparison of comparative religious studies with the said animal, and it is strange that Max Müller himself used it.

Spiritual science introduces us to the truth of different religions. Take a key point in Buddhism: the Buddhist knows, when he has understood the basic tenet of his faith, that there are bodhisattvas, and he knows that these bodhisattvas, once beginning as an individuality, undergo a more rapid development than the other human individualities and then ascend to the Buddha. Buddha is a general name for all those who, in a human, carnal incarnation, ascend from the bodhisattva to the Buddha. And one of those who are especially honored with the name Buddha is precisely the son of Shuddhodana: Gautama Buddha. And with regard to him, it must be recognized, as with every Buddha, that when he attained the dignity of Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, the incarnation in which this occurred was his last incarnation, and that he would not need to descend again to a carnal incarnation on earth. This is regarded as a truth by Buddhists. A comparative religion scholar would regard it as a childish notion. But the anthroposophist, who familiarizes himself with the secrets of religions in all fields, does not approach the Buddha in this way, but he knows that such a thing is a truth. And so, just like any devout Buddhist, the anthroposophist faces Buddhism and says: Yes, I know that there are such things as bodhisattvas who ascend to the Buddha, who do not need to reincarnate again. That is one of the sentences of your religious community that I recognize, just as you do, and by acknowledging it, I can look up to your Buddha with reverence, just as you do. That is to say, the anthroposophical Christian begins to fully understand what the Buddhist says, and he has the same feelings and perceptions with him, he shares them with him, and they understand each other from the one side at first.

Now let us take the opposite case, where the Buddhist has also become an anthroposophist and is learning to recognize what the Christian, who has raised himself above the narrow-mindedness of the confessional orthodox point of view, knows about Christianity. Let us assume that the Buddhist Buddhist hears what a Christian can say about the Christ Impulse itself. He hears that within Christianity, within Christian esotericism, it has been recognized that at one point in the course of evolution, a being called Lucifer approached man in his development; he then hears that as a result, this human being descended lower than would have been the case had there been no Luciferic influence. And he then hears that it is actually something that we look up to as if it were a matter for the gods when we consider the rebellion and revolt of Lucifer against the progressive powers of the gods. So we are looking into a matter for the gods. And then we hear from the Christian who really understands his Christianity that the settlement of this matter between the advancing gods and Lucifer had to become what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. And why?

Well, in its present form, death and everything associated with death has really come about through the influence of Lucifer. But death is something that can only be found in the physical world. There is no death in a supersensible world, insofar as supersensible worlds are accessible to man with his clairvoyant consciousness. Not even the group souls of animals die; they only transform. There is metamorphosis, but not what is called death. The disintegration, the falling apart of a part of a particular entity, death, only exists in the physical world. Now, as a compensation, it had to be chosen - this can only be hinted at - by supernatural beings to suffer death in order to have a common cause with men, something that could be a compensation for the Luciferian rebellion. To conquer Lucifer, the Divine had to go through death; to do so, it had to descend to earth.

So what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha is a divine matter through which a compensation was created for the Lucifer matter. It is the only divine matter that has taken place before the eyes of men. This unique impulse, which cannot be imagined as anything other than the passing through of the Divine through death on the physical plane and the emanation of the Christ impulse into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth from that point on. This is now regarded by anyone who knows Christianity as the primary essence of that Christianity. In this way, Christianity, understood in a deeper sense, differs from all other religions in that the other religions see the main thing about their origin in some religious founder, in a personality; but that Christianity does not see the essential in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but sees in this personal founder only the bearer of the Christ impulse, that Christianity sees the essential in a fact. This must be grasped with all possible intensity: in a fact that had to take place as such at some point in the evolution of the earth: in the passing through of the divine through death. That is the special truth of Christianity: that it is not an individuality but a fact, an event, an experience that is placed at the starting point. Of course, it does not matter if someone says to us, “Yes, look, Jesus of Nazareth still has all kinds of passions, all kinds of qualities that a, let us say, according to oriental views, somehow advanced man should no longer have.” That does not matter at all. That is not the point at all. Anyone who allows themselves to be misled by this has no understanding of Christianity, because Christianity is not about Jesus of Nazareth at all, but about the event of Golgotha, about that fact. Let other founders of religions have personal qualities that other peoples like better than those of Jesus of Nazareth! But those who become Buddhists or anthroposophists will realize that in Christianity it is the event of Golgotha that matters, and they will give the Christian back what he has given them. They will say: Just as you yourself admit that there are bodhisattvas who develop as individualities, ascend to the Buddha and then do not need to incarnate again, so we admit that once in the development of man such a passing through of the divine through death has occurred. You admit that there is a shade of truth in our religion, and we admit that there is a shade of truth in yours. — Thus both sides understand each other. They would not understand each other, for example, and discord would be created if Christians came who thought they had become Anthroposophists and said: I don't believe you that a Buddha can no longer appear in a physical body, but I assume that in a certain time the Buddha will appear again in a physical body. - That would be an impossibility for someone who recognizes the essence of Buddhism. It would be impossible to expect the Buddhist to believe that his Buddha could appear in the flesh again. The Buddhist would say: “You do not understand Buddhism.” And it is quite natural and should not be a matter for discussion that just as the person who claims that a Buddha will come again in the flesh does not know Buddhism, so the person who claims that a Christ can come flesh again, who therefore does not realize that it concerns here a unique life of a divine entity on Earth, precisely for the purpose of passing through death on the physical plane, and not something else. So it concerns mutual understanding across the whole Earth, to really grasp each other and thereby establish peace. Discord would be caused if one were to claim to a Buddhist that Buddha would reappear in the flesh; and discord would be caused if one were to claim that the Christ could come again in the flesh. Such things would have to take a deep revenge, for they are impossibilities in view of what really lives in the evolution of mankind. It would be grotesque if anyone were to claim that the Christ had to come again and that people should understand him better now than they did then and should prepare themselves better for him and not kill him: such a person would not know that the killing was crucial and that without it there would be no Christianity at all! The good will to understand really does lead to mutual understanding, and we see how spiritual science can be an instrument for seeking the main core in the individual religious denominations everywhere. If you really want to, you will find it. That is why it is the message of peace for the world. Spiritual science will have to create a cultural soul for the whole world, just as it has given rise to the material cultural body that now extends across the whole earth in industry and commerce. It is precisely by recognizing the diversity that has been given to humanity in the various religious beliefs, and then in turn relating to that which appears to us as the core of truth through spiritual science, that we achieve a kind of synthesis, a unification of the various world views in our time. This should be emphasized with regard to one point.

The aim of the anthroposophically oriented movement that we are pursuing here has never been to present the differences between religious denominations in such a way as to ascribe advantages to one religious denomination and disadvantages to the other. How often has it been said: The spiritual height that was there immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe in the culture of the ancient Indian Rishis has not been reached at all today. It has therefore not been reached by Christianity as it exists today either. We do not indicate advantages and disadvantages, but present the individual religions in their essence. So we also only present when we draw attention to other differences. If we follow the more oriental way of thinking, namely the one that has the most followers, the Buddhist one, you will see one thing: there the main interest of the people is taken up by what is called the passage through the various incarnations. They speak there of a bodhisattva; but a bodhisattva is not one who lives only from the year of birth to the year of death, but one who comes back again and again and then becomes a Buddha; and one speaks of bodhisattvas as if they appeared in various numbers within the development of humanity. One generalizes more, one grasps more the individualities that remain. But how has it been done so far in the Western view? The exact opposite was the case. When people spoke of Socrates, Plato, Raphael, Michelangelo, they were referring to personalities, and here the Western view presents the limited entities as the essential being. This had its good side, because thereby a special education was achieved to chisel out and work out the individual human personalities. This was essentially the case with those views that H. P. Blavatsky, for example, did not understand: the ancient Hebrew and the New Testament views.

One looked, for example, to Elijah. The occult researches about him have something surprising. I need only say that we notice the uniqueness of which makes him a forerunner of what should have happened through the Christ Impulse. He still understands the matter in such a way that the Divine Being is expressed in the National Ego; but he already points out that the most worthy means of recognition lies in the Ego itself. In this respect, Elijah can be seen as a kind of herald of Christianity, and none of the other prophets seems to me to be a herald in the same way as Elijah. There is still a hint of Jehovah in his words, but with him we find Jehovah as close to the human ego as possible. Then we turn our attention to another figure, again as an individual personality, to John the Baptist. We find how he precedes the Christ Impulse, how John the Baptist really presents himself as the one who characterizes the Christ Impulse in words. He says: Change your mind, no longer look to the times of ancient clairvoyance, but seek the Kingdoms of Heaven within your own humanity! — That which the Christ Impulse is in reality: John the Baptist characterizes it. He is a herald of Christianity in a most wonderful way. What lives in the heart of John the Baptist appears to us as a kind of further development, an inner spiritual further development, compared to what lived in Elijah.

We then turn to Raphael and look at him as seemingly a very different figure from John the Baptist; but by looking at Raphael - yes, we just need to immerse ourselves in him a little in a truly human way, and we find in him a herald of Christianity.

Take the following. We turn to a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the passage where it says: “And Paul came to Athens, and the Athenians gathered around him, and Paul stood before them and said: You women and men of Athens, you have so far worshiped your gods in all kinds of signs; but the Godhead does not live in external signs in reality. You also have an altar, however, on which it says: “To the unknown God!” But I say to you that the unknown God is the one who cannot be indicated by external signs in his true form, but who underlies all that is alive and all that exists. He is the one who lived on earth and was resurrected, the one who, through resurrection, will lead man himself to resurrection.” And further on, the Acts of the Apostles tell us – and we can almost see Paul standing before the Athenians – how some Athenians believed and others did not. Among the former was Dionysius, the Areopagite. Then we look at the painting that hangs in the Camera della Signatura in Rome and was painted by Raphael, and which is called “The School of Athens”. Now let us assume – as was quite natural at the time –

Raphael had before him the passage from the Acts of the Apostles that we have just been discussing. It came to life in him. And now we look at the various Athenians, to whom he gave the faces, and except for the hand movement, we see stepping forward – stepping forward among the Athenians – a figure whom we recognize if we just consider Paul in the Acts of the Apostles.

And so we could go through the most diverse things with Raphael. If we focus on his various Madonnas, we must ask ourselves, however: Isn't one thing strange about Raphael, he is great when he paints the scenes that show the becoming, the growing in the emergence of Christianity, the little Jesus as something that contains the whole of Christianity becoming in the germ. But we do not find Raphael's painting of Judas betraying Christ, nor does he actually paint Christ carrying the cross, because his Christ carrying the cross seems to us to be forced, not at all like Raphael's other works. Instead, we find the Annunciation, the Ascension, that is, the things that point precisely to the emergence of Christianity.

And how did these things speak to people? Yes, they spoke most peculiarly. You know that one of Raphael's most magnificent works is in Dresden: the Sistine Madonna. People who think superficially might think that this is a work of art that was paraded through Germany like a victor. It made no impression on Goethe at all because he had heard how people generally thought about this work. As a young man, Goethe was not yet as sure in his judgment as he was in his old age and was still receptive to what people said. What did the museum officials in Dresden tell him? Well, that the child was ugly in its entirety, that the Madonna had been painted over by an amateur, that the little putti below had been added by some kind of handyman. That was still the attitude towards the Sistine Madonna when Goethe came to Dresden as a young man. But let us see how it is now. Let us consider what Raphael actually has become for people! Raphael worked in Rome at a time when there was much dispute about religious dogmas. The way in which Raphael paints the Christian mysteries is interdenominational. If we take the later great Italian painters, we see the religious mysteries painted in such a way that we recognize: this is the Christianity of the Latin race. Raphael paints in such a way that we are dealing with universal renderings of Christian mysteries that transcend nations. That is why we see how, in a short time, the Sistine Madonna finds its way into the souls even in Protestant areas. And if anthroposophy is to work for the understanding of the Christian mysteries, it will find its way best into those souls in which the feelings live that are won by images like the Sistine Madonna, into those souls that are prepared in this way. And when we say today that Christianity is only at the beginning of its development, that it will only receive its true form through the spiritual key that anthroposophy is able to give, then we know that Raphael stands as a herald for this Christianity.

And again we turn our gaze to yet another figure, taking only what is Western in outlook: we turn to the figure of the German poet Novalis. If we turn to Novalis, we find traces of the purest anthroposophical teaching in every detail; one need only unravel them, so to speak. Thus we see how Novalis is imbued with an anthroposophical Christianity.

We have thus presented four figures as personalities. That was the Western view. Now comes the spiritual-scientific deepening. Through this, people will already experience why, for example, Raphael feels that magnetic attraction to be incarnated into the earth on a Good Friday, in order to outwardly suggest through the birth on Good Friday that he has something to do with the Easter mystery. These things can only be hinted at today; in a few decades people will understand the things that are being asserted in this way, just as they understand scientific facts today: that it is the same individuality that lived in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis. First they will recognize the personalities, then the individuality as it has passed through them. And now we understand the fourfold heraldry and the ascent in this fourfold heraldry. Now we stand by such a thing quite differently than we used to. Today we already know that the original form of the Stanze in Rome can no longer be seen; they have been spoiled, are no longer as they were painted by Raphael's hand, and only centuries need pass for these things to disappear. Even if the replicas will have a longer life, what created the individuality is dissolved into its atoms. But even if Raphael's physical works are pulverized by the passage of time, we know that the same individuality that created those works was present again in Novalis and brought about, in a different way, what was in him.

Thus we see how today, in addition to what the Western way of looking at things has achieved, the limited vision of personalities is added to individuality; how, in other words, the best that the Western world view has achieved is combined with the best that the Eastern way of looking at things has. This is how time progresses. As humanity progresses and realizes these things, the spiritual world will not remain silent, but will speak to humanity in even the most mundane of phenomena. And so, people will not only have to rise to the spiritual world through a kind of knowledge, but more and more this knowledge will be transformed into a kind of, one might say, experience. But for this to happen, a real spiritual movement is needed today. That such a movement is necessary is evident simply from the fact that people no longer judge even the simplest things in the right way.

Let us single out one detail today. A person who leads a healthy life goes through waking and sleeping in the course of twenty-four hours. We know that when he falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed and the astral and I go out. What then happens to what remains in bed? When the clairvoyant looks back from his astral body at what is happening in the etheric and physical bodies, he sees how a more vegetative life begins, a life that has actually been destroyed by daytime consciousness. Fatigue is compensated for; that is, the etheric body and the physical body now flourish and sprout, and the astral body and the I have been withdrawn. When they submerge again into the physical body and etheric body in the morning, they have to make them tired again; they graze, let wither what has sprouted during the night.

Everything that is in the microcosm is also present in the macrocosm. When we see in spring how the earth lets its greenery shoot out in the plants, how flowers and leaves sprout and how the plants prepare to bear fruit, what do we have there? The one who compares externally will say that the waking up in the morning can be compared to the waking up of nature in spring. But the opposite is true! We have to compare the blossoming in spring with falling asleep. We have to compare the emergence and growth of plants in spring with what happens in the etheric and physical body of a person when they fall asleep. Then, as summer approaches, it becomes more and more alive, as in the human physical and etheric bodies in the middle of the sleep period. And in autumn it becomes as if the human being descends into the physical and etheric body in the morning, in autumn, which causes withering of what has sprouted during spring and summer. One must correctly put together what happens outside and inside; one must not seek external allegories and compare spring with waking up and autumn with falling asleep, but the other way around.

So that we can say: That which is the spirit of the earth goes to sleep in spring and wakes up as earth spirits in autumn and winter. In winter, they are connected to the earth as earth spirits, in order to rise again in spring and summer to the heights of heaven, to the astral heights and to the other side of the earth. When spring comes again, they go back to sleep.

It does not contradict that the earth sleeps once on one half and the other time on the other half. Something similar is also the case with man in a certain respect. The person who follows the processes clairvoyantly sees that in spring it is the same as when a person falls asleep, where the individual spirit withdraws into the astral world; he sees that in spring what we call the earth spirits withdraw into the astral world, and vice versa. Yes, today's humanity – except for those sitting here, who would probably burst out laughing if one were to speak of the falling asleep and waking up of the earth spirits. One believes this humanity; it does everything to prove that it has no idea of the real processes of the world. But it was not always so, not at all, but it was different in the past! There was an old human clairvoyance, and that saw these facts correctly. It was seen that the earth spirits withdraw in spring to go up, so to speak, into cosmic heights. In autumn these spirits descend again. This was recognized in ancient times. It was natural to point out that in the middle of summer there is something like an absence of the actual earth spirit from the earth. Instead, there is an upsurge of the elemental nature spirits, as in a paroxysm, and a lagging behind of what is earthly-bodily on the earth, which thus emerges through the senses. If one wanted to make this clear, one could not do better than to move the Feast of St. John to this time, in order to point out how the sprouting nature spirits and the actual spirits of the earth, which are the I and the astral body of the earth, work.

But what about when winter approaches? Then the earth wakes up, and the astral body and the ego are connected with the earth. That is when we have to move the festivals that primarily relate to the spiritual part of the human being. That is where Christmas has been moved to. And then, when the spirit of the earth moves upwards, which is indicated by Easter, this movement away from the earth, this movement into the astral, was related to the relationship between the sun and the moon.

All these things that we are looking into connect us in a wonderful way with ancient clairvoyance, showing us how, in what has been handed down from ancient times, we have to see something that has to do with ancient human clairvoyance. It is quite natural for the materialistic world view to say that it has only the body to educate, that it says: It is inconvenient for us, especially with regard to cheque transactions and similar things, to have Easter early one year and late the next, and this must be remedied so that trade and industry can get away with it as comfortably as possible. Easter should always be celebrated on the first Sunday in April! — This is only appropriate for the materialistic age, which has no connection with the spiritual world. Just as it is appropriate for materialism to entertain such ideas, it is equally true that a spiritual movement must maintain the connection with humanity's ancient festivals. And we will not hold back in doing what is appropriate for a spiritual worldview, especially with regard to practical activity.

And this should be expressed in what is presented to you in our calendar, which of course appears ridiculous to the outside world, but we do not want to withhold it from them, even if they think we are fools because of it. It is expressed through this calendar that we must maintain the connection with ancient times. In the illustrations for the calendar, which were created by a dear and beloved member of our group, you have a renewal of that which has already become dry and barren: the imaginations that relate to the constellations of the sun and moon and the signs of the zodiac, renewed for the soul of today, given in such a way that you really benefit from it when you look at the sequence of weeks and days. If you ask how you can gain access to such things yourself, then take a look at the Soul Calendar: these meditations are the result of many years of occult research and experience. If you make them effective in the soul, you will see that what is forming in the soul is the connection between the effectiveness of spiritual

worlds in the succession of time. And what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, we have made outwardly, exoterically, so that it does not shock at first glance. We have drawn a circle around it, on which 1912/13 is written, but inwardly the calendar is calculated in such a way that the beginning is marked by the birth of human ego-consciousness, that is, with the Mystery of Golgotha. And besides, the years are counted from Easter to Easter, which is bound to prove rather inconvenient for commercial life, but is necessary for spiritual life.

Thus something is provided that has grown out of our way of thinking and that can be used by everyone, so that by using it they can take a step closer to the spiritual path than can be achieved by any other means.

It will become more and more apparent how the things we undertake within our anthroposophical movement are actually conceived from a unified basic principle and impulse, and how the individual does not owe his existence to a whim, but is placed in such a way that he really fits into our work as a whole as a single building block. For this, of course, it is necessary that more and more individual members also develop an understanding of this collaboration and that we move beyond special interests and special aspirations and focus more on what unites us. Of course, it is understandable that many individual members have special aspirations and special requests, that some would like to bring this or that into the anthroposophical movement. But especially here in this place, where truly selfless cooperation will be necessary if we really want to achieve what we have planned, it must be deeply, deeply rooted in our hearts that we will only have a beneficial effect if we do not assert our special aspirations, but rather what can be integrated into the whole, what is being striven for, as a building block. Otherwise it cannot become a whole. This is so extraordinarily important, and in this respect I believe that the realization of what should have happened there is the basis for studying how the anthroposophical movement should develop.

So today I have tried to present to you some of our anthroposophically oriented views, and we have thus created a kind of substitute for what should have been this time, but could not be because not all the official approvals have been obtained: namely, the laying of the foundation stone of our Johannesbau. But we hope that in the not too distant future we will be able to make up for this. For perhaps in doing so we will also lay the foundation stone for a revival of the anthroposophical movement as we understand it in the West. And if we succeed in doing the right thing in this field, then we will already have provided the proof that we, in all loyalty to the truth, without any inclination towards sensationalism, are making those occult efforts our own which present-day humanity needs for its further development.