The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This is the third volume in the series of lectures by Rudolf Steiner published under the title, The Festivals and their Meaning.

In the Councils of the undivided Church from the fourth to the ninth centuries, Christian thinkers wrestled with the theology of the Father and the Son, but the Church has never arrived at a theology of the Holy Spirit. To this Rudolf Steiner makes a profound contribution in these lectures, by linking together the three great Christian Festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. He thereby shows Whitsun as the completion of the great redemptive work of Christ, a completion into which man could not enter in full consciousness until our present age. In doing this he throws light upon the great truths of Reincarnation and Karma in their relation to Christianity, and points to the spiritual unity which can bring together East and West.

These lectures are full of spiritual teaching and inspiration, but in some ways they are all the more difficult to grasp at first reading. They repay a hundred-fold patient and deep meditation.

A. P. S.

From the time of the Foundation Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society (Dornach, Christmas to New Year, 1923–24) until his death shortly before Easter, 1925, Rudolf Steiner wrote a Letter week by week, addressed to the members of the Society. The Letters were printed in the members' supplement to the Goetheanum Weekly and in the English edition of it, Anthroposophical Movement. The later Letters (forming a self-contained series from autumn 1924 onward) were published in book form in 1956, entitled The Michael Mystery (Vol. II of Letters to Members).

An urgent need has been felt for the earlier Letters in which Rudolf Steiner describes the character of the Society arising out of the Foundation Meeting and gives advice as to its conduct and its relation to the world. To meet this need, the Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung has issued these Letters in a separate volume entitled Das lebendige Wesen der Anthroposophie und seine Pflege: Briefe an die Mitglieder, and has given the Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain permission to publish the translation contained in the following pages (Vol. I of Letters to Members).

RUDOLF STEINER HOUSE
London, N.W.1, 1963

(From an incomplete transcript)

When we contemplate the world around us we find as our environment on Earth the beings of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms, and whatever belongs to and is produced from these kingdoms—mountains, rivers, clouds and so forth. We look up to the heavens and as we contemplate the stars and the planets we shall realise as the result of anthroposophical study that, like the Earth, these different celestial bodies have their inhabitants. But as man turns his gaze to his earthly environment and also to the heavens, he finds in this spatial environment Beings who are connected with one part only of himself. We know from Anthroposophy that man is a fourfold being, composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, and that in sleep the Ego and astral body separate from the physical and etheric bodies. But the Universe we perceive through our senses is related to our physical body only, not to our astral body or Ego. The only exceptions are two celestial bodies: the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon are the abodes of spiritual Beings just as the Earth is the abode of man. The other celestial bodies are also peopled by spiritual Beings but during his life between birth and death man is related to them in an indirect way only. In this respect the Sun and Moon are exceptions. They are the two gates or portals through which, in physical life on Earth too, men are linked with the spiritual world. The Sun is connected with our Ego, the Moon with our astral body.

We shall begin to understand this if we turn to what has been said in the different books and lecture-courses.

You know that the Moon, now moving independently through cosmic space, was once united with the Earth; at a certain point of time it liberated itself and went out into the Universe where it now forms a kind of colony of the Earth. This applies not only to the physical Moon but also to the Beings who inhabit it. You know too that the Earth was once inhabited both by men and by certain higher Beings who were the first great Teachers of humanity. They were not incarnated in physical bodies as men are to-day but only in etheric bodies. Nevertheless intercourse between men and these Beings continued until the Atlantean epoch. In those primeval ages on Earth men were exhorted at certain times to maintain complete stillness and calm in their souls, to be oblivious of their physical environment. And then, in those primeval men—we ourselves, in fact, for we were all on Earth in previous lives—it was as if the Great Teachers spoke from within them and they felt this as Inspiration. These Beings did not communicate their messages and teachings to men as we communicate with one another to-day, but in the way I have indicated. Works giving expression to a wonderful, primordial wisdom were the fruits of this intercourse. Modern man is fundamentally arrogant, priding himself on being infinitely clever. And so indeed he is, in comparison with the men of those remote ages. But cleverness by itself leads neither to wisdom nor to real knowledge. Cleverness is due to the intellect and intellect is not the only instrument for acquiring knowledge. It was by deeper forces of the soul that men in primeval times were led to the knowledge which they did not express in intellectual phraseology or in terms of our pedantic grammar—for all grammar is pedantic—but in language that was half poetry. Beings at an advanced stage of evolution, the primeval sages who taught men through Inspiration, were the originators of works of supreme beauty, fragments of which have been preserved to this day. Only the dull-witted could fail to wonder at the Vedic literature, the Yoga and Vedanta philosophy of India, the lore of ancient Persia and Egypt. The more thoroughly we steep ourselves in these records, the more obvious it is that although we of the modern age are far cleverer than those ancient men, the knowledge they presented in a most beautiful, poetic form leads very deeply into world-mysteries. The scripts which fill us with such admiration and astonishment if our hearts are rightly attuned are only the last vestiges of the wonderful, primordial wisdom that once existed in humanity as oral tradition and that Spiritual Science alone is able to investigate. But men have outgrown this wisdom in its primal form. They would not have reached maturity nor achieved freedom in knowledge through their own efforts had they continued at the stage of that ancient wisdom.

The great Teachers, having fulfilled their task, left the Earth together with the Moon which as a physical planet had gone out into the Universe. Today the great Teachers form a kind of spiritual colony on the Moon and a seer who investigates the Moon with the help of Initiation-Science finds it peopled by those wise Beings who were once the companions of men. The wisdom of these Beings can even now be investigated through a higher development of the faculties described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These Beings have an important task to perform for humanity—a task which it is difficult to describe in earthly words.

The Moon Beings keep the “books,” the records, of the whole past of humanity and of every individual man. These books are not, of course, anything in the least like the volumes in our libraries but this designation is nevertheless justifiable. The “books” contain records of what every individual human being has experienced in his successive earthly lives. When we are descending from the Cosmos to the Earth from the existence stretching between death and a new birth, we come into inner contact with the records of our past in these great “books” kept by the Moon sages. Before we arrive on the Earth, this past is imprinted in the astral body we bring with us into earthly existence and in that astral body are the “entries” made by the Moon Beings.

In ordinary circumstances these entries do not reach the head. During earthly life the head is by no means an organ of outstanding importance, although it is, of course, essential for the concepts and ideas relating to outer, material existence. What is inscribed into man during the final stage of his descent from the Cosmos to the Earth is inscribed—believe it or not as you will—into the part of him we call the spiritual side of the metabolic-limb system. The inscriptions therefore lie deep down in the unconscious, but they are actually there and they pass over into the process of growth, into the health and above all they determine what I will call the “curability” (Heilbarkeit) of a human being when he is ill on Earth. It is obviously important to understand the nature of illness but even more important to understand how to heal. Supersensible knowledge itself is an essential help, for this reveals what has been inscribed from the Akasha Chronicle by the Moon Beings into the forces of the process of growth, into the forces of nourishment, into the forces of breathing, and so on. It is these inscriptions that determine whether a man puts up strong or only slight resistance to the healing of an illness. One individual will be easily healed, another only with difficulty. This is entirely dependent upon how the karma from previous earthly lives makes it possible for the inscriptions to take effect.

When we think about what the Moon, together with the Beings who inhabit it spiritually, means for us on the Earth, we are finally led to say that the Moon is intimately connected with our past, with our previous earthly lives. To understand what the Moon existence out yonder in cosmic space means on Earth is to have intuitive perception of man's past. Destiny is formed out of what we bring over from our previous earthly life, that is to say, from our past, and what we experience during the present life. And out of what can be experienced in the present life, together with our past, our future destiny takes shape.

In its cosmic aspect, therefore, the Moon with its Beings is revealed as the power which carves the pattern of our past in our destiny. You will realise from this how little is known to-day about the true functions of the celestial bodies. Information about the Moon such as we are accustomed to hear from the physical sciences to-day is not knowledge in the true sense. A modern physicist who purports to describe the Moon assumes that the mountain ranges depicted on lunar maps were always there. This is a very naive belief. The Moon Beings themselves were always there, the soul-and-spirit belonging to the Moon was always there, but not the physical substance. You will be able to understand this by thinking of man himself. In the course of a man's earthly life the physical substances in his body are perpetually changing. After a period of seven to eight years, all the substances originally within us have been replaced. What has remained is the soul-and-spirit, and the same applies to the heavenly bodies. The substance of the Moon, although of longer duration than the substance of the human body, has all changed in the course of the ages; spirit-and-soul alone has remained. With these things in mind, our view of the Universe is altogether different from that presented by the material knowledge of to-day. This knowledge is extremely astute, highly intellectual; above all it can calculate with deadly accuracy. The calculations are accurate—but they are not true. Suppose someone makes calculations about the structure of the heart. He scrutinises it to-day and again in a month's time. It has changed, very slightly. After another month the change is again slight, and then he works out to what extent the heart changes in a year. He need only multiply and he has the figure for ten years. He can calculate what the measurements of the heart were three hundred years ago, and what they will be three hundred years from now. The calculations will certainly be correct. Only—the heart did not exist three hundred years ago, nor will it exist three hundred years hence! The same procedure is adopted in other cases. The calculations are invariably correct but they do not tally with the reality! The same applies to the outer substantiality of the heavenly bodies. Their substance changes but the element of soul-and-spirit remains. And in the case of the Moon it is this element of soul-and-spirit that is woven into our destiny by the great Recorders of our past life and therefore constitutes part of the web of our destiny.

So the Moon is in truth one of the portals showing man the way into the spiritual world—the world out of which his destiny is woven by Beings who were once his wise companions of the Earth in times when men themselves wove their destiny instinctively. The weaving of destiny now takes place entirely in the subconscious.

Still another portal leads into the spiritual world: it is the portal of the Sun. When through Initiation-science we acquire knowledge of the Sun, the Beings we encounter are not connected with the Earth in the same way as the Moon Beings; in the Sun sphere we do not encounter Beings who once had their abode on the Earth. The Beings we encounter in the Sun are referred to in the book Occult Science as the Angeloi and the higher Beings of the Hierarchies. When I say “in the Sun,” you must of course picture such Beings in the whole Sun sphere, in the flood of light radiating from the Sun.

The Sun is the abode of the Angeloi, one of whom is always connected with an individual human being. We ourselves, in respect of our Ego are connected with these higher Beings through our Sun existence. The Angeloi are in a certain sense the cosmic prototypes of men, for in future times man will attain their rank. These Beings, with whose nature we ourselves have a certain relationship, have their abode in the Sun sphere. From this you will realise that just as our past is connected with the Moon existence, so is our future connected with the Sun existence. Moon and Sun represent our past and our future. When we know on the one side that the Moon Beings are the “bookkeepers,” the “recorders” of our past, that records of our past earthly lives are inscribed, as it were, on the leaves of their books, Initiation-Science makes it clear that we must turn to the Angeloi when we give any thought to our future. Just as what we have done in the past works on into our present life, the things we do in the present must work on into the future. But this is possible only through the Angeloi who direct their gaze to a man's present deeds and bring them to effect in the future.

It is good and right to take account of this function of the Angeloi. We do many things that ought to bear fruit in the future. Humanity of the present age has become sadly thoughtless about such matters. When a man has performed some deed he should think of his Angelos, saying inwardly: “May my Guardian Spirit receive this my deed as a root and from it bring forth fruit.” The more definite and vivid the imagery used when a man addresses his Angelos in connection with deeds which should subsequently bear fruit, the more abundant this fruit can be in the future.

And so the Moon Beings preserve our past destiny and the Sun Beings weave new destiny for the future. It is not outer, physical light alone that the Sun and Moon send down to the Earth. Being connected as it is with our astral body, the Moon provides the initial impulse whereby everything from our past is woven into our destiny. The Sun is connected with our Ego and through the Beings who are a prototype of our future cosmic existence, has to do with our future destiny. And so the heavenly mirror-pictures of our destiny are images of the relationship between Sun and Moon.

Initiation-Science explains and confirms these facts. When a man has achieved the necessary degree of development as I have described it in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he then sees, when he contemplates the Full Moon, not only what normal consciousness sees. In the light of the Full Moon he perceives his past destiny, the content of his previous earthly life. And when with enhanced spiritual vision he focuses his gaze upon the place occupied by the dark, physically invisible New Moon, its dark shadow becomes for him the great Admonisher formed by his destiny, proclaiming to him what his attitude must be to actions in his previous earthly life in order that he may make compensation for them in the further course of his karma.

It is possible for a man to establish a similar relationship with the Sun. This enables him to have an inkling of future destinies—a general glimpse, at least, without specific details.

If we now turn from the cosmic aspect to man himself, we find that human destiny is woven in a wonderful way out of two kinds of circumstances. When two individuals meet each other, one of them, let us say, in his twenty-fifth year, the other in his thirtieth, it may be the case—not, of course, always—that when the one or the other looks back over his life up to this point he realises with absolute certainty that each of them has pursued his path of life as though they were deliberately seeking for one another. To ignore such things simply denotes lack of thought. The child had already set out upon the path that led inevitably to the other human being and the latter's path too led to the common meeting-point. All this took place in the subconscious realm—but what has been at work there? Think of the one individual as A and the other as B. Before entering into earthly life, A descended through the Moon sphere. The Moon Beings had inscribed in their records and also into his astral body, what he had experienced in common with B in the past earthly life, and these entries made by the Moon Beings in the Akasha Chronicle influenced the paths taken by both A and B. From the moment they meet, the subconscious is no longer all-important, for the two now come face to face and make a certain impression on one another. This is not a case of conservation of the past; it is the present that is now at work. The Angeloi intervene and lead the individuals concerned to further stages. The forces of Sun existence are now operating, so that within a man's inmost being, Sun and Moon together weave his destiny. This can be clearly visualised by thoughtful perception of the course of human life.

When two individuals meet, the impression they make upon each other may be intrinsically different. There are cases where one of the two takes the other right into the sphere of his will, of his feelings. The outer, personal impression has had little influence here. Intellectualists have no understanding of what is going on inwardly in such cases, for one of the most wonderful experiences imaginable is to see what kind of relationship is formed when two human beings come across each other for the first time. It may happen that A takes B into the sphere of his will by saying to himself: What B does I want to do myself; what pleases him, also pleases me.—Now B may be unsightly and unattractive and nobody can conceive that he could possibly be pleasing to A.—You see, the attraction in this case is not caused by the reasoning mind or by the sense-impressions, but by the deeper forces of the soul—by the will and what goes from the will into the heart. However unsightly the other may be, he has become so only in the present earthly life. The origin of the bond between the two lies in the experiences they shared in the previous life. Seen from outside it seems that the two cannot possibly live in harmony, but the fact is that what is present subconsciously in each of them leads their wills together. Even in childhood this often becomes evident. A child tries so hard to be like “him,” to have the same wishes as “he” has, to feel as “he” feels. A karmic connection is certainly present in such circumstances.

That is one kind of meeting between individuals and if they were alive to such happenings—as will inevitably be the case in a by no means distant future, when more attention will be paid to man's inner nature—the working of the will would indicate that past earthly lives have already been spent in company with such individuals; moreover subconscious soul-forces give hints of experiences shared with others in the past incarnation.

The other kind of meeting is this.—One individual comes across another but no relationship whatever is established between their wills; the aesthetic or mental impression is predominant. How often it happens that a man A makes the acquaintance of man B, but does not afterwards refer to him with the warmth or abhorrence with which he speaks of someone with whom he has a karmic connection from earlier times. One may praise an individual with whom there is no karmic tie, one may appreciate him, consider him a splendid fellow, but he makes no effect upon the will—he makes an effect only upon the mind, upon the aesthetic sense.

That is the second kind of meeting between individuals. If the effect made by the two upon each other reaches into the will, into the heart, into the inmost nature, then a karmic connection exists; the two individuals have been led to each other as the result of common experiences in the past earthly life. If an effect made by another person reaches only into the intellect, into the aesthetic sense, this is not an outcome of the Moon's activity, but a situation brought about by the Sun and one that will have its sequel only in the future. And so through a thoughtful, observant study of human life we can learn to perceive the signs of karmic connections.

What I have now told you is a fruit of knowledge attainable through Anthroposophy, and just as nobody need himself be an artist to see beauty in a picture, as little need a man himself be an Initiate to understand these things. They can be understood because the ideas harmonise. There are people who say: The spiritual world is no concern of ours; we shall understand it only when we are actually in it.—They say this because they are accustomed nowadays to accept as proof only what can be confirmed in a material, physical way. Such people are like dunderheads who say: Everything in the wide world must be supported—otherwise it falls down; the Earth, the Moon, the Sun—all have their places in cosmic space but they must have supports to prevent them from falling! Such people do not know that the cosmic bodies mutually support each other. Anthroposophy calls for this kind of understanding. Its ideas cannot be supported by external, physical proofs, but for all that they mutually support each other. When you read an anthroposophical book for the first time, you may lay it aside because you are accustomed to find everything proved up to the hilt and in this book there are no such proofs. But if you read on you will find that like the cosmic bodies the ideas support and sustain each other.

The teachings can be understood even when one is not an Initiate, but through Initiation-Science they become much more concretely real and are experienced differently. Therefore someone who is sufficiently advanced is able to speak in a different way about the web of human destiny that is woven out of the past, the present and the future. The experiences of a person who has reached a certain stage of Initiation become much more concrete.—Suppose that somebody is standing in front of you; he tells you something and you hear it clearly. An Initiate can hear the inner voice as well as the outer; he can hear the spiritual speech which is no less clear than ordinary human speech. A person with whom an Initiate was karmically connected in the past and whom he meets in the present life, speaks to him as clearly and unambiguously as people speak in the ordinary way. The Initiate hears an inner speech. You will say: then an Initiate must have around him a whole collection of people who speak to him with varying degrees of clarity. And that is actually the case. At the same time it is concrete proof of the way in which the previous earthly life has been spent. I have said that the Moon Beings, the great Recorders, register destiny; but immediately an Initiate encounters someone with whom he was karmically connected in the previous earthly life, the light of the Full Moon radiates to him the recorded ‘entries’ of the other individual.

What we think and do in the immediate present does not at once speak to us, but after a certain time, by no means very long, our deeds that have been registered by the Moon Beings become living and, in a sense, articulate. The Akashic pictures are living pictures; if you discover the content of a past earthly life you learn to know both yourself and the other human being concerned. Common experiences of the past incarnation rise up into consciousness; no wonder that we hear them speak both from within ourselves and from within the other individual. We are united inwardly with those with whom we were associated in the previous earthly life.

In the future men must develop a delicate feeling for the stirrings of the will when meeting another person. In about seven to nine thousand years all human beings on the Earth will be able to hear those with whom they are karmically connected, speaking from within.

Now if, after Initiation has been attained, a meeting takes place with someone with whom there is no karmic bond, who is encountered for the first time, again the experience is different. Naturally, an Initiate may also come across individuals with whom he is not karmically connected. In any case his experience will differ from that of others. He has a fine and delicate feeling for new facts revealed by the individual confronting him, in this case, as a cosmic being.

An individual encountered for the first time enables us to see more deeply into the Cosmos. It is a piece of good fortune to meet such a person and recognition that this meeting enlarges our knowledge of the world must develop into fine sensitivity. An Initiate has a certain obligation in connection with every individual with whom he has no karmic connection from the past, whom he encounters for the first time in the Cosmos (the spiritual world). He must link himself with the spiritual Being belonging to the realm of the Angeloi who is the Guardian Spirit of this individual. He must become acquainted not only with the individual himself but with his Guardian Angel as well. The Guardian Angel of this individual speaks unambiguously from within him. Hence when an Initiate encounters different human beings with whom he has no karmic bond, he hears a clear and definite speech. He hears what the Angeloi of these individuals are saying.

This gives a certain character to the intercourse between an Initiate and ordinary men. He takes into himself what the Angelos wishes to say to the person who has come into his ken; he transforms himself as it were into the Angelos of this person and what he can say to the latter is therefore more intimate than it is for ordinary consciousness. The Initiate is actually a different being in all his contacts with individuals whose first meeting with him is in the Cosmos, because he has identified himself with the Angelos of each individual concerned. This is the secret of the faculty of self-transformation possessed by those who with the power bestowed by Initiation come face to face with other men. People to-day have very little feeling for such things compared with the faculty of perception they possessed in centuries by no means very long ago. It might have happened then that a sage, confronting twenty other persons, would have been described quite differently by each of them. The commonplace verdict in such circumstances would be that as each of the twenty descriptions given was quite different from all the rest, none of the twenty writers actually saw the individual in question. But perhaps they all did! He changed in every case by establishing a link with the Angelos of each person concerned.

In this connection a veritable abyss lies between what is accepted usage today and what was taken for granted not so very long ago. A great deal of learning is available in our time but it is communicated in an entirely different way. In the higher training given in an epoch not far behind us, those who were called upon to be leaders of the people as priests or teachers were taught to develop the capacity to unite themselves with the Angelos of a human being. But even remembrance of this has vanished. Knowledge of the Angeloi was indispensable for those who aspired to be leaders of mankind, in order to develop the power of self-transformation.

And now something else.—It will strike you as extraordinary—I have spoken of it in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact—that there are great similarities in biographies of ancient Initiates. Study these biographies and you will find that very many features are alike, for the great Initiates underwent similar experiences in their souls. Biographies of ordinary human beings would never be alike. If those who encountered Zarathustra had all written about him, every characterisation would have been different, because Zarathustra changed every time an individual came before him. What the world was meant to know about the great Initiates was biography inspired by higher Spirits.

When the meeting between an Initiate and some individual takes place for the first time in the Cosmos, the Initiate has to establish contact with the Angelos of that individual. In doing so he acquires a great deal of knowledge about the outer spiritual world. In point of fact one cannot acquire deeper knowledge of other human beings through spiritual faculties without learning to know a host of Angeloi. A true knowledge of man is impossible without knowledge of the Angeloi. Just as human beings not karmically connected with each other acquire knowledge of the surrounding world through ordinary perception, the Initiate gains knowledge of the world of the Angeloi—which is then the bridge between himself and the higher Hierarchies.

There are also other indications of the existence of a karmic connection. We may meet an individual and then have a great deal to do with him, work with him and so on, but we never dream about him. The reason is that the karmic connection is not with our astral body, but only with our Ego.

We may come across someone of whom we have only a fleeting glance and yet he follows us into our very dreams—into our waking dreams too. Our picture of him is quite unconnected with his outward appearance and has arisen entirely in the inner life, because we have a karmic tie with him. Again we may meet someone with whom we are karmically connected and feel impelled to paint him. An artist may paint a portrait in which an uncultured person sees no likeness whatever, whereas an Initiate may recognise a previous incarnation of the individual whose portrait has been painted. We get to know someone with whom we have a karmic connection in the depths of his being although the knowledge may remain subconscious. Through individuals with whom we have had no previous karmic connection, whom we meet for the first time, we enlarge our knowledge of humanity in general.

When you go to a tea-party or some such function, just keep your ears open and listen to the conversation.—If someone has met another individual with whom he is karmically connected, he will say little about the others present, but about this particular individual he will say something of real significance, especially if he is unaware of what is behind it all. At the same kind of tea-party you may get into conversation with someone with whom you have no karmic connection at all. Your interest in him is very superficial and he seems to you to be typical of all the other guests. Such a gathering is very brief as a rule, and a great deal of talk goes on about world affairs, about noted politicians and the like. After listening to these few people we may judge the whole of society by this criterion. The judgement may be erroneous but nevertheless it is through individuals with whom we have no karmic connection that another aspect of the world is presented to us. There was once a traveller who happened to reach Konigsberg Station at midnight. He asked for a cup of coffee and was addressed in very coarse language by the red-headed waiter who had been dozing. The traveller wrote in his diary: “The people of Konigsberg have red hair, are sleepy and coarse.” He was judging all the people of Konigsberg by this night-waiter—someone with whom he had no karmic connection!

Through studies of this kind we learn not only how to assess life and its values, but we get nearer to other human beings and are connected with them in a different way. We learn not only to understand human life—which is the essential task of Anthroposophy—we also learn to know cosmic life. Sun and Moon cease to be the subject of abstract theories and become living realities in the Cosmos—the great counterparts in the Universe of the microcosmic destiny of men on the Earth.

Sun-activity combines with Moon-activity in our life. The light radiating to us from the Moon is connected with our cosmic past and the light of the Sun is connected with our cosmic future.

It was the aim of the Christmas Meeting, when the Anthroposophical Society was given a new foundation, to stress the importance of Anthroposophy for life itself. It was said that esotericism in the true sense of the word must be a living power among us. The Christmas Meeting was not intended merely to be a festive gathering of a number of Anthroposophists, but its efficacy and its impulses were meant to endure. One new plan is to issue a News Sheet—as a matter of fact the first three numbers have already appeared—containing reports of what is going on in the Anthroposophical Society. The Society must become a kind of living, spiritual organism. On my journeys I have constantly found Members in The Hague, for example, saying: “We have no idea what the Members in Vienna are doing, and yet we belong to an Anthroposophical Society!”—I wonder how many here in Zurich could tell me what is going on in the Groups of the Society in Leipzig or Hamburg? But this is what must be possible in future. Members of the New Zealand Group should have a real picture of what is going on in Vienna, and so on. It will be helpful if the Members will send to the editorial office of the News Sheet accounts of their experiences both in the Society and outside it. This material will then be edited, and Members will be able to read about whatever is going on in the Society. I propose in future to include in the News Sheet short, concentrated aphorisms for use in the Group Meetings or on other occasions.

All these measures should instil real life, pulsating life, into the Anthroposophical Society, and every Member should realise that this was the aim of the Christmas Meeting. Moreover it is only because this is how things ought to be, and indeed must be, if Anthroposophy itself is to do justice to its past and future, that I have undertaken the Presidency, associated with an Executive which I know will work fruitfully from the centre at the Goetheanum. I had for many years kept apart from all administrative matters, and had it not been an absolute necessity I should not have thought of starting anew and repeating in old age what one did as a young man. I want to appeal to every Member of the Anthroposophical Society to help in ensuring that through the Christmas Meeting the foundation stone of anthroposophical life shall be laid in the hearts of our Members and that it shall develop as a living seed, so that active life may constantly increase in the Society. If that happens, the Society will also be able to send its impulse out into the world.

The truth of repeated lives on Earth was once expressed in German literature in impressive words to which attention has often been called in the Anthroposophical Movement. At the height of his powers Lessing wrote his memorable treatise, The Education of the Human Race, at the end of which he declares his belief in repeated lives on Earth. In monumental sentences he declares that the historical development of humanity can be intelligible only on the assumption that the individual man passes through many lives on Earth and carries over into other epochs of evolution what may have been experienced and accomplished in an earlier epoch. In this connection, two facts only need be borne in mind: when attempts are made by historians to explain later events as the effects of earlier causes, all kinds of reasons are brought forward—the influence of ideas, of physical happenings, and so forth—in short, pure abstractions. The truth is that the same individuals who were living, let us say, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, lived in earlier epochs as well; they then absorbed what was happening around them or what was to be experienced from their fellow human beings, carried it all through the gate of death into the spiritual world in which man lives between death and rebirth, and brought it down again with them into a new earthly life. They are therefore themselves the bearers of what has passed over from one epoch to another in the course of the evolution of humanity.

The past is forever being carried over to the future by individual men. This is the one fact that can fill the soul with a feeling of reverence when it is taken with due earnestness. And the other fact is that on reflection, all of us sitting here will be able to say: We ourselves have lived on the Earth many times and what we are to-day is the product of those previous lives. When we survey history and let it shed light upon our own experiences, the realisation that there are repeated lives on Earth may well imbue knowledge with a mood of reverence, and Lessing must certainly have experienced something of the kind when he wrote: “Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest, because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the Schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?” [Translation by F. W. Robertson, 1872.] And he voices his consciousness of realities such as those indicated above, in the monumental words: “Is not then all Eternity mine?”

The line of spiritual development which could have been introduced into German culture at that time through Lessing's treatise, was broken. And in any case its continuance would certainly have been ridiculed by the mentality of the nineteenth century.

More than twenty years ago in Berlin, when we were beginning anthroposophical work within the framework of the Theosophical Society, it was announced on the programme of the meeting held in connection with the founding of what was then called the German Section of the Theosophical Society, that the title of one of the first lectures I proposed to give would be: “Practical Exercises for the Understanding of Karma” (über praktische Karma-Übungen). It was a matter at that time of introducing the idea of karma with such forcefulness that it could have become one of the leitmotifs in the development of the Anthroposophical Movement. But when I spoke about what I meant by this title to one or two well-known members of the old Theosophical Society who had come over to Berlin, there was general opposition. Such a subject was considered to be quite impossible. And as a matter of fact—although I am not suggesting that these people were right—it would have been premature at that time to speak to wider circles about these intimate esoteric truths. If one wishes to avoid abstract generalisations and to speak in a concrete way about karma and its significance in the historical life of mankind, this is not possible without touching upon matters of a deeply esoteric nature and making use of the concepts of esotericism. Hence in a certain respect everything in the way of knowledge that has since been developed in the Anthroposophical Society was a necessary preparation, because in the days to which I have referred the members of this Society were not sufficiently mature.

But sooner or later the time must come when it is possible to speak concretely of the truths of karma and their connection with the evolution of humanity. If we were to wait any longer this would be a grave defect on the part of the Anthroposophical Society. Hence one of the intentions expressed at the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to the effect that communication of the findings of genuine spiritual investigation into these more intimate questions of the evolution of humanity should no longer be withheld. And in line with this, the Anthroposophical Movement will in future be attentive to what the spiritual Beings desire, not to what timidity and caution regard as inopportune or untimely.

In this connection the Christmas Meeting at the Goetheanum was not only of qualitative significance for the Anthroposophical Movement but something that was to mark the beginning of deeper and more intensive anthroposophical work. And it is from this point of view—which must also become a point of view of the whole Movement—that I shall speak to you to-day.

We witness great happenings in history and are aware that the keynotes in certain domains of life are set by particular personalities. It should be obvious to us that some historic personality who not so long ago was the inaugurator of the kind of thinking under the influence of which we are still living to-day, can only be understood—as the historical aspect in general can only be understood—when anthroposophical investigation penetrates into earlier incarnations of such personalities. This leads to something else as well. By observing personalities of whom history tells we become aware of threads of destiny running through their different lives on Earth and the light thus shed upon karma helps to make our own personal destiny intelligible. This is of very great importance.

There must be no sensationalism in the study of karma; the sole purpose of such study must be to illumine the circumstances of human life and the experiences of individual human souls. We see, for example, that particularly in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century, a materialistic attitude of soul became general; in certain respects this attitude continued on into the twentieth century and has helped to produce the chaos and confusion prevailing in culture and civilisation to-day. There is a radical difference between the trend that was perceptible—above all in German spiritual life—after the close of the first third of the nineteenth century and the earlier character of this spiritual life. Perceiving this difference, we naturally ask about its origin. In the last two thirds of the nineteenth century there are men who cannot fail to interest us, whose individualities we feel urged to trace back to their earlier lives on Earth.

The seer who is able to carry out such investigations is led back, to begin with, not to Christian but to non-Christian incarnations. It is natural here—for it tallies approximately with the indications given of the length of the intervals between successive lives on Earth—to go back to the very widespread spiritual movement of Mohammedanism, or Arabism, which arose about half a millennium after the founding of Christianity. Starting from Asia, Christianity spread across to Spain and thence to all Western Europe, having had a slight influence upon civilisation in North Africa; it also spread across Eastern and Middle Europe, but in its expansion was flanked, as it were, by Arabism which, with the impulse of Mohammedanism active within it, forced its way on the one side through Asia Minor and on the other side through Africa across to Italy and Spain. And the many wars of which history tells bear witness to the bitter conflict waged between European civilisation and Arabism. Here again it is important to ask: What are the concrete facts underlying the evolution of the human soul?

We will now consider some of these concrete facts. For example: at the time when Charlemagne was ruling in very primitive conditions of civilisation in Europe, brilliant spiritual culture was being developed at the Court of Haroun al Raschid over in Asia. At this Court were gathered the greatest minds of that time, men of outstanding brilliance, whose souls were deeply imbued with oriental wisdom but who also combined with this wisdom the culture that had come over from Greece. The spiritual life cultivated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid embraced Architecture, Astronomy (as it was then understood), Geography, Mathematics, Poetry, Chemistry, Medicine, and the most illustrious representatives of all these branches of learning living at that time had been brought together there.

Haroun al Raschid was an energetic and active patron, a personality who provided the foundations for a truly wonderful centre of culture in the eighth/ninth century A.D. And at this Court of Haroun al Raschid there was a remarkable personality, one who in the life spent at the Court would probably not have given the impression of being an Initiate. But he himself, as well as the Initiates, knew that in an earlier life on Earth he had been one of those who were most highly initiated. Thus in a later incarnation, at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, there lived a personality who did not appear outwardly as an Initiate but who had been an Initiate in an earlier life. The others at the Court had at least some knowledge of this nature of Initiation-life in days of antiquity. The personality of whom I am speaking was a magnificent organiser—as we should say nowadays, using a rather unworthy expression—of all the sciences and arts at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

We know that Arabism in its external aspect spread under the impetus of Mohammedanism across Africa, Southern Europe, Spain and farther into Europe. We know too of the wars and conflicts that were waged. But the campaigns came to an end. It is usually considered that Arabism was driven out of Europe by battles such as those fought by Charles Martel, at Xeres de la Frontera. But there was a tremendously strong spiritual impulse in, Arabism, and the remarkable thing is that when it was outwardly beaten back as a political and belligerent power in Europe, the souls of eminent Arabists, when they had passed through the gate of death, were intensely concerned in the spiritual world with the question of how the influence of Arabism could be made effective in Europe. In the spiritual world the outer form of things is not of primary importance. Between two successive incarnations of an individuality there may be little outer resemblance; the significance lies in the inner nature and character. This is a difficult idea for our contemporaries to grasp. In an age when it can be held against a man that he once wrote not unfavourably about Haeckel and subsequently wrote in a different vein regarded by pedants as contradictory, [Dr. Steiner is here referring to criticisms of his own writings on the subject of Haeckel.] when such a lack of insight is in evidence, there will be little understanding of how outwardly different individuals can be in two successive lives on Earth, although the same fundamental impulse is at work in both.

The development of the great Arabist souls between death and a new birth was such that in the spiritual world they remained connected with the impulse that had streamed from the East to the West; they remained connected with their own deeds. In the external world, civilisation advanced; forms of culture quite different from those characteristic of Arabism made their appearance. But the souls of individuals who had been eminent figures in Arabism came again to the Earth and without carrying over Arabism in its outer form, bore its inner impulses into a much later age. They appeared as the bearers of culture in the sphere of language, in the habits of thinking and feeling and in the impulses of will of a later age. But in the souls of these men the impulse of Arabism was working on, and it is not difficult to see that the stream of spiritual life dominating the last two thirds of the nineteenth century was deeply influenced by minds that were the product of Arabism.

Our gaze turns to the soul of Haroun al Raschid, passing in that life through the gate of death. Between death and a new birth this soul continues to develop and appears again in the modern age in quite different conditions of civilisation. For the individuality of Haroun al Raschid appears in English spiritual life as Lord Bacon of Verulam. In the universality of Bacon's mind we have to see the rebirth of what Haroun al Raschid had achieved at his oriental Court in the eighth/ninth century. We know how intensely and profoundly European culture was influenced by Bacon and has continued to be so influenced. It is true to say that in scientific investigation and the scientific approach to things, men still think as he did. This of course cannot be said of every detail but it is true of the general trend of the age. If we contemplate the brilliant achievements of Haroun al Raschid and their influence upon the outer world, and then, having learnt through spiritual investigation that he appears again in Lord Bacon of Verulam, we think of the known course of Lord Bacon's life, we shall certainly find consistency, similarity—not in the external forms but in the inner trend of these two incarnations.

I spoke of a personality who lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and in an earlier incarnation had been an Initiate. It may well happen—I say this in parenthesis—that one who was an Initiate in bygone times does not, in a later life, give the impression of having attained Initiation. When I speak again and again of a number of ancient Initiates, of teachers and priests in the Mysteries, you are bound to ask yourselves: Where are they to be found? Why are they not living among us at the present time? Now an individuality with great spiritual enlightenment in an earlier life can work in a later life only through the medium of the body and the education afforded by that later epoch. But for a long time now, the character of education has made it impossible for what once lived in these Initiate-souls to express itself. They are obliged to operate in quite different forms of life and only those endowed with a power of intimate observation are able to realise that men in whom the Initiate is not apparent in the later earthly life have nevertheless passed through lives during which they reached Initiation.

One of the most striking examples in this respect is Garibaldi, the hero of the freedom of Italy. The elemental forcefulness displayed in a truly remarkable life is in itself enough to indicate that this personality lived at a level transcending the conditions of the immediate earthly existence. He had been an Initiate in an earlier incarnation and became a political visionary—for that is what he must be called. In an earlier life he had been an Initiate, filled with impulses of will which then, in the later life as Garibaldi, he brought to a head in the way that was possible for a man born in 1807. But think of the peculiar features of his earthly life. The starting-point for me was that I observed how Garibaldi's path of destiny in the nineteenth century was linked with three other men with whom he was connected and with whom he worked in a way that on the face of it is really not entirely comprehensible. In the depths of his nature Garibaldi was an intensely loyal Republican, yet he rejected everything that would have united Italy under the flag of a Republic. Convinced Republican though he was, he set out to establish the Empire, and moreover under Victor Emmanuel.

Occult investigation has now to concern itself with this enigma: How came it that Garibaldi was the one responsible for making Victor Emmanuel King of Italy?—for it was he, Garibaldi, who made him King. And then our vision falls on two other personalities: Cavour and Mazzini. The circumstances are remarkable. Garibaldi was born in 1807 and the others within the space of a few years. Garibaldi was born in Nice, Mazzini in Genoa, Cavour in Turin, Victor Emmanuel not far away. All of them were born within a small area.

A concrete starting-point is needed for researches into karma. It is not much help to know how clever a man is or what scientific knowledge he has acquired. Even if someone has written thirty novels in his life, this fact will not provide a starting-point for penetrating with vision into earlier lives on Earth. Whether a person limps or has a habit of blinking is much more important for investigation of an earlier incarnation. It is precisely by what seem to be insignificant features in life that the occultist is guided along the paths where light is shed from one earthly life into earlier incarnations.

And so a criterion for occult research in the case of Garibaldi was the way in which, in the nineteenth century, he established relations with the other three individuals. There was another criterion as well. Outwardly observed, Garibaldi was a man with a strong sense of concrete reality, one who stood firmly on his feet, mindful only of practical exigencies. But in this Garibaldi-life there were intimate phases, showing clearly that Garibaldi stood at a level above the conventional experiences of life. While still quite young he took part in many dangerous sea voyages on the Adriatic, was several times captured by pirates but on every occasion freed himself again by very hazardous means. It is also noteworthy that the first time Garibaldi saw his name in print was when he read in a newspaper the announcement of his own death-sentence. This is a biographical incident that does not happen to everybody! The death sentence had been passed on account of his participation in a conspiracy, but it was never carried out. Garibaldi fled to South America and there led an adventurous life, rich in inner experiences and full of vital force.

How very little the ordinary conditions of earthly existence affected Garibaldi is shown, for example, by the way in which he contracted his first marriage—which for many decades was an exceedingly happy one. How he became acquainted with the woman he married is a strange story. He was on board ship, still some distance out at sea, and looking towards the land through a telescope he saw a woman standing there. He fell in love with her at once. Falling in love through a telescope is by no means an everyday occurrence and in such a case the ordinary bourgeois conditions of life mean nothing! What happened? Garibaldi steered at once to the land and met a man who was so taken with him that he invited him home to a meal. This man was the father of the girl he had seen through the telescope! A slight drawback was that Garibaldi spoke only Italian, she only Portuguese, but although neither knew the other's language he made her understand that they must unite for life. It turned out to be the happiest and also one of the most interesting marriages imaginable. She shared in all his undertakings and experiences in South America and once, when a report reached her that Garibaldi had been killed in one of the many fights for freedom, she searched every battlefield—as legend narrates of other women. She lifted every corpse in order to look at the face but finally discovered on her journeyings that her husband was still alive. During these adventures she gave birth to her first child who would have died from cold if she had not bound it with a sling around her neck and kept it warm against her breast. These are not ordinary circumstances and the companionship was anything but a conventional one in the bourgeois sense. Some time after the death of his wife, Garibaldi married again, this time in perfectly conventional circumstances. But this marriage—which had not been arranged through a telescope—lasted no longer than a day! These happenings and similar features of Garibaldi's life are clear evidence that there was something quite out of the common about him.

Spiritual vision revealed to me that in an earlier incarnation¹ in the Christian era, this personality had been an Irish Initiate; he had come over with a mission from Ireland to Alsace where he taught in a centre of the Mysteries and where he had as pupils those individualities who were born later on in approximately the same period and in the same region as he. Now in various Mysteries where Initiation was attained there was a law according to which the connection of certain pupils with the teacher must be so close and strong that the teacher might not desert them when circumstances brought them together in a later life. Garibaldi was bound to feel a very strong tie with the individuality of Victor Emmanuel because the latter had been his pupil in an earlier Initiation-life. In such a case, theories are of no account. In a later life what is of real importance is not any external undertaking, but obedience, even if an unconscious obedience, to that inner law by which men are brought together in accordance with impulses working in the intimate processes of historical evolution.

The whole of Garibaldi's life indicates how the attainments of one who was an Initiate in a previous life are obliged to express themselves in a later incarnation because the bodily constitution and the education provided in a given century do not make it possible for such a personality to appear outwardly as an Initiate.

The same applies in the case of the personality who lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and who, when he had gone through the gate of death, was bound to take a different path from that of Haroun al Raschid himself. This personality was connected in the very depths of his soul with all the mysteries of Initiation he had received from oriental wisdom. He could not follow the path that was taken, more with an eye to outer renown, by Haroun al Raschid. He was obliged to take a different path. These paths led to reincarnation in a later epoch when the two individualities worked in the currents of civilisation and culture that were under their own influence—the influence, that is to say, of Haroun al Raschid and his Counsellor. The soul of this Counsellor appeared again as Amos Comenius, who again was not able to bring the Initiation-principle to outward manifestation but whose forceful and effective intervention in the world of education in the age that is also the age of Bacon, shows that profound and significant impulses were alive in him. And so we see how after his life at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, the soul who has now become Amos Comenius is reincarnated with a more inward vocation; we see how Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates; and we see how in these personalities, civilisations, cultures, flow together. If we contemplate the spiritual life of Europe as it developed particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we shall everywhere find Arabism in its new forms. In everything that has been influenced by Bacon, Arabism is present in a more outwardly brilliant form. In everything that has been influenced by Amos Comenius, the deep inwardness of oriental wisdom can be perceived.

What I am telling you is not a made-up story. These things are not discovered by speculation but only by uniting oneself inwardly with the spirit-entities concerned and by means of inspired investigation seeking the way from the one earthly life into the other. Through the incarnation of souls in repeated lives a great deal has been brought over from Arabism into the modern age. What is all-important is that the character and purpose of such investigation shall not be misunderstood. I told you that it is not a question of following clues that in materialistic life would usually be considered significant. Nothing much will be discovered by so doing.—I will give you an example.

I had a teacher—I have also spoken of him in my autobiography—who was a really excellent geometrician. At a certain period in my fife he began to interest me very deeply. There was something absolutely original about him, a one-sidedness that amounted almost to genius; he had other characteristics as well, but his geometrical talent provided no pointer to his earlier incarnation. This really first-class constructive geometrician had a certain external peculiarity—a club-foot. Now investigations which lead over from one incarnation into another very often reveal that everything connected in the one incarnation with the development of the legs is connected, in another life, with the development of the head. A remarkable metamorphosis takes place of the inner forces which in one life are those of the limb-system and in another, those of the head-system.

My teacher's club-foot became for me the starting-point of occult investigation. And what transpired? The vision that was focused upon this defect led me to another personality who also had a club-foot namely, Lord Byron. I now knew: this has to do with reincarnations connected in some way with each other. And it turned out that in a previous incarnation there was something in the souls of both these men that had led them to common action, although in their last incarnation, as far as their earthly activity was concerned, they were not actually, but almost, contemporaries. I stress the point here that I am not dealing with incarnations as women because in past epochs life in a man's body was more important. Incarnations as women are only now beginning to be of importance, although in the future it will be of very special interest to take account of them. In considering many historical personalities, however, one often omits intervening incarnations as women.—You must not conclude from this that there have been no such incarnations, but I am speaking now of aspects which lead back first and foremost to previous incarnations as men.—And so through these two personalities whose connection with each other I had perceived, I was led back to a time—it was either in the tenth or eleventh century A.D. but I have not been able to determine this exactly—when they had lived in the East of Europe, in regions that are now part of modern Russia. They were comrades. At that time the legend of the Palladium and its changing whereabouts in the world had already reached the ears of a few.—You know, perhaps, that the Palladium was regarded as a holy treasure upon which the fortunes of civilisation depended. According to the legend, this Palladium was first in Troy, then in Rome and was then transferred with pomp and splendour to Constantinople by Constantine the Great, who caused a pillar to be erected over it for his own glorification. At the top of this pillar was a statue of Apollo. In a chaplet were pieces of wood which Constantine had caused to be brought from the Cross of Christ. Everything was done with an eye to his own glorification. The legend related that the Palladium would at some time be carried northwards, whither the civilisation centred in Constantinople would then be transplanted.—This legend came to the ears of the two comrades of whom I am speaking and they were seized with enthusiasm to obtain possession of the Palladium in Constantinople. They did not succeed but they embarked on many adventurous undertakings with the aim of removing this holy treasure to the North. Especially in the case of the one who was subsequently reincarnated in the West as Byron, we see how his enthusiasm for the cause of freedom was a karmic continuation of the search for the Palladium in the earlier life. And the same spiritual configuration was to be seen in the intimate impression made by my geometry teacher upon those who knew him: here was a sense of freedom in the domain of science.

And so the paths led from details of secondary importance—in this case the club-foot—to earlier incarnations of the personalities in question. When it is a matter of speaking of the karmas of individuals one must always have an eye for the inner configuration of life.

Let me give one more example.—In the eighth/ninth century A.D., in the region that we should today call the North East of France, there lived a personality who in those days would have been considered a well-to-do landowner. But he was adventurous and went out on predatory expeditions in the neighbouring provinces. Incredible as it seems today, such things as the following did happen in those times.—He would leave his house and estate and wage campaigns sometimes more, sometimes less successfully in the neighbouring districts. On returning from one of these expeditions he found that he had been robbed of his property; another man was in possession and he had so many soldiers and weapons that the property could not be wrested from him by its rightful owner. There was no place to which the latter could go and he became a serf—as it would have been said later on—of the one who had dispossessed him. And so a strange relationship developed between these two men. The former owner of the estate was obliged to reverse his position. The property that had once been his now belonged to someone else and he himself was in the position previously occupied by the new owner. He (the former owner) and like-minded companions would hold all kinds of meetings—as we should call such gatherings nowadays—in the neighbouring forests by night, voicing vehement resentment against the one who had taken possession of the property and against conditions where such things were tolerated. The intense resentment and the things that were said at that time as an expression of it are an interesting study.

I was able to follow the paths taken by these two men who passed through the gate of death in the ninth century and were born again in the nineteenth. The one who had been an owner of property of which he was afterwards dispossessed, appeared as Karl Marx, the founder of socialism in the nineteenth century. However greatly the outer circumstances differ, speculation leads nowhere. But by following certain underlying currents we find in the dispossessed landowner of the ninth century the soul of Karl Marx in the nineteenth. The one who had persecuted and abased him so cruelly in that earlier century became his friend Friedrich Engels. There is no question of sensationalism here but of understanding life and history from the concatenation of circumstances in earthly existence.

Such matters must be taken with deep earnestness, unmixed with any trace of sensationalism. In this example we have an illustration of European spiritual life, but it was into this spiritual life that Arabist trends were inculcated. In the modern age too, a great deal of Arabism will be found—but in a quite different form.

Now a predecessor of Haroun al Raschid, one of the earliest successors of the Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century A.D. was Muawiyah. He was a remarkable personality who longed to make conquests in the West but achieved little; his inner longing for the West could not find fulfilment, but he was still aware of the urge towards the West when he passed through the gate of death, and this impulse continued through his life between death and a new birth. Then this individuality of one of the Prophet's earliest successors appeared again, exercising a dominant influence upon the conditions prevailing in the twentieth century. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I had spoken of many things that are confirmed by what can be known about the repeated lives of a certain personality. People understood little of what I said on those occasions, for the power of conviction with which these utterances were made came ultimately from the observation of karmic relationships through many lives on Earth. Muawiyah appeared again in our age as Woodrow Wilson, who carried Arabist abstraction in its most radical form into external civilisation. In Woodrow Wilson there appeared an individuality who brought Arabism to very strong expression in our time, particularly in the famous Fourteen Points. The calamities for which Woodrow Wilson was responsible can best be studied by comparing the actual phrasing of those Fourteen Joints with certain passages in the Koran. You will then find that a great deal becomes intelligible and you will discover remarkable things once you have knowledge of the true circumstances.

The fact is, my dear friends, that the study of history to-day can be satisfactory from the human point of view only when the concrete phenomena of repeated lives on Earth are taken seriously, together with the perception of karma and the inner connections in the individual earthly lives of men. Since the Anthroposophical Society has for two decades been prepared for what ought now to be brought about under the influence of the Christmas Foundation Meeting, the “Practical Exercises for the Understanding of Karma” that were announced in 1902 when the German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded, may surely be put into practice today with greater and greater thoroughness. These exercises, devoid of all sensationalism, should form part of our anthroposophical life, becoming the foundation for greater and stronger impulses that must be at work within the Anthroposophical Society. What has now been said ought also to be regarded as an expression of the fact that esotericism must stream through the Anthroposophical Movement which is now embodied in the Anthroposophical Society. But let us also realise with what deep earnestness these things must be studied. If this earnestness is present we shall be carrying farther the threads that were beginning to be woven when, at the end of his treatise on The Education of the Human Race, Lessing drew attention to the fact of repeated lives on Earth. For out of a deeper, more intimate study of man and of his destiny, humanity must come to realise that through Spiritual Science we gaze into the true being of man, the being who, having knowledge of his own nature can utter the words: “Is not then all Eternity mine?” But the expression of this Eternity in the concrete facts of karma and of destiny in the historical life of mankind must be recognised and known.

• 1. See Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies - Volume I, p.194 (lecture XII).

You will have sensed, my dear friends, in what I was able to tell you at the close of yesterday's lecture, concerning the old conception of Michael's conflict with the Dragon, an indication that for our time a revitalization is called for of the elements of a Weltanschauung once contained for mankind in this gigantic picture—and not even so long ago. I repeatedly drew attention to the fact that in many 18^th Century souls this conception was still fully alive. But before I can tell you—as I shall in the next lectures—what a genuine, up-to-date spiritual viewpoint can and must do to revivify it, I must present to you—episodically, as it were—a more general anthroposophical train of thought. This will disclose the way in which the conception under discussion can be revitalized and once more become a force in mankind's thinking, feeling, and acting.

If we observe our present relation to nature and to the whole world, and if we compare this with sufficient open-mindedness with that of former times, we find that at bottom man has become a veritable hermit in his attitude toward the cosmic powers, a hermit in so far as he is introduced through his birth into physical existence and has lost the memory of his prenatal life—a memory that at one time was common to all mankind. During that period of our life in which nowadays we merely grow into the use of our forces of mind and memory, and to which we can remember back in this earth life, there occurred in former epochs of human evolution the lighting up of real memory, of an actual retrospect of prenatal experiences man had passed through as a psycho-spiritual being before his earth life.—That is one factor that makes present-day man a world-hermit: he is not conscious of the nature of the connection between his earthly existence and his spiritual existence.

The other factor is this: when now he gazes into the vast cosmos he observes the outer forms of the stars and constellations, but he no longer has any inner spiritual relation to what is spiritual in the cosmos. We can go further: the man of today observes the kingdoms of nature that surround him on earth—the manifold beauty of plants, the gigantic proportions of mountains, the fleeting clouds, and so on. Yet here again he is limited to sense impressions; and often he is even afraid, when he feels a deeper, more intimate contact with the great spaces of nature, lest he might lose his ingenuous attitude toward them. This phase of human evolution was indispensable for the development of what we experience in the consciousness of freedom, the feeling of freedom, in order to arrive at full self-consciousness, at the inner strength that permits the ego to rise to its full height; but necessary as was this hermit life of man in relation to the cosmos, it must be but a transition to another epoch in which the human being may find the way back to spirit, which after all underlies all things and beings. And precisely this finding the way back to spirit must be achieved by means of the strength that can come to him who is able to grasp the Michael idea in its right sense and in its true form, the form it must assume in our time.

Our mentality, the life of our Gemüt, and our life of action all need to be permeated with the Michael impulse. But when we hear it stated that a Michael Festival must be resuscitated among men and that the time is ripe for assigning it its place among the other annual festivals, it is naturally not enough that a few people should say, Well let us start—let us have a Michael Festival! My dear friends, if anthroposophy is to achieve its aim, the superficiality so prevalent today must obviously play no part in any anthroposophical undertakings; but rather, whatever may grow out of anthroposophy must do so with the most profound seriousness. And in order to familiarize ourselves with what this seriousness should be we must consider in what manner the festivals—once vital, today so anaemic—took their place in human evolution. Did the Christmas or Easter Festival come into being because a few people had the idea of instituting a festival at a certain time of the year and said, Let us make the necessary arrangements? Naturally that is not the case. For something like the Christmas Festival to find its way into the life of mankind, Christ Jesus had to be born; this event had to enter the world-historical evolution of the earth; a transcendent event had to occur. And the Easter Festival? It could never have had any meaning in the world had it not commemorated what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha, had not this event intervened incisively for the history of the earth in the evolution of humanity. If nowadays these festivals have faded, if the whole seriousness of the Christmas and Easter Festivals is no longer felt, this fact in itself should lead to a revived intensification of them through a more profound comprehension of the birth of Christ Jesus and the Mystery of Golgotha. Under no conditions, however, must it be imagined that one should add to these festivals simply by establishing a Michael Festival with equal superficiality at the beginning of autumn. Something must be present that can be incisive in human evolution in the same way—though possibly to a lesser degree—as were all events that led to the institution of festivals.

The possibility of celebrating a Michael Festival in all seriousness must inevitably be brought about, and it is the anthroposophical movement out of which an understanding for such a Michael Festival must be able to arise. But just as the Christmas and Easter Festivals were led up to by outer events, in evolutionary objectivity, so a radical transformation must take place in the inner being of mankind before such a step is taken. Anthroposophy must become a profound experience, an experience men can think of in a way similar to that which they feel when imbued with the whole power dwelling in the birth of Christ Jesus, in the Mystery of Golgotha. As was said, this may be so to a lesser degree in the case of the Michael Festival; but something of this soul-transmuting force must proceed from the anthroposophical movement. That is indeed what we long for: that anthroposophy might be imbued with this power to transmute souls: and this can only come about if the substance of its teaching—if I may call it that—becomes actual experience.

Let us now turn our attention to such experiences as can enter our inner being through anthroposophy. In our soul life we distinguish, as you know, thinking, feeling, and willing from one another; and especially in connection with feeling we speak of the human Gemüt. Our thinking appears to us cold, dry, colorless—as though spirituality emaciating us—when our thoughts take an abstract form, when we are unable to imbue them with the warmth and enthusiasm of feeling. We can call a man gemütvoll only when something of the inner warmth of his Gemüt streams forth to us when he utters his thoughts. And we can really make close contact with a man only if his behavior toward ourself and the world is not merely correct and in line with duty, but if his actions manifest enthusiasm, a warm heart, a love of nature, love for every being. This human Gemüt, then, dwells in the very center of the soul life, as it were.

But while thinking and willing have assumed a certain character by reason of man's having become cosmically a hermit, this is even more true of the human Gemüt. Thinking may contemplate the perfection of its cosmic calculations and perhaps gloat over their subtlety, but it simply fails to sense how basically remote it is from the warm heartbeat of life. And in correct actions, carried out by a mere sense of duty, many a man may find satisfaction, without really feeling that a life of such matter-of-fact behavior is but half a life. Neither the one nor the other touches the human soul very closely. But what lies between thinking and willing, all that is comprised in the human Gemüt, is indeed intimately linked with the whole being of man. And while it may sometimes seem—in view of the peculiar tendencies of many people at the present time—as though the factors that should warm and elevate the Gemüt and fill it with enthusiasm might become chilled as well, this is a delusion. For it can be said that a man's inner, conscious experiences might at a pinch occur lacking the element of Gemüt; but through such a lack his being will inevitably suffer in some way. And if such a man's soul can endure this—if perhaps through soullessness he forces himself to Gemütlessness—the process will gnaw at his whole being in some other form: it will eat right down into his physical organization, affecting his health. Much of what appears in our time as symptoms of decline is basically connected with the lack of Gemüt into which many people have settled.—The full import of these rather general statements will become clear when we delve deeper into them.

One who simply grows up into our modern civilization observes the things of the outer world: he perceives them, forms abstract thoughts about them, possibly derives real pleasure from a lovely blossom or a majestic plant; and if he is at all imaginative he may even achieve an inner picture of these. Yet he remains completely unaware of his deeper relation to that world of which the plant, for example, is a part. To talk incessantly about spirit, spirit, and again spirit is utterly inadequate for spiritual perception. Instead, what is needed is that we should become conscious of our true spiritual relations to the things around us. When we observe a plant in the usual way we do not in the least sense the presence of an elemental being dwelling in it, of something spiritual; we do not dream that every such plant harbors something which is not satisfied by having us look at it and form such abstract mental pictures as we commonly do of plants today. For in every plant there is concealed—under a spell, as it were—an elemental spiritual being; and really only he observes a plant in the right way who realizes that this loveliness is a sheath of a spiritual being enchanted in it—a relatively insignificant being, to be sure, in the great scale of cosmic interrelationship, but still a being intimately related to man.

The human being is really so closely linked to the world that he cannot take a step in the realm of nature without coming under the intense influence exercised upon him by his intimate relations to the world. And when we see the lily in the field, growing from the seed to the blossom, we must vividly imagine—though not personified—that this lily is awaiting something. (Again I must use men's words as I did before to express another picture: they cannot quite cover the meaning, but they do express the realities inherent in things.) While unfolding its leaves, but especially its blossom, this lily is really expecting something. It says to itself: Men will pass and look at me; and when a sufficient number of human eyes will have directed their gaze upon me—so speaks the spirit of the lily—I shall be disenchanted of my spell, and I shall be able to start on my way into spiritual worlds.—You will perhaps object that many lilies grow unseen by human eye: yes, but then the conditions are different, and such lilies find their release in a different way. For the decree that the spell of that particular lily shall be broken by human eyes comes about by the first human glance cast upon the lily. It is a relationship entered into between man and the lily when he first lets his gaze rest upon it.—All about us are these elemental spirits begging us, in effect, Do not look at the flowers so abstractly, nor form such abstract mental pictures of them: let rather your heart and your Gemüt enter into what lives, as soul and spirit, in the flowers, for it is imploring you to break the spell.—Human existence should really be a perpetual releasing of the elemental spirits lying enchanted in minerals, plants, and animals.

An idea such as this can readily be sensed in its abundant beauty; but precisely by grasping it in its right spiritual significance we can also feel it in the light of the full responsibility we thereby incur toward the whole cosmos. In the present epoch of civilization—that of the development of freedom—man's attitude toward the flowers is a mere sipping at what he should really be drinking. He sips by forming concepts and ideas, whereas he should drink by uniting, through his Gemüt, with the elemental spirits of the things and beings that surround him.

I said, we need not consider the lilies that are never seen by man but must think of those that are so seen, because they need the relationship of the Gemüt which the human being can enter into with them. Now, it is from the lily that an effect proceeds; and manifold, mighty and magnificent are indeed the spiritual effects, that continually approach man out of the things of nature when he walks in it. One who can see into these things constantly perceives the variety and grandeur of all that streams out to him from all sides through the elemental spirituality of nature. And it flows into him: it is something that constantly streams toward him as super-sensible spirituality poured out over outer nature, which is a mirror of the divine-spiritual.

In the next days, we shall have occasion to speak of these matters more in detail, in the true anthroposophical sense. At the moment we will go on to say that in the human being there dwells the force I have described as the force of the Dragon whom Michael encounters, against whom he does battle. I indicated that this Dragon has an animal-like form, yet is really a super-sensible being; that on account of his insubordination as a super-sensible being he was expelled into the sense world, where he now has his being; and I indicated further that he exists only in man, because outer nature cannot harbor him. Outer nature, image of divine spirituality, has in its innocence nothing whatever to do with the Dragon: he is established in the being of men, as I have set forth. But by reason of being such a creature—a super-sensible being in the sense of world—he instantly attracts the super-sensible elemental forces that stream toward man out of nature and unites with them, with the result that man, instead of releasing the plant elementals from their spell through his soul and Gemüt, unites them with the Dragon, allows them to perish with the Dragon in his lower nature. For everything in the world moves in an evolutionary stream, taking many different directions to this end; and the elemental beings dwelling in minerals, plants, and animals must rise to a higher existence than is offered by their present abodes. This they can only accomplish by passing through man. The establishment of an external civilization is surely not man's sole purpose on earth: he has a cosmic aim within the entire world evolution; and this cosmic aim is linked with such matters as I have just described—with the further development of those elemental beings that in earthly existence are at a low stage, but destined for a higher one. When man enters into a certain relationship with them, and when everything runs as it should, they can attain to this higher stage of evolution.

In the old days of instinctive human evolution, when in the Gemüt the forces of soul and spirit shone forth and when these were as much a matter of course to him as were the forces of nature, world evolution actually progressed in such a way that the stream of existence passed through man in a normal, orderly way, as it were. But precisely during the epoch that must now terminate, that must advance to a higher form of spirituality, untold elemental substance within man has been delivered over to the Dragon; for it is his very nature to hunger and thirst for these elemental beings: to creep about, frightening plants and minerals in order to gorge himself with the elemental beings of nature. For with them he wants to unite, and with them to permeate his own being. In extrahuman nature he cannot do this, but only in the inner nature of man, for only there is existence possible for him. And if this were to continue, the earth would be doomed, for the Dragon would inevitably be victorious in earthly existence.

He would be victorious for a very definite reason: by virtue of his saturating himself, as it were, with elemental beings in human nature, something happens physically, psychically, and spiritually. Spiritually: no human being would ever arrive at the silly belief in a purely material outer world, as assumed by nature research today; he would never come to accept dead atoms and the like; he would never assume the existence of such reactionary laws as that of the conservation of force and energy, or of the permanence of matter, were not the Dragon in him to absorb the elemental beings from without. When these come to be in man, in the body of the Dragon, human observation is distracted from what things contain of spirit; man no longer sees spirit in things, which in the meantime has entered into him; he sees nothing but dead matter.—Psychically: everything a man has ever expressed in the way of what I must call cowardice of soul results from the Dragon's having absorbed the elemental powers within him. Oh, how widespread is this cowardice of the soul! We know quite well that we should do this or that, that such and such is the right thing to do in a given situation; but we cannot bring our self to do it—a certain dead weight acts in our soul: the elemental beings in the Dragon's body are at work in us.—And physically: man would never be tormented by what are called disease germs had his body not been prepared—through the spiritual effects I have just described—as a soil for the germs. These things penetrate even into the physical organization; and we can say that if we perceive man rightly in his spirit, soul, and body as he is constituted today, we find him cut off from the spirit realm in three directions—for a good purpose, to be sure; the attainment of freedom. He no longer has in him the spiritual powers he might have; and thus you see that through this threefold debilitation of his life, through what the glutted Dragon has become in him, he is prevented from experiencing the potency of the spirit within himself.

There are two ways of experiencing anthroposophy—many variations lie between, but I am mentioning only the two extremes—and one of them is this: a man sits down in a chair, takes a book, reads it, and finds it quite interesting as well as comforting to learn that there is such a thing as spirit, as immortality. It just suits him to know that with regard to the soul as well, man is not dead when his body dies. He derives greater satisfaction from such a cosmogony than from a materialistic one. He takes it up as one might take up abstract reflections on geography, except that anthroposophy provides more of comfort. Yes, that is one way. The man gets up from his chair really no different from what he was when he sat down, except for having derived a certain satisfaction from what he read—or heard, if it was a lecture instead of a book.

But there is another way of receiving what anthroposophy has to give. It is to absorb something like the idea of Michael's Conflict with the Dragon in such a way as really to become inwardly transformed, to feel it as an important, incisive experience, and to rise from your chair fundamentally quite a different being after reading something of that sort.—And as has been said, there are all sorts of shades between these two.

The first type of reader cannot be counted upon at all when it is a question of reviving the Michaelmas Festival: only those can be depended upon whose determination it is, at least within their capacities, to take anthroposophy into themselves as something living. And that is exactly what should be experienced within the anthroposophical movement: the need to experience as life-forces those ideas that first present themselves to us merely as such, as ideas.—Now I will say something wholly paradoxical: sometimes it is much easier to understand the opponents of anthroposophy than its adherents. The opponents say, Oh, these anthroposophical ideas are fantastic—they conform with no reality; and they reject them, remain untouched by them. One can readily understand such an attitude and find a variety of reasons for it. As a rule it is caused by fear of these ideas—a real attitude, though unconscious. But frequently it happens that a man accepts the ideas; yet, though they diverge so radically from everything else in the world that can be accepted, they produce less feeling in him than would an electrifying apparatus applied to his knuckle. In the latter case he at least feels in his body a twitching produced by the spark; and the absence of a similar spark in the soul is what so often causes great anguish—this links up with the demand of our time that men be laid hold of and impressed by the spirit, not merely by what is physical. Men avoid being knocked and jerked about, but they do not avoid coming in contact with ideas dealing with other worlds, ideas presenting themselves as something very special in the present-day sense-world, and then maintaining the same indifference toward them as toward ideas of the senses.

This ability to rise to the point at which thoughts about spirit can grip us as powerfully as can anything in the physical world, this is Michael power. It is confidence in the ideas of spirit—given the capacity for receiving them at all—leading to the conviction: I have received a spiritual impulse, I give myself up to it, I become the instrument for its execution. First failure—never mind! Second failure—never mind! A hundred failures are of no consequence, for no failure is ever a decisive factor in judging the truth of a spiritual impulse whose effect has been inwardly understood and grasped. We have full confidence in a spiritual impulse, grasped at a certain point of time, only when we can say to our self, My hundred failures can at most prove that the conditions for realizing the impulse are not given me in this incarnation; but that this impulse is right I can know from its own nature. And if I must wait a hundred incarnations for the power to realize this impulse, nothing but its own nature can convince me of the efficacy or impotence of any spiritual impulse.

If you will imagine this thought developed in the human Gemüt as great confidence in spirit, if you will consider that man can cling firm as a rock to something he has seen to be spiritually victorious, something he refuses to relinquish in spite of all outer opposition, then you will have a conception of what the Michael power, the Michael being, really demands of us; for only then will you comprehend the nature of the great confidence in spirit. We may leave in abeyance some spiritual impulse or other, even for a whole incarnation; but once we have grasped it we must never waver in cherishing it within us, for only thus can we save it up for subsequent incarnations. And when confidence in spirit will in this way have established a frame of mind to which this spiritual substance appears as real as the ground under our feet—the ground without which we could not stand—then we shall have in our Gemüt a feeling of what Michael really expects of us.

Undoubtedly you will admit that in the course of the last centuries—even the last thousand years of human history—the vastly greater part of this active confidence in spirit has been disappearing, that life does not exact from the majority of men the development of such confidence. Yet that is what had to come, because what I am really expressing when I say this is that in the last instance man has burned the bridges that formerly had communication with the Michael power.

But in the meantime much has happened in the world. Man has in a sense apostatized from the Michael power. The stark, intense materialism of the 19^th Century is in effect an apostasy from the Michael power. But objectively, in the domain of outer spirit, the Michael power has been victorious, precisely in the last third of the 19^th Century. What the Dragon had hoped to achieve through human evolution will not come to pass, yet on the other hand we envision today the other great fact that out of free resolution man will have to take part in Michael's victory over the Dragon. And this involves finding the way to abandon the prevalent passivity in relation to spirit and to enter into an active one. The Michael forces cannot be acquired through any form of passivity, not even through passive prayer, but only through man's making himself the instrument of divine-spiritual forces by means of his loving will. For the Michael forces do not want to be implored: they want men to unite with them. This men can do if they will receive the lessons of the spiritual world with inner energy.

This will indicate what must appear in man if the Michael conception is to come alive again. He must really be able to experience spirit, and he must be able to gather this experience wholly out of thought—not in the first instance by means of some sort of clairvoyance. We would be in a bad way if everybody had to become clairvoyant in order to have this confidence in spirit. Everyone who is at all receptive to the teachings of spiritual science can have this confidence. If a man will saturate himself more and more with confidence in spirit, something will come over him like an inspiration; and this is something that really all the good spirits of the world are awaiting. He will experience the spring, sensing the beauty and loveliness of the plant world and finding deep delight in the sprouting, burgeoning life; but at the same time he will develop a feeling for the spell-bound elemental spirituality in all this budding life. He will acquire a feeling, a Gemüt content, telling him that every blossom bears testimony to the existence of an enchanted elemental being within it; and he will learn to feel the longing in this elemental being to be released by him, instead of being delivered up to the Dragon to whom it is related through its own invisibility. And when the flowers wither in the autumn he will know that he has succeeded in contributing a bit to the progress of spirit in the world, in enabling an elemental being to slip out of its plant when the blossoms wither and fall and become seed. But only as he permeated himself with the powerful strength of Michael will he be able to lead this elemental being up into the spirit for which it yearns.

And men will experience the cycle of the seasons. They will experience spring as the birth of elemental beings longing for the spirit, and autumn as their liberation from the dying plants and withering blossoms. They will no longer stand alone as cosmic hermits who have merely grown half a year older by fall than they were in the spring: together with evolving nature they will have pressed onward by one of life's milestones. They will not merely have inhaled the physical oxygen so and so many times, but will have participated in the evolution of nature, in the enchanting and disenchanting of spiritual beings in nature. Men will no longer only feel themselves growing older; they will sense the transformation of nature as part of their own destiny: they will coalesce with all that grows there, will expand in their being because their free individuality can pour itself out in sacrifice into the cosmos.—That is what man will be able to contribute to a favorable outcome of Michael's Conflict with the Dragon.

Thus, we see that what can lead to a Michaelmas Festival must be an event of the human Gemüt, a Gemüt event that can once more experience the cycle of the seasons as a living reality, in the manner described. But do not imagine that you are experiencing it by merely setting up this abstract concept in your mind! You will achieve this only after you have actually absorbed anthroposophy in such a way that it makes you regard every plant, every stone, in a new way; and also only after anthroposophy has taught you to contemplate all human life in a new way.

I have tried to give you a sort of picture of what must be prepared specifically in the human Gemüt, if the latter is to learn to feel surrounding nature as its very own being. The most that men have retained of this sort of thing is the ability to experience in their blood circulation a certain psychic element in addition to the material factor: unless they are rank materialists they have preserved that much. But to experience the pulse-beat of outer existence as we do our own innermost being, to take part once more in the cycle of the seasons as we experience the life inside our own skin—that is the preparation needed for the Michael Festival.

Inasmuch as these lectures are intended to present for your contemplation the relation between anthroposophy and the human Gemüt, it is my wish that they may really be grasped not merely by the head but especially by the Gemüt; for at bottom, all anthroposophy is largely futile in the world and among men if it is not absorbed by the Gemüt, if it carries no warmth into this human Gemüt. Recent centuries have heaped cleverness in abundance upon men: in the matter of thinking, men have come to the point where they no longer even know how clever they are. That is a fact. True, many people believe present-day men to be stupid; but granting that there are stupid people in the world, this is really only because their cleverness has reached such proportions that they debility of their Gemüt prevents them from knowing what to do with all their cleverness. Whenever someone is called stupid, I always maintain that it is merely a case of his not knowing what use to make of his cleverness. I have listened to many discussions in which some speaker or other was ridiculed because he was considered stupid, but occasionally just one of these would seem to me the cleverest.

Cleverness, then, has been furnished us in abundance by the last few centuries; but what we need today is warmth of Gemüt, and this anthroposophy can provide. When someone studying anthroposophy says it leaves him cold, he reminds me of one who keeps piling wood in the stove and then complains that the room doesn't get warm. Yet all he needs to do is to kindle the wood, then it will get warm. Anthroposophy can be presented, and it is the good wood of the soul; but it can be enkindled only by each within himself. What everyone must find in his Gemüt is the match wherewith to light anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is in truth warm and ardent: it is the very soul of the Gemüt; and he who finds this anthroposophy cold and intellectual and matter-of-fact just lacks the means of kindling it so it may pervade him with its fire. And just as only a little match is needed to light ordinary wood, so anthroposophy, too, needs only a little match. But this will enkindle the force of Michael in man.

We begin this celebration of the end of our year by having Dr. Steiner tell us the beautiful Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson, of that Olaf Åsteson who, as Christmas approached, fell into a kind of sleep that lasted thirteen days: the holy thirteen days that we have come to know through various of our reflections. During this sleep he had important experiences, which he was able to relate when he woke up.

We have made various observations that could draw our attention to the fact that, through the spiritual scientific world view, we can regain in a different way old treasures of knowledge for human knowledge that were known in days gone by by people as that which belongs to the spiritual worlds. Again and again we will come across this pre-worldly knowledge of the spiritual worlds through one or other of them, and again and again we are reminded that this knowledge of the past was based on the fact that man, by virtue of his earlier organization, was able to stand in such a connection with the whole universe and its happenings that, as we express ourselves in our language, the human microcosm was immersed in the laws of the macrocosm and that in this immersion in the macrocosm he could have experiences about things that intimately concern his soul life, but which must remain hidden from him as long as he walks on the physical plane as a microcosm and is endowed only with the knowledge given to the senses and to the mind bound to the senses.

We know, of course, how only a materialistic world view of faith can be that man alone is endowed with the ability to know, feel and will within the order of the world; whereas from the point of view of a spiritual world view, it must be acknowledged that just as there are beings below the human level, there are also beings above the human level of thinking, feeling and willing. Man can familiarize himself with these entities when he immerses himself as a microcosm in the macrocosm. But then we must speak of this macrocosm as if it were not only a spatial macrocosm, but as if time in its course has significance in the life of the macrocosm. Just as man must withdraw from all the impressions that can be exerted on his senses from his surroundings, just as he must create darkness around him by closing his sensory perception in order to light the light of the spirit within when he wants to descend into the depths of his soul, so must the spirit that we can call the earth spirit be closed off from the impressions of the rest of the cosmos. The least degree of influence from the outer cosmos must be exerted on the earth spirit so that the earth spirit itself can concentrate inwardly, contract its abilities inwardly. For then the secrets are discovered that the human being has to go through with this earth spirit because the earth is separated from the cosmos as earth.

One such time when the greatest degree of influence from the external macrocosm is exerted upon the earth is the summer solstice, the time around the summer solstice. Many messages from ancient times remind us of this, which are linked to representations and celebrations of festivals, how such festivals took place in the middle of the summer season, how the soul in the middle of summer, by renouncing the ego and merging with the life of the macrocosm, is drunk on the impressions of the macrocosm.

Conversely, the legendary or other representations of what could be experienced in prehistoric times remind us that when the slightest measure of impressions from the macrocosm comes to earth, the earth spirit, concentrated within itself, experiences the secrets of earth soul life in the infinite universe, and that man, when he enters into this experience at the time when least light and warmth is sent from the macrocosm to the earth, then also experiences the most sacred secrets. That is why these days around Christmas have always been held in such high regard, because man, when he still had the ability in his organism to witness earthly life at the time when it is most concentrated, could be with the spirit of the earth.

Olaf Åsteson, Olaf the Earth-son, experiences many secrets of the universe in these thirteen shortest days, while he is absorbed in the macrocosm. And the Norse legend, which has been rediscovered in recent times from ancient records, tells us of the experiences that Olaf Åsteson had between Christmas and New Year's Day until January 6. And we have good reason, my dear friends, to remember this ancient way of integrating the microcosm into the macrocosm more often; our contemplation will then be able to tie in with such things. But for now, let us hear the legend of Olaf the Earth-son, who in the time in which we now live experienced the secrets of world existence by living with the Earth Spirit. So let us hear about these experiences.

The recitation followed.

My dear friends, we have heard how Olaf Åsteson fell asleep in that sleep that was to become a revelation for him of the secrets of those worlds that are withdrawn from the life of the senses, from ordinary life on the physical plane. In the legend, we have received the knowledge of those ancient realizations, of those ancient insights into the spiritual worlds, which are to be regained through that which we call the spiritual-scientific worldview.

The saying that runs through all the rallies dealing with the entry of the human soul into the spiritual world has often been quoted, and it states that man can only see the spiritual world when he comes to the gate of death with his experiences and then submerges into the elements. So that he does not have the elements of earthly existence around him as they are in the ordinary life of the physical plane, as the earth, the water, the air, the fire, but that he is lifted out above this outside, this sensual outside of the elements, and immersed in what these elements are when you get to know them in their true nature, their next true nature, where beings are present in them that are related to the experience of the human soul.

That Olaf Åsteson experienced something of this immersion in the elements can still be felt where it is first told how Olaf comes to the Gjallarbridge and how he walks over the bridge in the paths of the spiritual world that stretch far and wide. How vividly is the experience with the earth element described to us, how he immerses himself in the earth element. This is brought to such a vividness that it tells us that he feels earth in his mouth like dead people lying in graves. And then it is clearly indicated to us how he experiences the water element and everything that can be experienced in the water element when one experiences this water element at the same time with its moral content. Then again it is indicated how man comes together with the fire element, with the air element.

All this is described and brought together in a wonderfully vivid way in the experience of the human soul's union with the secrets of the spiritual world. The legend was found later; it was collected where it was still alive on the lips of the people. And there is much in this legend, as it is today, that is no longer as it originally was. Originally, there was undoubtedly only a vivid description of the experiences in the earth region, then of the experiences in the water region. And then the experiences in the air and fire regions were probably much more differentiated than is the case in the faint echoes that were found after centuries and that are presented to us today.

Likewise, the ending was undoubtedly much grander and less sentimental. The ending as it appears today no longer resembles the original's tremendously grandiose language, the superhumanly moving lay in such folk legends, while today's ending is only humanly moving; moving because it is connected with such deep secrets of the macrocosm and of human experience. |

In such times as these, in such seasons, if we understand them correctly, there is much reason to remember the fact that humanity - albeit with a different, more dull, more dim realization - was steeped in knowledge in the distant past that has been lost and must be regained. And here the question may arise again before our soul: Since we can already see today how such knowledge must come again for the good of humanity, must we not regard it as one of our most urgent tasks to do everything that such knowledge can bring about, that present-day human culture can permeate with such knowledge?

Various things will be necessary for this just hinted at change to occur in the right way in the whole human, I would now like to say, world-view feeling. Above all, one thing will be necessary; I say one, because it is one among many; but you can only take one at a time. What will be necessary is for human souls to acquire reverence and devotion on the basis of our spiritual-scientific worldview, in the face of what has been known in ancient times in the old way, the great secrets of existence. One must come to the realization of how this reverence and devotion has been neglected in materialistic times, and develop it in the soul.

One must get a sense of how dry and sober this materialistic time is, and how arrogantly humanity in the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period stood in the face of the revelations of ancient religions and ancient traditions of knowledge, which truly, if approached with the necessary reverence, give a sense that deep, deep wisdom lies within them. How irreverent we are, in fact, when we approach the Bible today! I will not even speak of that kind of modern abomination research that dishevels and frays the entire Bible. I will speak only of the sober, dry way in which we approach the Bible today, as it were equipped only with sensory knowledge and the ordinary powers of the mind, and how we can no longer muster an appreciation for the tremendous grandeur of human contemplation that confronts us in some passages. I would like to point to a passage from the Book of Exodus, chapter 33, verse 18: And Moses said to God: “Show me the form of your revelation.”

Whereupon Jehovah said: “I will pass by and let all my goodness pass before you, and I will call the name of Jehovah before you and will be gracious to whom I may be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I may show mercy.

But then Jehovah says: “You cannot see my face, for no one who can still live sees me.”

And Yahweh said: “Here is a place by me; stand on the rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a crevice of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand, and you will see my back side, but my face cannot be seen.

When we take into account many things that have entered our souls and hearts over the past years of our spiritual striving and approach this passage, we may have the feeling: Yes, what infinite wisdom speaks from this passage, and how deaf are the human ears of the materialistic age that they can hear nothing of the infinitely deep wisdom that speaks from this passage. At the same time, I would like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to a little book that has been published with the title “Words of Moses” by Bruns' Verlag in Minden in Westphalia, because some of the material in this little book is better translated than in other editions of the Five Books of Moses. Dr. Hugo Bergmann, who is the editor of the “Words of Moses”, has put a lot of effort into the interpretation.

We have often emphasized that, if man wishes to enter the spiritual worlds, he must acquire a completely different way of relating to the world than he does to the sense world. The sense world is around man. He looks at the sensory world, he sees it in its colors and forms, hears its sounds. The sensory world is there; we face it; it affects us; we perceive it, we reflect on it. This is our relationship to the sensory world. We are passive; it works its way into our soul, as it were. We think about the sensory world, we imagine the sensory world.

Our behavior is quite different when we live our way up into the spiritual world. This is one of the difficulties in gaining correct ideas about what a person experiences when he enters the spiritual world. I have tried to characterize some of these difficulties in the booklet: “The Threshold of the Spiritual World.” We present the sensory world, we think about the sensory world. When we go through everything that one has to go through who wants to walk the path of initiation, then something occurs that can be characterized as follows: the way the things around us relate to us, that is how we relate to the beings of the higher hierarchies: they present us, they think us. We think the objects outside of us, the minerals, plants and animals: they become our thoughts. We, in turn, are the perceptions, thoughts and perceptions of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. We become the thoughts of the angels, archangels, archai and so on. We are absorbed by them, as we ourselves absorb plants, animals and humans. And we must feel secure in knowing that the beings of the higher hierarchies think us, imagine us. These beings of the higher hierarchies take hold of us with their souls. Yes, we can almost imagine: when that Olaf Åsteson fell asleep in front of the church door, he became an idea of the spirits of the higher hierarchies, and while he slept, the beings of the higher hierarchies experienced what the beings of the earth spirit experience, which for us is, after all, a plurality. And as Olaf Åsteson sinks back down into the physical world, he remembers what the spirits of the higher hierarchies experienced in him.

Let us imagine: we are embarking on the path of initiation! How can we relate to the spiritual worlds into which we want to enter as a sum of spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies? How can we relate to them? We can address them and say: How do we enter into you, how do you reveal yourselves to us? And then, when we have gained an understanding of the different way in which the human soul relates to the higher worlds, we will, as it were, hear a response from the spiritual worlds: Yes, just as you perceive the world of the senses, that it appears before your eyes, comes before your senses, so you cannot perceive the spiritual world. We have to introduce you to it, and you have to feel yourself in us. You have to feel yourself as the thought you think in the world of the senses would experience itself if it could experience itself in you. You must give yourself up to the spiritual world, then everything that can reveal itself to you of the higher hierarchies will move into you. Then it will flow into your soul and think graciously in the sensory world. If the spiritual world wants to pardon you, then it will permeate you with its love! If it wants to have mercy on you and permeate you with its love.

You must not think that you can place yourself in the position of spiritual beings in the same way as in the world of sense. As Moses had to enter into the cave, so you must enter into the cave of the spiritual world. You must place yourself in it. As the thought lives in you, so you must live yourself into the spiritual beings. You yourself must live in it as a world thought in the macrocosm. You cannot experience what you experience of your own accord during your life on earth between birth and death; you can only do so after death, when you have died. No one can experience the spiritual world in this way before he has died, but the spiritual world can pass before you, granting you mercy, flooding you with its love. And then, when you develop your earth consciousness afterwards or while you are in this spiritual world, what the spiritual world is shines into your earth consciousness.

What the object is outside and how man faces the object, how the object intrudes into his consciousness and is then in it, so is man with his soul in the hollow of the spiritual world (drawings 1 and 2).

The spiritual world passes through him. Here man is before things. When man enters into the spiritual world, the entities of the higher hierarchies are behind him. He cannot see their faces, just as thoughts do not see our faces when they are within us. The face is in front; the thoughts are behind, they do not see the face. The whole secret of initiation rests in the words that Yahweh speaks to Moses.

And Moses says to God: “Show me the form of your revelation.”

Whereupon Jehovah said: “I will cause all my goodness to pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of Jehovah before you, and I will show mercy upon whom I shall be merciful, and will shew compassion on whom I shall shew compassion.

But then Jehovah says: “You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live.”

One comes to the gate of death through initiation.

And Yahweh says: “Here is a place with me. Stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I will put you in a hollow of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then, when I remove my hand, you will see my backside, but my face cannot be seen.”

It is the opposite way to perceive the sensory world. One must summon up much of what one acquires through years of spiritual striving in order to stand in the right way in awe and devotion before such a revelation. But then, little by little, this feeling of reverence for these revelations comes into the human soul, and among the many things we need for the change in spiritual human culture to take place, this reverence, this devotion, is one.

The time when the least amount of impressions from the macrocosm come to Earth, the time from Christmas until after the New Year, approximately until January 6, is well suited not only to remember the objectivity of spiritual knowledge, but also the feelings that we must develop within us by absorbing spiritual science. We must truly live our way back into the spirit of the earth, with which we together form a whole, and with which the old clairvoyant knowledge lived, as it is presented to us in this legend by Olaf Åsteson. In the materialistic age, humanity has often forgotten reverence and devotion to spiritual life. Above all, it is necessary to ensure that this reverence and devotion comes again, because only in this way will we be able to develop the right mood that will bring us to the new spiritual science. For the time being, there is still the mood that approaches this spiritual science in the same way as one approaches other, ordinary science. In this respect, however, a fundamental change must take place.

Because humanity has lost its insight into the spiritual world, it has also lost the right relationship of the human being to the whole of humanity, to humanity. The materialistic world view produces chaotic feelings about the existence of the world. These chaotic feelings about the existence of the world and humanity were bound to arise in the age of materialism. Let us take a time – and this time is ours: it is the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period – when people no longer had any real idea that the human being has a threefold nature: the physical, the soul and the spiritual being. For truly, it is so. What must be one of the first elements of spiritual scientific knowledge for us — the threefold nature of the human being in body, soul and spirit — was completely unknown from the first four centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period until our own time. Man was simply man, and all talk about a human structure of the kind we have in body, soul and spirit was considered foolish, fantastic talk.

One might think that these things are only significant for knowledge. But they are not. Not only are they significant for knowledge, but they are also significant for the whole way in which man places himself in life. In the third century of modern development, or, as we say in our language, of the development of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, three powerful words broke into this time, in which, so to speak, this time understood or at least tried to understand the center of human will in earthly life. These three words are significant, but they acquired their special character through their breaking into humanity at the time when the threefold nature of human nature was not yet known. Humanity heard about freedom, equality and brotherhood.

It was a profound necessity that these words should resound in modern culture at a particular time. We will only truly understand these words when we understand the threefold structure of human nature, because only then will we know what meaning these words can have for human nature in the true sense of the word. As long as one fills these three words with those chaotic feelings, which arise from the thought that man is man and the threefold nature of man is a foolish delusion, one cannot find one's way within the scope of the guideline of these three words. For just as the three words confront us, they cannot be applied directly, one might say, to the same level of human experience. They cannot. Simple considerations, which perhaps because they are so simple do not immediately appear before the eye of the soul in the gravity of what they mean, can suggest to you how, on the same level of life, what these three words mean can come into serious life conflicts.

Let us first take the area in which fraternity comes to us most naturally in the world. Let us take human blood relationship, the family, where we do not need to establish fraternity first, where it is innate in man by nature, and let us consider how it speaks to our feelings when we can see that genuine, true fraternity reigns in a family, that everything is connected fraternally. But now – without having to dampen in the slightest the wonderful feeling we can have of this brotherhood – let us take a look inside to see what can arise within the brotherhood of the family precisely because of the brotherhood of the family. There may be a member in the family who, precisely because of the brotherhood justified within the family, does not feel comfortable, longs to be outside the brotherhood of the family, because he feels that he cannot develop his soul within the brotherhood of the family, because he feels that he has to get out of the family, in which he can live so fraternally, in order to develop his soul freely. We see: freedom, the free development of the soul, can come into conflict with the most well-intentioned brotherhood.

Of course, the superficial person can say that this is not the right kind of brotherhood, that it is incompatible with the freedom of a soul within brotherhood. But you can say anything you can imagine. You can say that everything goes together, there is no doubt about that. I recently came across a dissertation. Among the theses to be defended, the thesis was put forward that A triangle is a quadrilateral. Of course, one can also defend that – yes, one can even rigorously prove that a triangle is a quadrilateral! In this way, one can also fully prove that fraternity and freedom are compatible. But that is not the issue; rather, the issue is how, for the sake of freedom, some areas must and will abandon fraternity. We could cite many other examples.

If one wanted to list the discrepancies between fraternity and equality, one would have to talk for a very long time about it. Of course, in abstracto one can again imagine: everyone can be equal, and one can show that fraternity and equality go together. But we are not dealing with abstractions, but with the observation of reality, if we take life seriously and honestly. The moment we know that the human being consists of the physical, which lives out on the physical plane, the soul, which actually lives out in the soul world, and the spiritual, which lives out in the spiritual world, At this moment the correct perspective for the context of the three powerful words that we have mentioned also opens up. Brotherhood is the most important ideal for the physical world. Freedom for the soul world, and - insofar as the human being is in the soul world, one should speak of the freedom of the soul, that is, of a social condition that fully guarantees the freedom of the soul. And when we consider that each of us must strive from our individual point of view for spiritual knowledge, for the development of our spirit, in order to stand with the spirit in the realm of spirits, it will very soon become clear to us where we would end up with our conception of the spirit if each of us sought only in his own way and each of us came to a completely different spiritual content.

We can only find ourselves as human beings in life if we can seek the spirit — each for himself — and ultimately arrive at the same spiritual content. We can speak of the equality of spiritual life. Of brotherhood on the physical plane and in relation to everything that is connected with the laws of the physical plane and lives into the human soul from the physical plane. Freedom in relation to everything that lives into the human soul as laws of the soul world; equality in relation to everything that lives into the human soul from the laws of the spirit world.

You see, a world new year must come in which a sun will grow in terms of its warming and illuminating power: that sun, which must give its illuminating warmth to much that lives in the time of darkness, but lives misunderstood. That is precisely the peculiar thing about our time: that much is striven for, much is said, without being understood.

But this too can lead us to reverence and devotion to the spiritual world. For when we consider that many in the third century of the fifth post-Atlantic period strove for and spoke the words brotherhood, freedom and equality without them being fundamentally understood, then we already have the opportunity to understand and find an answer to the question: where did these words come from? The order of the spiritual world, which is divine, has implanted them in advance in the soul of man, which does not yet understand, so that it may cling to such guiding words and so attain a true understanding of the world. Even in such facts we can observe the wise guidance in the evolution of the world. We can observe this guidance everywhere in times that are more or less distant or near; we can observe how we often only realize afterwards that what we did before was actually more full of wisdom than we could have done with the wisdom of the time that we had mastered. I drew attention to this right at the beginning of my writing on “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity”.

But if you take something like the fact that in the development of the world, in the development of man, there are words of direction that can only be understood little by little, then you will probably become aware of a picture that can be used to characterize this elapsed period of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch. In fact, in relation to certain things, it can be compared to the time of Advent, when the hours of daylight grow shorter and shorter. And now, in our time, in which we can again know something of the revelations of the spiritual world, development is entering a phase in which we can gain the idea that the times of light are becoming longer and longer, and we can speak of the fact that this course of time can really appear analogous to the thirteen days and the re-entry into the days that are growing again.

But the matter goes even deeper. It is not right, not at all right, for us to have only negative things to say about the materialistic age of the last four centuries. This new era arose from the fact that great discoveries and inventions were made, as they are called “great” in the materialistic age, for example, that the earth was circumnavigated, countries were discovered that were previously unknown, and that colonization of the earth began. That was the beginning of material culture. And then, little by little, the time drew near when people were almost suffocated by material culture. The time came when everything that was available in the way of spiritual powers was applied to understanding and grasping material life. More and more, as we have seen, was forgotten that which was available in insights and visions into the spiritual world from ancient knowledge. |

But it is not right to have only bad words for the materialistic age. Rather, another thing is right; it is right to consider that this human soul thought materialistically in its waking part, was materialistically minded, that it founded science and culture materialistically, but that this human soul is a whole. One could say: the one part of the human soul founded materialistic culture. In the past this part was inactive, people knew nothing of external science, knew nothing of the outward material life; then the spiritual part was more awake. (It was drawn.) In the last four hundred years it was just that part that was awake and founded materialistic culture; but the other part slept. And truly, the forces that we are now developing in humanity in order to work our way up to spirituality again were laid down in the time of materialistic culture in the parts of the soul that slept below. Humanity was truly in relation to spiritual knowledge in those times: Olaf Åsteson. It really was. It is just that humanity has not yet awakened! Spiritual science must awaken it.

The time must come when young and old alike will hear words spoken from that part of the human soul that has been asleep during the dark ages. This human soul has been asleep for a very long time, but the world spirits will approach this human soul and call out to it: Awake now, O Olaf Åsteson! — We must prepare ourselves in the right way so that we are not called: Awake now, O Olaf Åsteson! — and do not have ears to hear. We are pursuing spiritual science so that we have ears when the call for spiritual awakening in human development will sound.

It is good for human beings to remember from time to time that they are microcosms and that many an experience can be had when they are absorbed in the macrocosm. And we have seen that the time and season are favorable for us now. Let us try to let this New Year's Night be the symbol for the New Year's Night necessary for the development of humanity on earth, in which the new epoch of time will approach, in which the light, the soul light, the seeing, the recognition of that which lives in the spiritual and from which the human soul can be imbued and flooded with the spiritual will grow and grow more and more. If we bring the microcosm of our experience on this New Year's night into connection with the macrocosm of human experience across the earth, then we will be able to experience what we are meant to experience in terms of feelings, because we can sense something of the dawn of the new great world day in the fifth post-Atlantic period, the dawn of which we are standing at, whose midnight we want to experience worthily.

In a series of lectures I have been speaking about occult schools and their ramifications and I think it right today to bring this whole course of lectures to a close before we pass on to a different subject next time. A week from now I shall speak about the meaning of the days connected in the Church Calendar with the Christmas Festival—the less important New Year's Festival and the extremely important Feast of the Epiphany. The lecture today, therefore, will be more in the nature of a conclusion.

The question might be asked: What is the deeper significance of secret societies and of their aims in world-evolution? To such a question my answer would be that they have a real connection with the way in which beings in the world evolve and make progress.

As you know, different kinds of exercises are necessary for self-development, and such exercises are actually available. You have heard of Hatha-Yoga, Rajah-Yoga, and other exercises of different kinds, by means of which societies and brotherhoods connected with occult science have initiated their members. Somebody may say: All this, surely, could be attained without these secret societies. But I can tell you—and in the course of the lecture you will realise it—that the world cannot do without such societies. To put it bluntly, it is quite unjustifiable to speak in public in the style of the manifesto of the Freemasons which I read to you a fortnight ago. That is only one example. Men cannot reach what is usually known as immortality unless they are to some extent familiar with the occult sciences. The fruits of occult science do, of course, find their way out into the world along many channels. A great deal of occult knowledge exists in the various religions and all those who participate deeply and sincerely in the life of a religious community have some share in this knowledge and are preparing themselves for the attainment of immortality in the real sense. But to reach the knowledge of immortality in full consciousness, as a concretely real experience, to have the feeling that one belongs in very truth to the spiritual world—that is a very different matter. All of you have lived many times; but not all of you are conscious that you have lived through these many lives. This consciousness, however, will gradually arise and without it man's life is lived out with incomplete consciousness. It has never been the aim of occult science to inculcate into men a dim feeling of survival but to impart a clear, fully conscious knowledge of on-flowing life in the spiritual world.

There is a certain law which governs the progressive development of consciousness in all future stages of life. It is this: Nothing that a human being does not himself accomplish for the attainment of this consciousness, contributes towards its development. There is a maxim—on the face of it rather perplexing—that whatever is achieved in the way of development of consciousness in the world does something to further the evolution of the consciousness of every single being, even if such a being has not actually worked at the development of his own consciousness.

And now try to think of an example of really objective human action.—An architect builds a house; he does not build this house for himself, but undertakes the task of building it for reasons which he believes to be entirely impersonal. You know well that the reasons are very seldom impersonal. There are many people who, to all appearances, are not working for themselves; and yet in reality are. A lawyer, for example, is to all intents and purposes working for his clients. Part of his work may well be selfless, but the real question is one of earning his living. Whatever men do in business merely for the sake of their own livelihood, to the extent that their business only serves that end, just so much is lost in the way of spiritual gain. On the other hand, everything that is performed without regard to self, that is connected with the interests of another, helps to intensify and to strengthen our consciousness in the future struggles for existence.—I hope that this is clear.

And now think of the Freemasons. When they were true to their original, fundamental principles, they gave this injunction to their members: The buildings you erect are to contribute nothing at all to your own means of subsistence. What has still survived of the good old Freemasonry takes the form nowadays of charitable institutions and foundations. And although the Lodges have lost their living roots in the ancient wisdom, and the occult knowledge once in their possession, these charitable institutions are evidences of a humanitarianism which, while it is empty of real substance, still persists and is cultivated as tradition. Selfless activity is, in very truth, something that has belonged to Freemasonry. Freemasonry did indeed urge its members to work in the service of humanity, to work in the world objectively and selflessly.

We are living now in the epoch of evolution that may be called the mineral epoch; and our task is to permeate this mineral world through and through with the spirit within us. Think of what this means.—You are building a house. You fetch the stones from a quarry and hew them into the shapes required by the building, and so on. What are you inculcating into this raw material obtained from the mineral kingdom? You are inculcating human spirit into the raw material. If you construct a machine, you have laid the spirit that is part of you, into that machine; the actual machine does, of course, perish and become dust; not a trace of it will survive. But what you have done, what you have achieved, passes into the very atoms and does not vanish without a trace. Every atom bears a trace of your spirit and will carry this trace with it. Whether an atom has at some time been in a machine, or has not been in a machine, is not a matter of indifference. The atom itself has undergone change as a result of having once been in a machine, and this change that you have wrought in the atom will never again be lost to it. Moreover, through your having changed the atom, through the fact that you have united the spirit in you with the mineral world, a permanent stamp has been made upon the general consciousness of mankind; just so much consciousness goes with you into the other world. Occult science well knows in what way the human being can perform selfless actions and how greatly his consciousness will be enhanced by them. Certain men, who have been deeply imbued with this knowledge, have been so selfless that they have taken steps to prevent even their names from going down to posterity! An example of this is the work entitled Theologica Deutsch. Nobody knows who wrote it. On the outside there are only the words: The man from Frankfurt. He, therefore, was one who took care that his very name should be unknown. He worked in such a way that he merely added something to the objective world without asking for honour or for the preservation of his name. And here let it be said that the Masters, as a rule, are not personages known in history; they sometimes are embodied in historical personalities—when it is necessary; but in a certain respect this is a sacrifice on their part. The level of their consciousness is incompatible with work for themselves, and preservation of a name does, after all, involve this. It is difficult thoroughly to understand this rule but it will now be clear to you why the aim of the Freemasons is to work in the world in such a way that their deeds are hidden in social organizations or charitable institutions. For selfless deeds are the real foundations of immortality. In the outer world we see the reflex of such deeds. They need not necessarily be of great account. If someone gives a coin to a poor man, this may be an unselfish deed; but only to the extent that it was absolutely selfless does it find its way to the sphere of immortality—and very few deeds are selfless to this degree. An act of charity may be extremely egoistical when, for instance, it gives rise to a comforting feeling. Charity very often springs from selfish motives. If a poor man living among us has no meat at Christmas and we feel bound to give him some in order that we may feel justified in eating our own Christmas dinner—that, after all, is egoism. In the Middle Ages it would have been impossible to say who had built many of the cathedrals or painted many of the pictures. It is only in our epoch of civilisation that people have begun to attach such value to the human name; in earlier epochs, more spiritual than our own, the individual name was of less importance. Spirituality in those days was directed to reality; whereas our epoch adheres to the delusion of thinking that what is a mere concern of the moment should be preserved.

I have said this in order to indicate the principle by which these secret societies were guided. The members of such societies were at pains to efface themselves altogether as personalities, and to allow what they did to produce its own effects. And this brings us to the heart of the matter. The fact that some particular thing is kept secret is of far less importance than that everyone should keep secret his own share in the work; thereby he secures for himself immortality. The rule is therefore clear and unambiguous: As much as you yourself lay into the world, that much consciousness the world will give back to you. The measure of what you yourself place into the world is the measure of the consciousness that the world will give back to you. This is connected with great and mighty laws of world-existence. Each one of you has a soul, each one of you has a spirit. This soul and [this] spirit are called upon to climb one day to the highest stages of perfection. But the soul and the spirit were already there before your physical body existed; they were present before your first physical incarnation. You existed in physical incarnation in the early Lemurian, Hyperborean and Polarian epochs. Before then, however, you were only beings of soul. But as beings of soul you were part of the world soul; as beings of pure spirit you were part of the universal world spirit. The world spirit and the world soul spread out around you then as nature spreads out around you today. Just as the mineral world, the plant world and the animal world are around you now, so were the worlds of soul and of spirit once around you. And what was then outside you, is now your soul; you have taken into yourselves, made inward, what to begin with was outside and around you. What is now your innermost being was once part of an external world. This has become your soul. The spirit, too, once spread out around you. And what is now around you will become your inner life. You will take into yourselves what is now the mineral kingdom and it will become part of your inner being; similarly the plant kingdom. What surrounds you in nature will become your inner being.

You will understand now how this is connected with the first example given. You build a church for others, not for yourself. You can in very truth take into yourselves a world of majesty, beauty and splendour if you experience this world as such. To do something for the higher self does not partake of egoism because it is not done only for the self; the higher self will be united with all the others, so that what is done for the higher self is at the same time done for all.—This is the truth that was known to the Freemasons. When the Freemason was working with his fellow-builders, he knew: In future times the mineral world will be spiritualized; to build means nothing else than to spiritualize the mineral world. He knew that the edifice would one day become the content of his soul.

God once gave us the nature that surrounds us in the kingdoms of the minerals, plants and animals. We take nature into ourselves. That nature exists is none of our doing; all we can do is to make nature part of our own being. But what we ourselves prepare and make ready in the world—that is what will constitute our future existence.

We actually see the mineral world, as such; what we do with the mineral world, that we shall ourselves become in future times. What we do with the plant world, with the animal world and with men, that too, we shall surely become. If you found a charitable institution or have contributed something to its foundation, what you have contributed will become an integral part of you. If a man does nothing with what he can in this way [to] draw into his soul from outside, then his soul remains empty. It must therefore be possible for mankind to spiritualise—as far as this can be achieved—the four kingdoms of nature, of which man is one. To bring spirit into the whole external world—that has been the task of the secret societies of every age.

It will not be difficult for you to understand the following—Think of a child who is learning to read and write. To begin with, all the accessories are around him; the teacher is there, the books are there, and so forth, but nothing is yet within the child. Work continues until what was once outside the child has been instilled into him and he is able to read. And so too is it with nature. In times to come we shall have within us what is now spread out around us. As souls we spring from the world soul and when this world soul was around us we drew it into ourselves. So too the spirit; and so too it will be with nature. We take nature into ourselves from outside and nature will be within us as a power. That is the great thought at the basis of these secret societies.

All progress is the result of involution and evolution. Involution is the in-taking, evolution the yield, the out-giving. All states and conditions of world-existence alternate between these two processes. When you see, hear, smell or taste, you breathe nature into yourselves. The act of sight does not pass away without leaving a trace behind. The eye itself perishes, the object seen—that too perishes; but what you have experienced in the act of sight, remains. It will not be difficult for you to realise that in certain epochs it is necessary to make such things understood. We are going forward to an age when, as I indicated recently, men will understand what the atom is, in reality. It will be realised—by the public mind too—that the atom is nothing but coagulated electricity.—The thought itself is composed of the same substance. Before the end of the fifth epoch of culture, science will have reached the stage where man will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. When the similarity of substance between the thought and the atom is once comprehended, the way to get hold of the forces contained in the atom will soon be discovered and then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working.—A man standing here, let us say, will be able by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to explode some object at a great distance—say in Hamburg! Just as by setting up a wave-movement here and causing it to take a particular form at some other place, wireless telegraphy is possible, so what I have just indicated will be within man's power when the occult truth that thought and atom consist of the same substance is put into practical application.

It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not, by then, reached selflessness. The attainment of selflessness alone will enable humanity to be kept from the brink of destruction. The downfall of our present epoch will be caused by lack of morality. The Lemurian epoch was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; our epoch and its civilisation will be destroyed by the War of All against All, by evil. Human beings will destroy each other in mutual strife. And the terrible thing—more desperately tragic than other catastrophes—will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.

A tiny handful of men will make good and thus insure their survival in the sixth epoch of civilisation. This tiny handful will have attained selflessness. The others will develop every imaginable skill and subtlety in the manipulation and use of the physical forces of nature, but without the essential degree of selflessness.

In the seventh epoch of civilisation, this War of All against All will break out in the most terrible form. Great and mighty forces will be let loose by the discoveries, turning the whole earth-globe into a kind of [self-functioning] live electric mass. In a way that cannot be discussed, the tiny handful will be protected and preserved.

And now you will be able to picture, more clearly than was possible when I spoke of the things before, why the “good and proper form” as it has been called, must be sought, and in what sense Freemasonry was aware of its duty to build an edifice dedicated to selfless ends. It is easier to become one of the tiny handful of men who ensure for themselves a place in the life of the future by using the good old forms than by having to struggle out of chaos. People nowadays may be inclined to jeer at “empty forms,” as they say ... but those forms have nevertheless a deep meaning and purpose; they are in line with the structure of our period of evolution, and when all is said and done they are connected with necessary stages in the development of human nature and of the human soul. Just think of it. We are living in the fifth period of the fifth great epoch; we have still to live through two more periods of this great epoch. Then will follow the seven periods of the sixth great epoch and then the seven periods of the seventh great epoch. This makes sixteen stages of evolution in the future. Humanity has still to climb these sixteen stages. A man who can experience something of the conditions of existence there possible, is to a certain degree initiated. There is a correspondence between the degrees of initiation and the secret of the epochs still to come. In the life of our planet there are seven great epochs, and each of these seven has seven sub-periods—forty-nine conditions, therefore, in all.

Thus there are definite stages for the investigation of the secrets of future phases of evolution. The high Degrees of Freemasonry originally had no other aim or purpose than to be an expression, each one of them, of a future stage of the evolution of humanity. Thus we have in Freemasonry something that has been both good and beautiful. A man who attained one Degree knew how he must work his way into the future; he could be a kind of pioneer. He knew too that one who reaches a higher Degree can accomplish greater things. This arrangement according to Degrees can well be made, for it corresponds with the facts. If, therefore, it were possible to inculcate a new content together with a new knowledge into these forms, much good would accrue, for Freemasonry would then be imbued with real spirit once again. Content and form, however belong to the whole. The state of affairs today is that the Degrees are there but nobody has worked through them in the real sense! In spite of this, however, they are not there without a purpose.

The fifth epoch of culture is a purely intellectual age, an age of egoism. The intellect is egoistical in the highest degree and it is the hallmark of our time. And so we must make our way upwards through intellect to spirituality before we can picture the spirituality that was once actively at work.

The essential secret, therefore, is this: The human being must know how to keep silence about the paths along which his “ I ” unfolds, and to regard his deeds, not his personal “ I ” as the criterion. The real heart of the secret lies in his deeds and in the overcoming of the “ I ” through deed. The “ I ” must remain concealed, within the deed! Elimination of the interests of the personal “ I ” from the on-streaming flow of human karma—this belongs to the First Degree. Whatever individual karma the “ I ” incurs in the process, is thereby wiped out. Nation, race, sex, position, religion ... all these work upon human egoism. Only when man has overcome them will he be free of egoism. The astral body of every nation, every race, every epoch, has a definite colour ... You will always find a colour which is fundamental in the astral body of a human being who is [a] member of one of these classifications. This specific colour must be eliminated. Anthroposophical spiritual science works to level out the colours of the astral bodies of its adherents. They must be of like colour—alike, that is to say, in respect of the basic colour. This basic colour gives rise to a certain substance called Kundalini which holds together, within the human being, the forces which lead eventually to the spirit. This leveling-out process will bring war and bloodshed in its train—war in the shape of economic strife among nations, pressure for expansion, suppression in every form, strife in the sphere of investment and profit, industrial undertakings, and so forth. And by adopting certain measures it will increasingly be possible to handle vast masses of people by sheer force; the individual will acquire greater and greater power over certain masses of the people. For the course of evolution is leading, not towards greater democracy, but towards oligarchy of the brutal kind, in that the power of the single individual will immeasurably increase. If morals are not ennobled, this will lead to brutality in every possible form. This state of things will come, just as the great water-catastrophe came to the Atlanteans.

If now we go forward from Easter, the spring festival, we shall need to penetrate much more spiritually into the subject than we had to do in considering the previous seasons of the year. This may sound like a contradiction, but it is not so. In thinking of the Christmas season, we had to start from the way in which earthly mineral limestone is gradually transformed, and we carried this thought over to the time of Easter. In general, we have been turning our eyes on the active working of the spiritual in the material realm. Now in summer, high summer, man is really bound up with the being of Nature. From spring onwards into summer, Nature becomes constantly more active, more satisfied inwardly, and man with his whole being is woven into this mood of Nature. We can indeed say that in high summer man experiences a kind of Nature-consciousness. During spring, if he has the perception and feeling for it, he becomes one with all that is growing and sprouting. He blossoms with the flower, germinates with the plant, fruits with the plant, enters into everything that lives and has its being in the world outside. In this way he spreads out his own being over the being of Nature, and a kind of Nature-consciousness arises in him. Then, since in autumn Nature dies away and thus bears death within itself, man too, if he participates in what autumn—the time of Michaelmas—means for Nature, must experience in himself this dying away; but with his own self he must not take part in it. He must raise himself above it. In place precisely of a Nature-consciousness, a strengthening of his self-consciousness must occur. But in the glow of summer, just because a Nature-consciousness is then at its height in man, it is all the more necessary for the cosmos that—if only man is willing—the cosmos should bring the spiritual to meet him.

Hence we can say: In summer man is bound up with Nature, but, if he has the right feeling and perception for it, objective spirituality comes towards him from out of Nature's interweaving life. And so, to find the essential human being during the St. John's time, at midsummer, we must turn to the objective spirituality in the outer world, and this is present everywhere in Nature. Only in outward appearance is Nature the sprouting, budding—one might say the sleeping—being which calls forth from the powers of sleep the forces of vegetative growth, in which a kind of sleeping Nature-life is given form. But in this sleeping Nature, if only man has the perception for it, the spiritual which animates and weaves through everything in Nature is revealed.

So it is that if we follow Nature in high summer with deepened spiritual insight and with perceptive eyes, we find our gaze directed to the depths of the Earth itself. We find that the minerals down there send their inner crystal-forming process towards us more vividly than at any other time of the year. If we look with Imaginative perception into the depths of the Earth at St. John's-tide, we really have the impression that down there are the crystalline forms in which the hard earth consolidates itself—the very crystalline forms which gain their full beauty at the height of summer. At midsummer everything down below the earth shapes itself into lines, angles and surfaces. If we are to have an impression of it as a whole, we must picture this crystallising process as an interweaving activity, coloured throughout with deep blue.

I will try to show it on the blackboard, though of course I can do so only in a quite sketchy way. So we can say: On looking downwards, we have an impression of line-like forms, suffused with blue, and everywhere the blue is shot through with lines which sparkle like silver, so that everywhere within the silver-sparkling blue the crystallising process (white) can be discerned. It is as though Nature wishes to present her formative power in a wonderful plastic design, but a design that cannot be seen in the way we see with ordinary eyes. It is seen in such a way that one really feels oneself dissolved into the plastic design, and feels every silver-gleaming line down there to be within oneself, part of oneself. One feels that as a human form one has grown out of the blue depths of the earth's crust, and one feels oneself inwardly permeated with force by the silver-gleaming crystal lines. All this one feels as part of one's own being. And if one comes to oneself and asks—How is it that these silver-sparkling crystal lines and waves are working within myself? What is it that lives and works there, silver-gleaming in the blue of the Earth?—then one knows: That is cosmic Will. And one has the feeling of standing upon cosmic Will.

So it is when one looks down into the depths of the Earth. And if one looks up to the heights, how is it then? The impression one has is of out-spreading cosmic Intelligence. Human intelligence—as I have often said—is not of much value at its present stage. But the heavens at midsummer give one the feeling that cosmic Intelligence is alive everywhere—the intelligence not of single beings but of many beings who live together and within one another. Thus we have up there the out-spreading Intelligence woven through with light; the living Intelligence shining forth (yellow) as the polaric opposite of the Will. And while down below we feel—in that blue darkness everything is experienced only as forces, up above we feel—everything is such that in perceiving it we are illumined, permeated, with a feeling of intelligence.

And now within this radiant activity there appears—I cannot put it otherwise—a Form. When we were speaking of autumn, I had to name Michael as the most significant figure who rises before our souls out of the weaving of Nature. As to how Gabriel—to use the old name—enters into the time of Christmas, we shall have more to say. In the last lecture I showed you how at Easter, the season of spring, the figure of Raphael comes before us. He comes in dramatic guise, as the mediator who arouses in us the rightful approach, through reverence and worship, to what the Easter Imagination, the cosmic Easter Imagination, is. And now, for the St. John's time, there comes before us—to describe it in human terms, which are of course bound to be only approximate—an extraordinarily earnest countenance, which arises glowing warmly out of the pervading radiant Intelligence (red head in the yellow). We have the impression that this figure forms its body of light out of the radiant Intelligence. And for this to happen at the height of summer, something I have already described must come in: the elemental spirits of the Earth must soar upwards. As they do so, they weave themselves into the shining Intelligence up above, and the shining Intelligence receives them into itself. And out of that gleaming radiance the figure I have just mentioned takes form.

This form was divined by the old instinctive clairvoyance, and we can give it the same name by which it was known then. We can say: In summer, Uriel appears in the midst of the shining Intelligence.

It is with great earnestness that this representative of the weaving cosmic forces, seeking to embody himself in a vesture of light, appears in the time of summer. There are further things we can observe as the deeds accomplished by Uriel in the radiant light—Uriel, whose own intelligence arises fundamentally from the working together of the planetary forces of our planetary system, supported by the working of the fixed stars of the Zodiac; Uriel, who in his thoughts preserves the thoughts of the cosmos. And so, quite directly, the feeling comes: You clouds of summer, radiant with Intelligence, in which are reflected up above the blue crystal-formations of the earth below, just as these blue crystal-formations mirror in turn the shining Intelligence of the summer clouds—out of your shining there appears in high summer, with earnest countenance, a concentrated Imagination of Cosmic Understanding.

Now the deeds of this embodied cosmic Understanding, this cosmic Intelligence, are woven in light. Through the power of attraction residing in the concentrated cosmic Intelligence of Uriel, the silver forces (white) are drawn upwards, and in the light of this inwardly shining Intelligence, as seen from the Earth, they appear as radiant sunlight, densifying into a glory of gold. One has the immediate feeling that the gleaming silver, streaming up from below, is received by the sunlit radiance above. And the earth-silver—the phrase is quite correct—is changed by cosmic alchemy into the cosmic gold which lives and weaves in the heights.

If we follow these happenings further, on through August, we gain an impression of something that completes the form of Michael, already described. I told you what the sword of Michael is made of, and whence the dragon draws his coiling life. But now, in the radiant beauty which appears spiritually out of the cosmic weaving at the height of summer, we ask ourselves: Whence does Michael, who leads us over to the autumn time of Michaelmas, derive his characteristic raiment—the raiment which first lights up in golden sunshine and then shines forth inwardly as a silver-sparkling radiance within the golden folds? Where does Michael acquire this gold-woven, silver-sparkling raiment? It comes from that which is formed in the heights through the upward-raying silver and the gold that flows to meet it; from the transmutation by the sun's power of the silver sparkling up from the Earth. As autumn approaches we see how the silver given by the Earth to the cosmos returns as gold, and the power of this transmuted silver is the source of that which goes on in the Earth during winter, as I have described. The Sun-gold, formed in the heights, in the dominion of Uriel, during high summer, passes down to weave and flow through the depths of the Earth, where it animates the elements that in the midst of winter are seeking to become the living growth of the following year.

So you see that when we come to the time of sprouting, springing life, we can no longer speak of matter permeated by spirit, as we speak of the Earth in winter. We have to speak of spirit woven through with matter—that is, with silver and gold.

Of course you must not take all this in a crude sense; you must think of the silver and gold as diluted beyond human measure. Then you will come to feel that all this is a kind of background for the cosmic, light-filled deeds of Uriel, and a clear impression of the countenance and gaze of Uriel will come before you.

We feel a deep longing to understand this remarkable gaze, directed downwards, and we have the impression that we must look around to find out what it signifies. Its meaning first dawns upon the mind when as human beings we learn to look with spiritual eyes still more deeply into the blue, silver-gleaming depths of the Earth in summer. And we see that weaving around these silver-gleaming crystalline rays are shapes—disturbing shapes, I might almost call them—which continually gather and dissolve, gather and dissolve again.

Then we come to perceive—the vision will be different for everyone—that these shapes are human errors which stand out against the natural order of regular crystals here below. And it is on this contrast that Uriel directs his earnest gaze. Here during the height of summer the imperfections of mankind, in contrast to the regularity of the growing crystal forms, are searchingly surveyed. Here it is that from the earnest gaze of Uriel we gain the impression of how the moral is interwoven with the natural.

Here the moral world-order does not exist only in ourselves as abstract impulses. For whereas we habitually look at the realms of Nature and do not ask—is there morality in the growth of plants, or in the process of crystallisation?—now we see how at midsummer human errors are woven into the regular crystals which are formed in the normal course of Nature.

On the other hand, all that is in human virtue and human excellence rises up with the silver-gleaming lines and is seen as the clouds that envelop Uriel (red). It enters into the radiant Intelligence, transmuted into cloud-shaped works of art.

It is impossible to look towards the increasingly earnest gaze of Uriel, directed towards the depths of the Earth, without also seeing there something like wing-like arms, or arm-like wings, raised in earnest admonition, and this gesture by Uriel has the effect of imparting to mankind what I might call the historic conscience. Here at high summer appears the historic conscience, which at the present time has become uncommonly feeble. It appears, as it were, in Uriel's warning gesture.

Of course, you must picture all this as an Imagination. These things are quite real, but I cannot speak of them in the way a physicist speaks of positive and negative, of potential energy and so on. I have to speak in pictures that will come to life in your souls. But everything expressed in these living pictures is reality; it is there.

And now if we have gained the impression of the connection of human morality with the crystalline element below and of human virtues with the shining beauty above, and if we take these connections into our inward experience, the real St. John Imagination will come to meet us. For the St. John Imagination is there, just as we have the Michael Imagination, the Christmas Imagination, the Easter Imagination.

So to spiritual observation there appears, as a kind of culmination, this picture: Above, illuminated as it were by the power of Uriel's eyes, the Dove (white). The silver-sparkling blue below, arising from the depths of the Earth and bound up with human weaknesses and error, is gathered into a picture of the Earth-Mother (blue). Whether she is called Demeter or Mary, the picture is of the Earth-Mother. So it is that in directing our gaze downwards, we cannot do otherwise than bring together in Imagination all those secrets of the depths which go to make up the material Mother of all existence; while in all that is concentrated in the flowing form above we feel and experience the Spirit-Father of everything around us. And now we behold the outcome of the working together of Spirit-Father with Earth-Mother, bearing so beautifully within itself the harmony of the earthly silver and the gold of the heights. Between the Father and the Mother we behold the Son. Thus arises this Imagination of the Trinity, which is really the St. John Imagination. The background of it is Uriel, the creative, admonishing Uriel.

That which the Trinity truly represents should not be placed dogmatically before the soul, for then an impression is given that such an idea, or picture, of the Trinity can be separated from the weaving of cosmic life. This is not so. At midsummer the Trinity reveals itself out of the midst of cosmic life, cosmic activity. It stands forth with inwardly convincing power, if—I might say—one has first penetrated into the mysteries of Uriel.

If we were to present St. John's-tide in this way, there would have to be an arched or vaulted background, with the figure of Uriel and his gesture in the manner I have described. And against this background a living picture of the Imagination of the Trinity would have to emerge. Special arrangements would be necessary; the effect would have to be that of painting done instantly, perhaps by making artistic use of vaporous substances or the like. And if the true Imagination of these things is to be called up for people to witness, it must be at St. John's time. At Easter we have the complete picture only when we bring it into dramatic form, with Raphael present as a teacher in the Mystery Play that would have then to be presented; Raphael who leads man into the secrets of healing nature, of the healing cosmos. In a similar way, at St. John's time, all that can then be seen in weaving pictures would have to be transposed into powerful music, so that the cosmic Mystery, as it can be experienced by man at this season of St. John, would speak to our hearts.

We must imagine how all that I have described should find artistic expression, on the one hand, in pictorial and plastic art. But what is experienced in this way must be given life by the musical tones that embody the poetic motif which plays through our souls when we feel our way into great Uriel, active in the light, who calls up in us a powerful impression of the triune, the Trinity. The silver-shining that rays up from below, and is revealed in the form-giving beauty of the light above, must be expressed at St. John's-tide through appropriate musical instruments. Thus we should find, through these musical harmonies, our own inner harmony with the cosmos, for in them the secret of man's living together with the cosmos at St. John's tide would have to sound forth. All this would have to be given voice in the music, so that in looking up to the heights we would be looking at the weaving gold of the cosmos, and would see the glowing form of Uriel emerging from the light-filled gold and directing his gaze and his gesture down to the Earth, as I have described it. All this would have to be not in any fixed form, but in living movement. That would be one motif, a heavenly motif through which a man can feel himself united, on one side, with the shining Cosmic Intelligence.

On the other side, down below, he feels himself united with the tendency to fixed form; with that which is immersed in the bluish darkness from out of which the silvery radiance streams forth. Down there he feels the material foundation of active spiritual being. The Heights become Mysteries, the Depths become Mysteries, and man himself becomes a Mystery within the Mysteries of the Cosmos. Right into his bony system he feels the crystal-forming power. But he feels also how this same power is in cosmic union with the living power of light in the heavens above. He feels how all that comes about through mankind as morality in these Mysteries of the Heights lives and weaves in these Mysteries of the Depths, and in the conjunction between the two. He feels himself no longer sundered from the world around him, but placed within it, united above with the shining Intelligence, in which he experiences, as in the womb of worlds, his own best thoughts. He feels himself united below, right into his bony system, with the cosmic crystallising force—and again the two united with one another. He feels his death united with the spirit-life of the universe; and he feels how this spirit-life craves to awaken the crystal forces and the silver-gleaming life in the midst of earthly death.

All this, too, would have to sound forth in musical tones—tones which carry these motifs on their wings and make them part of human experience. For these motifs are there. They do not have to be sought out; they can be read from the cosmic activity of Uriel. Here it is that Imagination passes over into Inspiration.

Man, however, lives in a certain sense as an embodied Inspiration, as a being brought into existence by Inspiration, in the Mysteries of the heights and depths and in the Mysteries of their conjunction. He lives in the Mysteries to which the Spirit-Father points upward; the Mysteries to which the Spirit-Mother points downwards, the Mysteries which are united by the fact that the Christ, though the working together of the Spirit-Father and the Spirit-Mother, stands directly before the human soul as the sustaining Cosmic Spirit.

That which is woven out of all these cosmic secrets I may put before you somewhat in the following way. It is as though the human being, placed in the midst of all that goes on in high summer, were to feel something like this. The first words endeavour to represent how the gaze of Uriel concentrates itself into Inspiration, united with the Spirit-tones of the whole choir:

The Heights:

Schaue unser Weben
Das leuchtende Erregen
Das warmende Leben

The Depths

Lebe irdisch Erhaltendes
Und atmend Gestaltetes—
Als wesenhaft Waltendes

The Midst—The inner being of Man.

Fühle dein Menschengebeine
Mit himmlischen Scheine
Im waltenden Weltenvereine

Here in these nine lines are the Mysteries of the Heights, the Mysteries of the Depths, and the Mysteries of the Midst, which are also those of the inner being of man. And then we have the whole gathered up as a cosmic statement of these Mysteries of the Heights, the Depths and the Midst, sounding out as though with organ and trumpet tones:

Es werden Stoffe verdichtet
Es werden Fehler gerichtet
Es werden Herzen gesichtet.¹

Here you have that which can permeate the human being at midsummer, supporting him, exalting him, confirming him—the St. John Imagination filled with Inspiration, the St. John Inspiration filled with Imagination—in these words:

Schaue unser Weben
Das leuchtende Erregen
Das warmende Leben
Lebe irdisch Erhaltendes
Und atmend Gestaltetes—
Als wesenhaft Waltendes
Fühle dein Menschengebeine
Mit himmlischen Scheine
Im waltenden Weltenvereine

Es werden Stoffe verdichtet
Es werden Fehler gerichtet
Es werden Herzen gesichtet.

• 1. Behold our weaving, the kindling radiance, the warming life.
  Live in the earth's sustaining, and in the form-giving breathing,
  with the power of true being.
  Feel the limbs of man, from the heavens illuminated,
  in the strength of worlds united.
  Substances are densified, errors are judged and rectified,
  hearts are sifted.

In my former series of lectures I have been speaking about occult schools and secret societies, and I think it right today to bring this whole course of lectures to a close before we pass on to a different subject next time. A week from now I shall speak about the meaning of the days connected in the Church Calendar with the Christmas Festival—most especially about Epiphany, which follows on the less important New Year Festival.¹ The lecture today, therefore, will be more in the nature of a conclusion.

The question might be asked: What is the deeper meaning of such secret societies, and what is their whole purpose in world evolution? To such a question, my answer would be that they have a real connection with the way in which beings in this world evolve and make progress. If you wish to develop yourself, you know that different kinds of exercises are necessary towards this end and that they are available. You have heard of Hatha Yoga, Rajah Yoga and other exercises of different kinds by means of which societies and brotherhoods connected with occult science have initiated their members.

Somebody might say: All this, surely, could be attained without these secret societies. But I can tell you—and in the course of the lecture you will realise it—that the world cannot do without such societies. To put it bluntly, it is quite unjustifiable to speak in public in the style of the Manifesto of the Freemasons which I read to you a fortnight ago.²

One cannot attain to what is usually known as immortality unless one is to some extent familiar with the occult sciences. The fruits of occult science do, of course, find their way out into the world along many different channels. A great deal of occult knowledge exists in the various religions, and all those who participate deeply and sincerely in the life of a religious community have some share in this knowledge and are preparing themselves for the attainment of immortality in the real sense. But it is still something different, to subsist on the knowledge of this immortality and the feeling of belonging in the spiritual world in concrete experience and with full awareness.

All of you have lived many times; but not all of you are conscious that you have lived through these many lives. However, you will gradually attain this consciousness, and without it, man's life is lived through with incomplete consciousness. It has never been the aim of occult science to inculcate into man a dim feeling of survival, but to impart a clear, fully conscious knowledge of onflowing life in the spiritual world. And there is a certain great law which governs the progressive development of consciousness in all future stages of life. Namely, it is what man works at to help others attain such consciousness which contributes the most to its development. It is an apparently paradoxical proposition: Everything a being works at without aiming at developing its own consciousness, helps to maintain that being's consciousness.

Take as an example the building of a house. An architect builds a house; he does not build this house for himself, but undertakes the task of building it for reasons which have nothing at all to do with him himself. You know well that this is very seldom the case. There are many people who, to all appearances, are not working for themselves; and yet, in reality, they are.

A lawyer, for example, is to all intents and purposes working for his clients. Part of his work may well be selfless, but the real question is one of earning his living. Whatever men do in business merely for the sake of their own livelihood, to the extent that their business only serves that end, just so much is lost in the way of spiritual gain. On the other hand, everything that is introduced into the work for an objective end, everything that is connected with the interests of another, helps to conserve our consciousness for future evolution. So that is quite clear.

Now, think of the Freemasons. In the original arrangement, they gave this injunction to their members: Build such buildings as make no contribution at all to, or have nothing to do with, your own subsistence. All that has survived of the good old Freemasonry, are certain charitable institutions. And although the lodges have lost their living roots in the ancient wisdom and occult knowledge once in their possession, these charitable institutions are evidence of a humanitarianism which, while it is empty [of real substance] still persists and is cultivated as a tradition. Selfless activity is something that belongs to Freemasonry. Freemasonry did originally urge its members to work in the service of humanity, to build into the objective world.

We are living now in the epoch of evolution that may be called the mineral epoch; and our task is to permeate this mineral world through and through with our own spirit. Grasp exactly what this means. You are building a house. You fetch the stones from some quarry. You hew them into the shapes needed for the house, and so on. What are you joining this raw material, obtained from the mineral kingdom, with? You are joining raw material with human spirit. When you make a machine, you have introduced your spirit into that machine. The actual machine does, of course, perish and become dust; it will be broken up. Not a trace of it will survive. But what it has done does not vanish without a trace, but passes into the very atoms. Every atom bears a trace of your spirit and will carry this trace with it. It is not a matter of indifference whether or not an atom has at some time been in a machine. The atom itself has undergone change as a result of having once been in a machine, and this change that you have wrought in the atom will never again be lost to it. Moreover, through your having changed the atom, through your having united your spirit with the mineral world, a permanent stamp has been made upon the general consciousness [of mankind]. Just so much will be taken from us into the other world.

It is a fact that all occult science consists of knowing how a man can act selflessly in order to attain the greatest enhancement of his own consciousness. Consider how certain men who have known this very clearly, have been so selfless that they took steps to prevent their names from going down to posterity. An example of this is the Theologia Deutsch.³ Nobody knows who wrote it. Outwardly, there is only ‘The man from Frankfurt’. He therefore took care that his name could not even be guessed. He worked in such a way that he merely added something to the objective world without asking for honour or for the preservation of his name. By way of comparison, let it be mentioned that the Masters, as a rule, are not personages known to history;⁴ they sometimes incarnate [embody] themselves, when it is necessary, in historical personalities, but this is in a certain respect a sacrifice. The level of their consciousness is no longer compatible with any work for themselves—and preservation of a name does after all involve work for oneself.

It is difficult to understand this rule. However, you will now grasp that the Freemasons aim in this, as far as possible, to do their work in the world in such a way that it is concealed in the cathedrals, in social institutions and organisations, in charitable foundations. For selfless deeds are the real foundations of immortality: this is the reflex of selfless deeds in the outer world. They need not be of great account. If someone gives a coin to someone in a selfless way, then that is an action that is to be understood in that way; but only to the extent that it was selfless does it come into immortality. And very few [deeds] are selfless. A good deed may be very egotistical when, for instance, it creates a feeling of comfort. Good deeds spring extremely often from selfish motives. If a poor man living among us has no roast meat at Christmas, and I feel the need to give him some in order that I may feel justified in [eating] my own roast meat, that, after all, is egoistic.

In the Middle Ages no one could say who had built many of the cathedrals or painted many of the pictures. It is only in our epoch that people have begun to attach such value to an individual human name. In earlier epochs, more spiritual than our own, the individual name had less importance. Spirituality in those days was directed at reality; whereas our epoch adheres to the delusion that what is merely transient should be preserved.

I have said this only in order to indicate to you the principle on which these secret societies depended. It mattered to them to efface themselves altogether as personalities, and to allow what they did to live only in its effects. And this brings us to the heart of the secrets. The fact that some particular thing is kept secret is of less importance than keeping one's own share in the work secret. Everyone who keeps his own part secret thereby secures immortality for himself. The rule is therefore clear and unambiguous: As much as you yourself put into the world, that much consciousness the world will give you back. That is connected with the greatest universal laws.

You all have a soul and you all have a spirit. This soul and spirit are called upon to reach one day the highest stages of perfection. But you were already there before your first physical incarnation. You were first physically incarnated in the preceding races after the time of the Hyperborean and Polarian epochs.⁵ Before that you were purely beings of soul. But as beings of soul you were a part of the world soul, and as spirit you were part of the general world spirit. The world soul and the world spirit were spread around you as Nature is spread around you today. Just as the mineral world, the plant world and the animal world are around you today, so were the worlds of soul and spirit spread around you then. And what was once outside you is now your soul; you have made inward what to begin with was outside. What today is your inward part was once spread about outside. This has now become your soul. The spirit, too, was once spread around you. And what is now spread around you will become your inner life. You will take into yourself what is now the mineral kingdom, and it will become your inner part. The plant kingdom will become your inner part. What surrounds you in Nature will become your inner being.

You will understand now how this is connected with the first example given: you build a church for others, not for yourself. You can take into [yourself] a world full of majesty, beauty and splendour if you make the world majestic, beautiful and splendid. To do something for the higher self is not selfish because it is not done only for the self. This higher self will be united with all other higher selves, so that it is [done] for all at the same time.

It is this that the Freemasons knew. The Freemason knew, when he helped [by] building with the spiritualisation of the mineral world, that this would one day become the content of his soul—and to build means nothing else than to spiritualise the mineral world. That is the significant thing: God once gave us the Nature that surrounds us, as mineral, plant and animal nature. We take these in [to ourselves]. It is not due to us that it is there; all we can do is to appropriate it for ourselves. But what we ourselves create in the world—that is what will, through ourselves, constitute our future being.

The mineral world, as such, we perceive; what we make out of it we will, in the future, be. What we make of the plant world, of the animal world and of the world of men, that too we will be, in the future. If you found a charitable institution or have contributed something to it, what you have contributed, you will be. If a man does nothing which he can draw back in this way into his soul from outside, he will remain empty. It must be possible for man to spiritualise as much as he can of the three kingdoms of nature—four, for mankind also belongs thereto. To bring spirit into the whole external world—that has been the task of the secret societies of every age.

You understand that that must be so. Take a child who is just learning to read and write. To begin with, all the equipment is around him. Today, the child begins to learn to read. Nothing is in him yet, but the teacher, the primers and so forth are there. So it continues until what was outside the child has been instilled into him. And the child acquires the capacity to read. And so it is with Nature, too. In times to come we shall have within us what is now spread around us. We are souls, we spring from the world soul, and we drew it in, when it was spread around us. The spirit was likewise drawn in, and Nature, too, will be drawn in by us, in order to stay within us as an active ability.

That is the great thought at the basis of these secret societies, that all progress is the result of involution and evolution. Involution is the drawing in, evolution is the giving out. All situations in the universe alternate between these two processes. When you see, hear, smell or taste Nature, you breathe it in. What you see does not pass away without leaving a trace on you. The eye itself perishes, the object perishes, but [the fact] that you have seen something remains. You will understand now that at certain times it can be necessary that an understanding of these things be available. We are going forward to an age when, as I recently indicated, understanding will reach right into the atom. It will be realised—by the popular mind too that the atom is nothing else than congealed electricity. Thought itself is composed of the same substance.

Before the end of our present cultural epoch one will in fact have come so far that people will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. When one is able to grasp the materiality between the thought and the atom, then one will soon be able to understand the penetration of the atom. And then nothing will be inaccessible to certain methods of working. A man standing here, let us say, will be able, by pressing a button concealed in his pocket, to [explode] some object at a great distance, let us say in Hamburg, just as wireless telegraphy is possible, by setting up a wave movement and causing it to take a particular form at some other place. This will be within man's power when the occult truth, that thought and atom consist of the same substance, is applied to practical life.

It is impossible to conceive what might happen in such circumstances if mankind has not by then reached selflessness. Only through the attainment of selflessness will it be possible to preserve mankind from the brink of destruction. The downfall of post-Atlantean culture will be caused by the lack of morality. The Lemurian race was destroyed by fire, the Atlantean by water; ours will be destroyed by the War of All against All, [by?] evil, through the struggle of men with one another. Humanity will destroy itself in mutual strife. And the despairing thing—more desperately tragic than other catastrophes—will be that the blame will lie with human beings themselves.

A tiny handful of men will save themselves and pass over into the sixth epoch. This tiny handful will have developed complete selflessness. The others will make use of every [imaginable] skill and subtlety in the penetration and conquest of the physical forces of Nature, but without attaining the essential degree of selflessness . They will start the War of All against All, and that will be the cause of the destruction of our civilisation.

In the seventh post-Atlantean cultural epoch, to be precise, this War of All against All will break out, in the most terrible way. Great and mighty forces will ensue from discoveries that will turn the entire globe into a kind of self-functioning electrical apparatus. The tiny handful will be protected in a way that cannot be discussed.

Now you will be able to picture more clearly than was possible when I spoke of these things last time, why the Good [and Proper] Form must be sought and in what sense Freemasonry became aware that it must build a building [dedicated to] selfless [ends]. It is easier to survive and pass over into the future, to the tiny handful of new humanity, with the good old forms, than in chaos.

It is easy to jeer at empty forms, but they have however a deep significance. They are adapted to the structure of our [period of] evolution. After all, they are connected with necessary stages in human nature and the development of the human soul. Just think of it: we are living in the fifth period of the fifth great post-Atlantean epoch;⁶ we have still to live through two more periods of this great epoch. Then the seven periods of the sixth great epoch will follow and then the seven periods of the seventh great epoch. This makes sixteen stages of evolution in the future. Humanity has still to pass through these sixteen stages. A man who can experience something of the conditions [of existence] that are possible there, is to a certain degree initiated. There is a certain correspondence between the degrees of initiation and the secrets of the epochs still to come.

In the ‘form-state’ of our planet there are seven great epochs and each of these epochs has seven sub-periods (cultural epochs)—forty-nine conditions, therefore, in all. In the next ‘form-state’ of our planet there are again forty-nine conditions. Thus there are definite stages for the investigation of the secrets of future phases of evolution. The higher degrees of Freemasonry had no other aim or purpose, originally, than to be an expression of each one of the future stages of the evolution of humanity. Thus in Freemasonry we actually have something which has been very good, namely, that a man who had attained a certain degree knew how he must work his way into the future, so that he could be a kind of pioneer. He knew, too, that one who had reached a higher degree could accomplish more. This arrangement according to degrees can very well be made, for it corresponds with the facts.

If, therefore, it were again possible to pour a new content, together with a new knowledge, into these forms, much good would accrue. Freemasonry would then be imbued with real spirit once again. But content and form belong to the Whole. The state of affairs today is, as I have said: the degrees are there, but nobody has really worked through them. In spite of this, however, they are not there for nothing. They will be brought to life again in the future.

The fifth cultural epoch is a purely intellectual one, an epoch of egoism. We are now at the high point of egoism. The intellect is egoistical in the highest degree, and it is the hallmark of our time. And so we must make our way upwards through intellect to spirituality, which was once there ...[Gap]

The secret of secrets is this, therefore: the human being must learn how to keep silence about the paths along which his ego unfolds, and to regard his deeds, not his ego, as the criterion. The real heart of the secret lies in his deeds and the overcoming of the ego through action. The ego must remain concealed within the deed. Elimination of the interests of the ego from the on-streaming flow of karma—this belongs to the first degree. Whatever karma the ego incurs is thereby wiped out from karma. Nation, race, sex, position, religion—all these work upon human egoism. Only when mankind has overcome all these things will it be freed from egoism.

You can identify, in the astral body, a particular colour for every nation, every race, every epoch. You will always find a base-colour there, that the person has as a member of one of these classifications or categories. This [specific colour] must be eliminated. The Theosophical Society works to level out the colours of the astral bodies of its adherents. They must be of like colour, like in respect of the base-colour. This base colour gives rise to a certain substance ... [Gap] ... [called kundalini, which holds together, within the human being, the forces which lead eventually to the spirit.]⁷

Bringing this levelling-out about will actually entail bloody war, and through such things as economic strife among nations, wars of exploitation, financial and industrial enterprises, conquests, etc., and through the adoption of certain measures, it will be more and more possible to set masses of people in motion and simply to compel them. The individual will acquire more and more power over certain masses of people. For the drift of this development is not that we will become democratic, but that we will become brutally oligarchic, in that the individual will gain more and more power. If the ennobling of morals is not achieved, then the most brutal forces will lead. This will happen, just as catastrophe by water happened to the Atlanteans.

• 1 . The German text, as handed down, reads: an Weihnachten, vor allen Dingen an das minder bedeutende Fest Neujahr anschliessen, das Fest der Epiphanie,’ which could be rendered as follows: ‘... about Christmas, most especially about the less important New Year's Festival the Festival of Epiphany.’ One must assume that the shorthand copy of Seiler intended the following: ‘... das minder bedeutende Fest Neujahr anschliessende Fest der Epiphanie's, which would give the rendering as in the text of the lecture above. The said lecture was held on 30th December 1904 and its subject was the “Three Kings” Festival.’
• 2 . In the lecture given on 9th December 1904 (lecture 8 in this volume). Regarding the style of speaking appropriate to lecturing in public, see The Course of My Life,Chapter 32.
• 3 . Written about 1380. First published by Luther (fragmentary edition) Wittenberg, 1516. Complete edition 1518. First German translation by Johannes Arndt, 1597. Translation into modern German by Franz Pfeiffer, Giitersloh, 1875.
• 4 . See note 21 to the lecture given on 23rd May 1904. (Lecture 1 in this volume).
• 5 . The word nach (‘after’) is missing from the German edition, but to leave it out would be to negate the sense given in lecture I of this series: ‘Whitsuntide,’ given on the 23rd o May 1904, which reads: ‘It is a wrong conception when theosophists believe that reincarnations had no beginning and will have no ending. Reincarnation started in the Lemurian Age and will cease again at the beginning of the sixth Root Race or Age.‘ (See diagram opposite). The German would then read: ‘In physischer Inkarnation waren Sie in den vorhergehenden Rassen erst zur Zeit nach der hyperboraischen und polarischen Rasse vorhanden.’
• 6 . See diagram at the bottom of the page.
• 7 . called Kundalini, which holds together, within the human being, the forces which lead eventually to the spirit.] The latter part of this sentence (within square brackets) was a correction made for the earlier edition of this lecture, published on 23rd November 1947, in the members' newsletter of the German Anthroposophical Society, No. 47.

My dear friends! So, we have prepared ourselves initially with regard to the development of the attitude and disposition for the office of carer for souls. Before we now proceed on the basis of what has been created, we must become quite clear about a number of things, because the whole conception, which you entered into by placing your ego in a direct relationship with the spiritual world yesterday, so to speak, is one that already necessitates a spiritual-scientific foundation in a certain sense.

The point is that, as I said in my first discussions, the concept of the “priest” - we will find the name later - points to something other than what is given in today's Protestant conception. In this, the priest is more of a teacher. Now, the point is that it must appear justified in a certain way to distinguish oneself from the ordinary layman. This justification could not exist at all, that is, what we did yesterday would be an unjustified act if the whole concept of your profession were not placed in a spiritual atmosphere, if I may say so. And here we must ask: Can we make the concept of the “community” or, if we use the old word, the “ecclesia” a real one?

In the communities that have been established in more recent times, even if there was a different intention, this community was essentially an association of individuals, and apart from these individuals, there is actually nothing else of which one is fully aware. Now you must remember – what I am saying now is not meant as a theory, but so that it may permeate your work, because only in this way can your work become a true one – you must remember that everything higher that was realized in human primeval times through individual people leads us back to the concept of a group or species soul. In earlier times, groups of people were bound together by blood ties as tribes or, later, as larger blood communities or communities of relatives. But what was bound together in this way could not be counted as one, two, three, and so on, as so many individual people. Never in the mystery was such a community understood as a mere sum of people, but it was understood that a real community spirit is present, not incarnated on earth, but always present when something is to happen from the community.

Mankind has outgrown this way of being connected to the spiritual. But it is in the sense of what emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha, on a higher level, to lead mankind back to associations that have a real sense of community, so that it develops something through which an entity from higher worlds, in the sense of Christianity a servant of Christ himself, descends. “Servant of Christ” means in this case: a part of Christ, so that the community is not alone, but a part of Christ is there. In the times when blood provided the bond of community, the inclination towards the spiritual was an instinctive one and conditioned by physical basis. In the sense of Christianity, all this must be raised to a spiritual level. People must feel that when they gather in the church of their own free will, it means that in a certain sense they are only members of a common, more delicate body, but one that is truly animated and spiritualized. The one who is the priest then feels himself to be the bearer of this communal spirit. Thus it is not merely a matter of intellectual, theoretical, symbolic speech when the reality of the presence of the spiritual is repeatedly pointed out in the ritual forms, when, as it were, what is living down from spiritual worlds is called into the community of believers, into the “Ecclesia”. Therefore, it is necessary that the stripping of the personal also appears externally in the effectiveness of the priest. The priest actually ceases to have any significance as a personality during the most important acts of worship. He is truly a servant of the word, not a teacher of the word, he is a transmitter of the word from divine heights into earthly existence. And the purpose of donning the cultic vestments is to relinquish one's personality and to appear as a representative of a higher order than the human order on earth.

Therefore, we can say: In the Mass Sacrifice, in the Act of Consecration of Man, when we begin with the relay prayer and then proceed to the reading of the Gospel, we are actually only dealing with the first part of the Mass, with a preparation. And if you recall the first words of the relay prayer given to you, you will immediately find the words: “Let us worthily accomplish the Act of Consecration of Man.” The “worthily” is of the utmost importance for the priest's understanding. Every time he celebrates Mass, the priest must be aware that he must first struggle to achieve the dignity to celebrate the Mass. In this struggle for the worthiness to celebrate the Mass, lies precisely the stripping away of the personal. The priest is clothed in priestly garments and proceeds to the altar in them. That is to say, he completely disregards what is human about him, earthly man, earthly personality in this particular incarnation. He must become the instrument for the Spirit to express itself through him. Therefore, he must try each time anew to struggle for worthiness. And then it says [in the prayer of the Mass]: From the revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to Christ's deed. These are words that, in the immediate aftermath of Christ's deed, of the Mystery of Golgotha, are intended to express and support the struggle for an impersonal action.

This is how the service should begin. We must be clear about the fact that the Catholic Church has fostered extensive errors in this regard. It is right that the personality of the priest should not come into consideration, but in many cases it does not take into account the struggle for worthiness and the difficulty of achieving this personality; and so the Roman Catholic view has incorporated the notion that it does not matter if the priest is personally a sinful or even a bad person, because at the moment he celebrates, his personality is not taken into account, because the spiritual power, the spiritual authority, is at work. The Catholic Church has developed this with an extraordinarily great spiritual skill in a one-sided way, and it has been absorbed to a high degree into the consciousness of the faithful. Even the simplest, most primitive Catholics distinguish the spirit-bearer, who stands before the faithful through the symbolic vestments, from the living garment under the vestments, of which many Catholic priests become; he may be a sinful man, but he does not celebrate, the spirit celebrates, for which he is merely the bearer. This kind of Catholic view naturally eliminates the relationship that must exist between the individual personality of the priest and his priestly office. The priestly office is something that comes from the higher worlds. But there is no way around the fact that at least the priest's language is influenced by what he is as an individual human being, that his heart and his mind also influence his language, that he strives for worthiness to be allowed to wear this priestly garment as this one personal human being. Therefore, it is necessary to have a correct understanding of consecration.

What does “consecrate” actually mean? We cannot arrive at an adequate concept in this regard if we simply take a historical view of what has developed over the past few centuries. If we want to proceed historically, we can only do so by considering the acts of consecration as they have existed since the original revelation and as they have been renewed by Christianity, in terms of their spirit. What then do the words 'consecrate' and 'initiate' mean? It means that the spiritual world is lowered over something earthly, so that one beholds this earthly thing as enveloped by the spiritual world. If we want to draw this symbolically, we could do so in the following way (it is drawn on the board). I attach great importance to making this quite clear to you. Let us take for example an ancient Near Eastern mystery. There was, let us say, the sixth degree of the “sun hero”, the seventh degree of the “father”. What does that mean? Well, if this figure represents a person of the sixth degree, his dignity meant that which descended from above and enveloped him from above. He walked around as an earthly man, but for his followers he represented not what was created by the earth, but what is created by the sun, that is, by the spiritual sun. “To consecrate” therefore means to take something away from the earth. The robe worn by the priest, if it is to be regarded as consecrated, envelops, as it were, the earthly personality; the person wearing the robe belongs to the spiritual world. There is only one exception to this, which of course was not yet present when the Persian mysteries were instituted and performed, and that is the following: In the older mysteries you will find everywhere that the act of consecration consists in calling down a heavenly being upon an earthly one. That which is impressed upon the earthly being is not present on earth. The only exception was Jesus Christ, who was present on earth and who, when celebrating Holy Communion, did not say what an old initiated priest would have said: I offer the bread as the body of the heavenly spirit, I offer the wine as the blood of the heavenly spirit. - He would, of course, have clothed it somewhat differently, because he could not have said “body” and “blood”, but “etheric body”, “etheric current” or the like, words that can no longer be heard today, but which were possible at that time in the sacred language. The only exception is what was said by Christ at the institution of the Lord's Supper: “This is my body, this is my blood.

This is radically opposed to all earlier acts of consecration. If you look at the acts of consecration of earlier times, you will have to say to yourself that these acts of consecration were based on the possibility of unearthly events having an effect on earthly events; they were therefore magical. When Christ Jesus came to Earth, He became a human being among humans, and the consequence of this is that the relationship of confession and trust in Christ Jesus now has a power that previously only existed in magical power. Thus, a human consecration ceremony is now possible, which simply begins with the words: “Let us worthily accomplish the human consecration ceremony out of the revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to Christ's deed.” An old priest would have had to say: “Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man in the revelation of extraterrestrial spirituality, in the worship of extraterrestrial spirituality, in devotion to extraterrestrial spirituality.” One must be aware of this; then one comes to feel and experience the Trinity correctly, in the Christian sense, and this is to be expressed in the relay prayer, which is then the continuation in the worthy preparation. You will see from each sentence that there is a struggle for a correct understanding of the Trinity.

I have already pointed out to you that the Gospel of John is basically not understood correctly by most theologians, because the Father God is called the “Creator” and Christ, the Logos, merely the “Savior”. But the Gospel of John expressly states: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. — The active, productive, actual Creator in the world is the Son of God, not the Father, so that the Trinity formula must express the confession of the Son of God as the Creator. God the Father must be felt as the underlying substance of all, as the underlying being of all; he must be felt in the sentence “God the Father be in us,” as the Son of God, who came to earth through Christ, is correctly understood by: “The Son of God creates in us”. This is simply the correct understanding in the sense of the Gospel of John, and such a correct understanding of the Trinity must be striven for at the beginning of every reading of the Mass.

In the consciousness of our humanity, we feel the divine Father.

There is an immediate indication of the sense of being with this “we feel the divine Father”.

He is in all that we are.

He is the underlying substance of everything.

Our substance is his substance. Our being is his being. He walks in us through all existence.

Thus, the Being in the Father is that which must be brought to consciousness. Then one proceeds to the confession of the Son-God:

In the experience of Christ in our humanity, we feel the divine Son. He reigns as the Spirit-Word through the world. He creates in everything we create. Our being is His creation.

Therefore, in so far as there is creation in us, we have come into being through the Word just as everything else has, for apart from the Word nothing of what has come into being has been created.

Our life is his creative life. He creates through us in all spiritual endeavors.

Once you have properly absorbed this into your consciousness, you can develop the right relationship with the Spirit God, the third aspect of the Godhead.

In the grasping of the spirit by our humanity, we feel the healing God. May He shine as the spirit-light through the world. May He shine in everything we behold. May our beholding be imbued with His spirit-light. May our recognition accept Him into His spirit-shining life in a pleasing way. He spiritualizes everything in our human soul.

We have seen, by first bringing the Act of Consecration of Man before our soul as a test, that the words “Christ in you” are often repeated, whereupon the acolyte says: “And fill your spirit, O Lord”. The priest turns to the congregation, and it is immediately understandable what is to be done with the pronouncing of the word “Christ in you”. As the altar server stands before the priest as the representative of the congregation, he is, so to speak, the one who indicates where the earthly plan, the earthly level begins. He speaks for the community, and the words “And may your spirit be filled” are not an order from the community, nor a wish of the community; when the words are spoken in the subjunctive, they signify that which actually comes from the community. Do you now understand the whole context and the subjunctive? What does the priest represent? The priest is only the one who represents the spirit of community within himself. In what does this spirit of community prevail in his body? In the believers who are there, in the participants of the Ecclesia. So what the community says through the altar boy is: Christ fill your spirit, the spirit of the community. Thus it is a matter of the community spirit of the congregation; it is diverted from the human and directed to the spiritual. “And may He fill your spirit.” You just have to understand this word in its subjunctive mood in the right way. Such things are quite important, and there must be an awareness of them.

When this preparation is over, the reading of the Gospel can begin in the manner indicated. The reading of the Gospel is, after all, the proclamation of the word of God by the Priest. The Catholic Church also inserts the so-called “Gloria” before the Gospel on feast days. It is entirely in the right spirit of spiritual intention that you take as little account as possible – in fact none at all – of what has only come about over time from the Roman Catholic Mass sacrifice. The progression over the course of the year must also be marked by the fact that the most important sections of the Gospel are read to the community during the year, so that, in a sense, the Gospel is divided up and the whole process from the birth of Christ to the Ascension is developed through the reading of the Gospel over the course of the year, although it is certainly possible to use one or the other Gospel. The most correct thing to do is to start at the Feast of the Nativity, at Christmas, by reading the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and then, by Christmas, to have progressed so far that, during the year, the Gospel has been covered by reading the Mass.

Regarding the further progress of the Mass, it should be noted that after transubstantiation has taken place and Communion is still to come, then the right place in the Mass is to interrupt the ritual that we read three days ago on a trial basis and insert the Lord's Prayer. Indeed, in recent times there has been a great deal of laxity in all denominations with regard to the Lord's Prayer. Originally, the Lord's Prayer is actually a compendium of the most important truths in the world, reflected through human feeling. In the Protestant confession, the Lord's Prayer is said in a way that is, I would say, not always sufficiently prepared. Just think of the solemnity of saying the Lord's Prayer when transubstantiation has preceded and the Lord's Prayer is inserted at this point. I am not saying that the Lord's Prayer should not be recited by the faithful as often as possible. But even the simplest individual prayer, such as the Lord's Prayer, is recited more reverently by the faithful - despite all the errors of the Roman Catholic Church - by the fact that the Roman Catholic hears the Lord's Prayer at an important point in the mass. This gives the whole mood in which the Lord's Prayer is prayed a certain solemn nuance. However, the Catholic Church has thoroughly dispelled this solemn nuance among the faithful by telling the penitent during confession, when a penitent has confessed his sins to the confessor, to say five Our Fathers every day as penance. This bartering of sin for the recitation of the Lord's Prayer is, of course, a terrible thing and desecrates the sacred character that the Lord's Prayer takes on during Mass and which helps it always retain its solemn tone. What the Catholic Church achieves in this respect, by speaking in Latin, a language that is incomprehensible to the faithful, can be replaced by the force with which the Lord's Prayer is spoken, because merely reciting the Lord's Prayer does not actually correspond to the grandeur of the Lord's Prayer. Although there should not be the slightest tendency to create a sense that something bordering on magic is being done – the Catholic Church has achieved this through the Latin language – it should be said that the Latin language, in a certain respect, also proves to be non-magical when it comes to nuancing the profound truths of the Lord's Prayer, which should never become trivial. It is true that there is a certain justification for the continued use of the Latin language for certain purposes that were intended to steer humanity away from the personal. But today, what could be given by the Latin language in the Lord's Prayer must be replaced by the power of speaking when praying the Lord's Prayer in front of the community. The believer must hear the Lord's Prayer during the cultic action, precisely because it is his daily prayer, in a way that goes beyond the ordinary measure of language. The Latin language has, after all, recreated the Lord's Prayer in such a way that it is, in a certain sense, a mantram:

Oremus. Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere:

Pater noster, qui es in coelis:
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also forgive those who owe us debts.
And lead us not into temptation.
But deliver us from evil.

Something must be transferred back from the Latin Lord's Prayer, which already exists in a mantric way, to the Lord's Prayer when it is prayed at the point between transubstantiation and communion during Mass. We will include these things in the Mass at the next Mass rehearsal.

Each of you will read the mass. This expresses what makes each of the priests the same as the other priest before the spiritual world. It is the highest form of democracy in spirit. Thus, what takes place in the spiritual through the formation of the community is fulfilled with the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the sense of Christianity, the ordination of a priest is actually the only form of initiation. The other religious communities that are not directly Christian, especially the old religious communities, had the degrees, the degrees within the spiritual hierarchy. In a certain sense, such degree initiations can still be introduced today; they have a good purpose. However, they cannot be introduced within a Christian community led by a Christian priesthood. Therefore, what are higher levels in the Christian priesthood are to be understood differently than as higher degrees. As priests, all stand equal. But what must enter into the church are human conditions. Within human conditions, we need a hierarchy of offices; so that where a Christian community is based on properly understood worship, “leadership” and “senior leadership” and so on relate to the order of communities on earth. This must be very carefully distinguished. The Catholic Church has not understood how to make this distinction in the right way, otherwise it should not have regarded, for example, the confirmation as a monopoly of the episcopal dignity. Every priest should be able to administer confirmation. Strict views must prevail in these matters. You see the stricter views sometimes peeping through in history, but at the same time you see confusion in history.

Our time is so far advanced in the development of mankind that you, my dear friends, cannot afford to allow confusion in this direction. For example, you will have to be very strict about the following: If we do things in such a way that a priest appears among us first as an ordained priest and he ordains the others, then in terms of ordination they all become equal to him. If he is also a superior, there is nothing superior in his conferring the ordination on the others. He confers the ordination on the others because he has already become a priest. But what is added is that with the ordination the priest is at the same time installed in office, and that is an earthly act; it is, if I may use a profane word, an administrative act; that must be added. Thus, for example, one can say: Since the one who is appointed as the highest arbiter also has an overview of how the individual priests who are to be ordained are used, it is simplest if he performs the ordinations at the same time, but as a priest he performs the ordination to the priesthood, and as the highest arbiter he establishes the office. This is reflected in history in the famous Investiture Controversy, where the way historians talk about it reveals something terribly confusing, while the distinction between secular office, secular office and incorporation into a spiritual order must be observed. It was simply not possible to properly distinguish between the conferral of the priestly dignity and the conferral of the office. You will see that if the correct understanding of these things takes hold among you from the very beginning, then you will have created a kind of cement for all your connections that would otherwise be lacking.

What I would still like to say today with regard to the reading of the Mass is that the simplicity of the four main parts should be maintained and that insertions should only be made on the most important annual feasts and on certain other occasions, which we will discuss in the next few days. So, of course, a Christmas mass must contain something special in the parts that are not the main parts, as must a Easter mass, a Pentecost mass and a mass that is said for a dead person or a mass that is seen as a somehow otherwise intended celebration.

That is what I wanted to tell you today.