[
  {
    "id": "GA057-1",
    "title": "How and Where Does One Find the Spirit?",
    "date": "15 Oct 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19081015p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "We have spoken about the facts of the spiritual life through several years. Today a new series of talks begins. Who has already taken a program knows that the objects of this year's spiritual-scientific talks span a wide range. On one side, you find talks deeply intervening in our spiritual life; however, it should also be shown how just spiritual science is destined to intervene deeply in the objects of practical life. However — this should be expressly stressed in the introduction — the point of view should be fixed today; we want to orientate ourselves especially about the spirit as such today. This talk should be introductory, orienting, and programmatic.\nIf the word “spirit” is pronounced, one points to something that, as long as there is human longing and human hope, is the aim of all human beings, of the primitive ones as well as of the high developed ones. Nevertheless, one cannot say that that which just the word spirit means attracts a deeper understanding in our days.\nToday the science of the spirit appears as the most popular and the most bewildering at the same time, because the human being cannot face the spiritual research indifferently and objectively. This question stirs up the deepest affects, the most intensive passions in our soul. The answers to these questions are relevant from the start to the human beings. If the human being looks only a little deeper into his soul, he notices that he has an opinion — even if he does not pronounce it — how the answer should turn out. All questions belonging here touch the human being in such a way that one can say, an answer can offend the one person in this way, the other person in that way. The one may feel sore just about a sober consideration; whereas the other thinks that the freedom of research or science is attacked if anybody exceeds the exact research only somewhat.\nThe characteristic of the human development has brought with it — especially since the boom of natural sciences — that today the conceivably highest confusion prevails about the view of the spirit, and especially in the circles which should foster just such a thing like the science of the spirit. If one wants to recognise something of the spirit, such a sum of fine and intimate concepts is necessary that here a confusion of ideas is extremely significant and detrimental. The modern human being is right if he turns to the fundamental principles of science first if he wants to know anything about the spirit. Then he must turn to psychology at first. It should be “the science of the soul.” It becomes soon clear just to somebody who approaches unprejudiced what one calls the science of the spirit what one understands today by the science of the spirit. Today, there is hardly anybody who speaks about these matters and does not confuse soul and mind. I want to go back to real phenomena.\nThere a book Outline of Psychology appeared before some time (1908) by a person (Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1850–1909, psychologist) who one regards as a significant expert of his discipline. It is an example how today the science of the soul is pursued. However, this is not my starting point to show which confusion of the concepts of soul and mind has happened. We read there on one of the first pages: if hypoxaemia occurs in the brain, the result is a faint, because then the mental ability stops or is reduced at least. However, a mental effort causes an influx of blood. Stimulants work on the brain via the nervous system, et cetera. — Now at first one has to point to the fact that someone who wants to bring, nevertheless, a “science of the soul” uses the expressions “soul” and “mind” or “spirit” as substantially synonymous, and is not aware of the fact that they are different things. Hence, there comes just the evil. The spiritual scientist would say, hypoxaemia and faint only paralyses the activity of the soul, however, the spiritual activity does not decrease. In addition, the activity of the soul causes influxes of the blood to the brain. Here the saying of Goethe applies that no matter is without spirit. — With faint, another spiritual activity exists, so that the soul withdraws from the brain and leaves the field to a spiritual activity different from that if the soul is present.\nModern psychology does not differentiate soul and mind. Therefore, it is important to form a clear concept of the mind first. This is very difficult. Today, people — driven by a power as it were — believe that everything is contained in material processes and want to look at the spirit only as an effect, as a consequence of the material. The spiritual researcher looks for the spirit not only in the human being, but also everywhere around us. It appears like an internal physiognomy in everything. It is spread out everywhere in the universe. No human being, no animal, no plant, no stone can be without having the spirit as basis. I like to use a picture. We imagine a water container in which the water is cooled bit by bit. Thereby ice may originate, so that we see some lumps of ice swimming in it. We imagine now that any being cannot perceive water, but only ice. There the ice would appear just only from the water; however, the being would deny the water. Everywhere only ice exists, but no water, this being would say.\nNow the human beings behave similarly to mind and matter. As well as in our picture the ice originates from the water, there the matter originates from the original, from the spirit. Matter is nothing else than compressed spirit. It appears for the sighted human being from the spirit, to somebody who cannot see from nothing. Everything in the universe is compressed spirit. If now the materialist comes and says, what you call spirit does not exist, and then his logic is in a bad way, because he is only allowed to admit, actually, that he cannot perceive the spirit. Someone who has a healthy logic should talk with such a man only about something whose existence he has admitted, so about matter. If we speak of the soul, we are never allowed to separate the concept of inwardness from it which we see best of all in the soul of the human being.\nAn example shows the difference of mind and soul best of all. We imagine that we see an event before ourselves, which makes us tremble, which frightens us, for example, shooting a gun to us. A third person who sees this feeling of fear in us is able to say only that the other had this face which is dependent, however, on the state of the person. A human being who has maybe forgotten fear would face the danger intrepidly. However, that person faces the event with fear and fright. We call that something mental that is stimulated in our inside by an external perception that way. However, for the spiritual there is no outside and no inside. What is outside is inside, too. If you check your inside, you notice that there is a transition from the mental to the spiritual that, however, a difference exists between that which we call mental and which we call spiritual. About the sensations, which rise in us, one cannot argue, because they are different with the single human beings. In the one, a world of feelings would arise at the sight of a picture by Raphael, while a primitive human being feels nothing. In between there are still all possible gradations. Here we are concerned with something mental. However, mathematics, for example, gives us something spiritual, for example, in mathematics. Nobody can understand by experience what a circle is. An inner view is necessary for it. This is so easy, but people do not understand it. We know about that which is something spiritual that everybody can experience it as we do if he creates the necessary preconditions of it only. To the same extent as we realise that we advance from an inner experience to one which is accessible to all people, to the same extent we should realise that we go over from something mental to something spiritual.\nIf we assume that the human being rises to such a height that he is able to say something about a thing of the outside world about which the human beings can agree, he rises to the concept, to the idea of the thing. Then we should realise that that is the same, which was there before the thing, according to which the thing is created. Only someone can believe that he can obtain something spiritual from a world in which no spirit exists who supposes to obtain water from a glass in which no water is. If we look at any being of the outside world, so that we open ourselves not only to the uplifting, to the beautiful, but also to the sad, if we open ourselves to the real being of the things, we must understand that we let light up in ourselves what was there before the thing, from which it has originated. Thus, the physical appears to us like a compression of the spiritual.\nMany a prejudice has its origin in the habit to imagine the outside world as something spiritless and to show the spiritual as something that the human being adds. He can only have that in his consciousness that is the effect of the outside world on him. Remember that one often says on this occasion, we can only know that a table exists, just the table in itself that has the given effects on us. — The fact that one can judge in such a way is an example that in wide circles is no understanding of the nature of spirit.\nA simple picture can show us what the centuries-long research simply slides over if one asserts that the human being knows nothing about the thing in itself. If anybody says this, it seems obvious. Physics, science generally, point repeatedly to the fact that you do not at all perceive “yellow,” for example, but only movements of the ether. They cause the yellow colour in you, just as the movements of the air the tone. You do not come out of yourself; you see only what is in you. — A simple comparison extinguishes this whole conclusion. Imagine, you have a seal and sealing wax. The name Muller is imprinted. No trace of brass has gone over from the seal to the sealing wax. However, the point is the name that has been completely transferred into the sealing wax. Now the sealing wax could also say, I know nothing about the seal, because from the outside nothing can be transferred to me. Thus, it is with science to a T. The name Muller has been completely transferred onto the sealing wax. Who states that such an effect would not be possible does not understand that there is no border between the material and the spiritual. We have to figure out more and more the fact that the spirit has to do nothing with that which is in us, but that it is outside and in us. We have to distinguish soul and mind from each other. Then we have created a basis to know that all bases of life are bases of the spirit. Psychology tries more and more to lead back the spiritual to something purely physical. However, we had to experience that the spiritual was derived from physical and purely mechanical processes! The sciences that are not intentionally materialistic today are unaware of it.\nLet us go back once again! Imagine how a faint originates from hypoxemia in the brain and thereby the soul is immobilised. We must approach this process with spiritual science. This shows us that the human being is not only this material being, which we can perceive with the external senses, but that he is a complex being. The physical body is a compression, a coarsening of something spiritual, of something finer, that there is a coarsening of the etheric body or life body at first. We see the human being literally as a water ball, which solidified partially as ice, so that the ice lump swims in the water from which it has formed like from a fine mother substance.\nIt is with the physical and etheric bodies in such a way. Matter is a form of spirit different from the spirit as such like the ice is another form of water. However, the etheric body is not yet the finest. It is the compression of the astral body. Now we have the human being already as a tripartite being. He has the physical body in common with all beings of the physical world. One can recognize the etheric body purely logically at first. If we take a rock crystal, it keeps its form, until it is destroyed from the outside. These are the essentials of the mineral. That does not apply to the plant, the animal, and the human being. We probably have the same substances in the human being, but these are so complex that the human body would break up immediately if it did not bear a fighter against the decay of the physical body in itself: this is the etheric body or life body. If the etheric body is outside, like after death, then only the physical body disintegrates. However, the etheric body or life body prevents the decay between birth and death. The human being has it in common with plant and animal, the astral body only with the animal. Here with the astral body, we have already arrived at finer and finer spiritual members, we have already come to the soul.\nSpiritual science could speak of three human members, of body, soul, and mind. However, if we pursue this more exactly, we separate into physical body, etheric body, and astral body. If we have a human being before ourselves, we have the physical body at first, as far as one can see it physically. However, we also have the etheric body, the fighter against the decay. However, this is not yet the whole human being. Already the most primitive human being knows that joy and grief, desire and pain live in him. We call the bearer of that “astral body.” Materialists could argue that this is only an effect of the physical processes, that it is nothing real.\nIf this were the case, if these processes were only an outflow of physical processes, for example, of the blood circulation, it would be a mere quibble speaking of an astral body. However, the astral is not a result of physical processes, but the processes in the nerves are the results of the astral. That which excites joy and grief, desire and pain was there sooner than the physical body. We see how in us today, so to speak, the last rests of the immediate effect of the spiritual on physical processes express themselves. I have pointed to the senses of shame and anxiety already earlier. A human being turns pale because of fear. What has happened there? On the other hand, if the human being feels: something is in me that I would like to hide — and he blushes. The sense of shame and anxiety are soul processes, soul experiences. However, they express themselves in physical processes. If we are anxious, we like to take together all forces inside, assert ourselves; the blood contracts inside, as it were. It is almost corporeal: a direction, which is unconsciously materialistic, has turned the whole process upside down.\nPragmatism, which came from America, pronounced the view: if we face a loaded gun, not the fear makes us tremble, but something that goes out from the gun makes us tremble at first. The result of it is the appearance of fear. The human being cries not because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries. Materialism plays such pranks to you. However, spiritual science shows us that everything that happens, that trickling of water, or a process which we examine under the microscope or a human being, an animal, a plant, is also an outflow of something spiritual as something mental-spiritual is the cause of fear. Thus, we find the spirit everywhere round ourselves if we are only accustomed to look at everything as a physiognomy of the spirit. Everybody can attain the spirit in this way. On the other hand, one could say, there the human being sees the spirit through the veil of the material. Is it also possible, however, to see the spirit immediately? The human being must take the word “initiation” completely seriously. Goethe made so many remarks important for spiritual science, for example: “the eye forms in the light for the light.” From indifferent organs the eyes of the human being have gradually developed. Goethe has the certainty in common with all spiritual scientists that the human being looks back at a long, long development. If there had been no light, eyes would never have come into existence. As the animals lose the ocular light in dark caves, the light has formed the eye.\nAs true as without the eyes the world is dark and sinister for the human being, it is also true that the eye is formed in the light for the light, that there would be no eyes without light. In addition, the tones conjure up the ability of hearing, the smells the ability of smelling, and so on. It was in the past that way and even now it is that way concerning the physical organs of the human being. However, it is also for the spiritual organs in such a way. One can speak only of light and colour if the organs are there; but the light is there for a long time before. In addition, it is with the spirit. It also is there already before and is capable to wake up the slumbering spiritual abilities in the human being, which then perceive the spirit as the eyes perceive the light. The spirit forms the spiritual organs as the light the eyes. Thus, the human being can develop the spiritual organs, which the spirit formed for the spirit.\nIf anything appears to us as physiognomy of the spirit, we can grow into a spiritual world there, if we have the patience to develop and to form. So spiritual science speaks of the spirit still in another way. As we get to know by the botanist, the physicist, and others, what they fathom of the secrets of the physical world, there is and there has always been spiritual science. Today, the majority of the human beings know nothing about the concealed worlds of this spiritual science. At first, this science was fostered in the mysteries, unnoticed by the remaining world. Spiritual science must come out today and announce publicly what it has to say as the physical science announces its results publicly.\nJust as the physical science uses external tools, the spiritual researcher must be his own tool. There have always been such researchers. Only somebody who develops the organs can tell how it is in the spiritual world. However, if it is pronounced, then the simple, healthy human mind suffices to understand it. Another development is only necessary to research. I would like to give you an example how by intimate processes spiritual development takes place. This way is not tumultuary. Many a human being becomes a citizen of the spiritual world, without his fellow men anticipating it. Nevertheless, large is the area that reveals us how to work on ourselves if we want to gain an insight of the spiritual world. I give an example how intimate this work is.\nThere are three levels of knowledge: at first the knowledge of the physical world, then imagination which, however, has nothing to do with speculative fiction; it leads in a certain way into the spiritual world. The inspired and intuitive worlds form the third level. One attains the imaginative level doing certain internal exercises patiently for a long time. These exercises do not deduct you from the external world, but make you more competent and more practical. However, at the same time they lead into the higher worlds.\nThere, for example, is such an instruction of a teacher to his pupil: have a look at a plant. It grows out of the ground, develops leaves, blossoms, fruits; have a look at this whole development of the plant how it develops chlorophyll, et cetera. The plant can be a model for the human being. As well as the plant is interspersed with the green colouring the human being is interspersed with the red blood. Although the plant is on a lower level than the human being is, nevertheless, it has something over him. Its substance, its matter, its chlorophyll is not interspersed with low desires and passions. The human being is no longer chaste and pure, but he had to pay his higher development with the fact that he took up desires and passions in himself. The expression of it is the red blood. Juxtapose both, and then think of the Goethean saying that is the saying of all spiritual teachers at all times:\n\nAnd so long as you don't have it, this: “Die and be transformed!” you will only be a gloomy guest on the dark earth.\n(From Blissful Longing in the West-Eastern Divan )\n\nThat is the substance, which is penetrated with desires and passions and must be purified again, so that it is raised about itself, although it is on a higher level, and becomes again chaste and pure. The blood must be again the expression of this chastity and purity. Imagine the red rose; you face the chaste red plant sap. Admittedly, it is there still a plant sap, but you may see something before yourself in the red plant sap that can be to you like the dawn of a higher development of the human being, a symbol shows this: the black cross with red roses. Become engrossed in this symbol excluding any other thought, experience in it how the human beings have to develop up to the purity of the red rose petal. If you experience this, you experience the first trace of the spirit.\nThus, always other pictures are added to this picture. These pictures are there to conjure up the spiritual organs inside of the soul. Then this comes true for the human being that he finds any rest and help in the spiritual world. Therefore, spiritual science is of such an immense significance to the external world. It is true what Novalis says: the human being is the perfect tool, if he only wants to be it. In addition: the human being lives in a spiritual world that he can perceive if he is only elastic enough to develop the necessary organs in himself. In addition, true it is what Goethe lets Faust say:\nThis spirit world is not sealed off;\nyour mind is closed, your heart is dead!\ngo, neophyte, and boldly bathe\nyour mortal breast in roseate dawn!\nGoethe spoke that way because he had recognised the spirit and wanted to put it up as a motto for all spiritual researchers."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-2",
    "title": "Goethe's Secret Revelation: Exoteric",
    "date": "22 Oct 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/TP1980/19081022p01.html",
    "book_title": "Goethe's Secret Revelation",
    "content": "Whoever follows the history of human development, not only in the usual documents and traditions, but goes rather deeper into things which though at first appearing only symptomatic of that development, really point the way to the inner and therefore true forces of evolution, will find renewed significance in a memorable scene at the end of the eighteenth century. An address based on the highest contemporary Science was given to the Natural Science Society at Jena by a very important Botanist of the day called Batsch. Two men, one some ten years older than the other, listened to this address, and it happened that they left the place together and fell into conversation. The younger said to the elder: ‘When one considers such an address, it shows once again how the scientific method of observation picks things to pieces, sets one by the side of another, and scarcely takes into consideration the homogeneous spiritual bond existing in all the different units.’ In other words it seemed wrong to the younger man that plant should be put side by side with plant without any reference to a higher something, which must also exist in the world, uniting the various plants.\nThe elder man replied: ‘It might perhaps be possible to find a method of studying nature, which goes to work differently, and which in spite of being a study which must lead to knowledge, has, as its aim, the unifying element, namely that which is absent in external observation by the various senses.’ The man took a pencil and a piece of paper from his pocket and at once drew a remarkable shape, a shape that resembled a plant, but no existing plant, to be seen or perceived by the outward physical senses, a shape which, as it were, exists nowhere and of which he said that it existed indeed in no individual plant, but was the ‘plant-hood,’ the proto-plant type which existed in all plants and represented the unifying element. The younger man looked at it and said: ‘Yes, but what you have drawn there is not an experience, not observation, that is an idea’ — having in mind that only the human spirit could form such ideas, and that such an idea had no significance for external, so-called objective nature.\nThe elder man was unable to understand this objection at all, for he replied: ‘If that is an idea, then I see my ideas with my eyes!’ He meant that just as an individual plant is visible to the external sense of sight, and is an experience, so his proto-plant, although invisible by means of an external sense, was objective, existent in the outer world, living in all plants, the archetype in all individual plants. You know that the younger of these two men was Schiller, the elder Goethe.\nThis conversation is a symptomatic, significant indication of modern spiritual science.\nWhat really prompted that reply of Goethe's to Schiller? There spoke in him the consciousness that one does not only grasp an external objective truth with that representation given by the external sense, and furnished by a limited understanding from external sense-perceptions, but that the human being, when he sets in motion higher spiritual forces, which are not applied to separate sense-observations, arrives at truth and reality just as one does by means of external sense perceptions.\nWe may well say that Schiller, who at that moment was incapable of realizing what lay behind, when he believed that Goethe had made his drawing in terms of subjectivity, has left us the finest testimony of man's capacity to scale the heights as revealed to him by Goethe. From that moment we see Schiller's ever increasing comprehension of Goethe's ideas. A letter of his provides a psychological document of the first importance, where he says: ‘For a long time, although from a distance, I have watched the progress of your spirit with ever renewed admiration, and noticed the path you have set yourself. You seek the necessity of nature, but on the most difficult road, from which indeed any weaker power would draw back. You take all nature as one in order to obtain light on each separate part, and you seek the explanation of the individual in the “all” of its phenomena. You ascend from the simple organism, step by step to the more complex, in order finally to erect genetically from the materials of all nature's structure the most complex of all, the human being. You seek to penetrate into his hidden technique, by re-creating him in the manner of nature. A great and truly heroic idea which sufficiently shows to what extent your spirit holds together the rich totality of its conceptions in a beautiful unity.’\nThus we may regard as a testimony to the objectivity of Goethe's idea-world that which in his consciousness brought forth such a reply, and which Schiller later confirmed in this letter.\nIt is remarkable that Heinroth, a psychologist who lived in the twenties of the nineteenth century and is to-day forgotten, uttered a very significant phrase about Goethe in his Anthropology, which is really a psychology — one of those phrases which are significant through their application, and throw great light on what they are meant to illumine. He used the phrase, speaking of Goethe's whole method of approach, ‘objective thinking’ and he enlarged upon the phrase by saying: Goethe's thinking is a quite peculiar thinking, really inseparable from the objectivity of things, resting quietly in objects, in which it is raised to ideas.\nNow whoever is able to look into Goethe's whole spiritual organism — as we shall to-day and the day after tomorrow, when we shall try to penetrate still deeper into this question, when we shall consider more inwardly what we are to have presented to us to-day outwardly — will see that in this thought he adheres to facts without stopping merely at the surface of things and the experience of the senses, and finds within these facts the spiritual, the world of ideas. We see that for this reason Goethe's thought has become so important for a large part of our modern human development. We may say that there is something exceedingly remarkable in this effect of Goethe's spirit on the most diverse types of people, on the most varied views even on the different successive epochs.\nLet us consider for a moment the point at issue and we shall see what unique results Goethe's spiritual standard has in fact produced. If we take three philosophers of German spiritual life, who are quite different from each other in their points of view, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer, we find from a study of their mutual relationships and of their relationships to Goethe something quite remarkable about Goethe's influence on history. Fichte reveals himself as a thinker, wandering on remote heights, especially when he had finished his Foundation of Science at Jena in 1792. It is difficult to rise to an understanding of Fichte's peculiarity, it is difficult to penetrate to him, although everyone who has succeeded must admit that he has gained food for spiritual discipline from him to an extraordinary degree. But it is not for every man to ascend to such spheres of the purest concept. Fichte, who wandered on these heights of abstraction, particularly at that moment, sent his work to Goethe with the following significant words: ‘I see and have always seen in you the purest representative at the present stage of humanity of the spirituality of feeling. To your feeling therefore, philosophy rightly turns. The spirituality of your feeling is the normal standard for philosophy.’ Thus Fichte to Goethe.\nLet us look now at another philosopher, at Schopenhauer, and let us see first how Schopenhauer stood to Fichte. They were, in truth, a hostile pair — at least Schopenhauer was very hostile to Fichte. Schopenhauer never wearied of abusing Fichte. To him he is a windbag, thinking and writing empty ideas. He repeatedly emphasizes how unreal and meaningless Fichte's philosophy is. In fact there could not be a greater contrast than these two. And Schopenhauer indeed went to Goethe to be taught. For a time he experimented together with Goethe in order to learn the fundamental physical concepts, and a good deal in his first work, and even in his chief work is derived from the impression Goethe made on him. If you know Schopenhauer, you know also with what homage he spoke of Goethe. Schopenhauer and Fichte — two great contrasts unite in Goethe, and he seems like the unifying force of each.\nLet us take finally Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegel is also difficult to reach with the understanding. He tries to create a fact-world of concepts in a comprehensive, systematic frame, and demands that man should lift himself to a stage where he grasps concept as fact, where he is capable of experiencing it directly. Schopenhauer finds in this something entirely worthless, merely a playing with abstract words. If we wish to know Hegel's relation to Goethe, we need mention only one instance and we shall see how they stand. There is a beautiful letter in which Hegel writes: ‘Goethe seeks behind the sense-revelations the actual spiritual phenomena, which he calls the proto-phenomena, as he calls the proto-plant the proto-phenomenon of the vegetable world. While he speaks from the heights of the spiritual world as philosopher and shows us what we can think and comprehend, he works himself on the other hand up to the point where he comes into touch with spirit-created thoughts. Thus Goethe's proto-phenomenon is united with what the pure, thinking philosophy derives from above.’\nHere also we see a harmony between Hegel and Goethe, as between Goethe and Schopenhauer. In Goethe they find themselves united. And when we proceed from these older times to our own, what do we find?\nIn Goethe's lifetime research in Natural Science was different. More than then the only right method of strict Science to-day is considered to be a research relying on external sense-observations and the formal working out by the mind of what is limited by the obscuration of the results thus obtained. But a Haeckel, as he shows in every book, is determined to stand on the firm ground of Goethean world-conception, and so we see a more materialistically coloured philosophy emphasizing the importance of relying on Goetheanistic world-conception. You can find books to-day written on a basis for which the spirit is an absolute reality in the highest sense of the word, and in them you can trace the debt to Goethe. Spiritualistic and materialistic students can fight from opposite camps, but both believe they may look up to Goethe in the same way. He thus provides something which bridges the gulf between opponents.\nThese facts testify to the force of Goethe's world-conception, a force which has such an influence on others that though they do not understand each other, they find something in Goethe which they have themselves. Perhaps some of you know how widely apart Virchow and Haeckel stood from each other. But Virchow also, who saw eye to eye with Haeckel in so few things, has in an important address on Goethe equally found support in him. So in Goethe we see a power, which, in face of all the contradictions and struggles of world-conceptions, is able to show, that things are not what these representatives of science consider, and for which they so stubbornly fight.\nIt is just when you consider the relation of these important people to Goethe, that you realize that it is the same towards what is called knowledge as it is with different painters, sitting round a mountain, and painting it from different points of view. The resultant pictures must also of course be different, though it is the same mountain they paint. You will get a comprehensive idea of the mountain only by comparing the various representations with each other and compounding them into a whole. If you put yourself in the same position with regard to knowledge, you will see that Goethe does not select a single point of view, but rather scales the mountain and shows that it is possible to take up a position on the summit and there to find a comprehensive panorama, in which all views are revealed in their deeper consistency or interconnection.\nIt is this which makes Goethe's spirit so eminently modern, and if in plunging deep into Goethe we get the feeling that he appears to us a modern, it will be a sufficient justification if in our frequent studies here of spiritual science and a world-conception based on the spiritual, we consider what he did and wanted to do as a kind of invitation to penetrate deeper into his nature. If he is a stimulating spirit in so many respects, why should he not also be a stimulant for that spiritual tendency (Spiritual Stream) one of whose highest and most beautiful aims is a tolerant investigation into the different standpoints of world-conceptions, and which makes it a principle not to stand still on one fixed point, but, in order to find truth, to climb ever higher and higher by means of methods applied to inner development and growth of inner organs of perception, because thus alone can one see the deeper spiritual foundations? We shall now consider how far Goethe coincides with the deepest feelings of modern mankind on a narrowly limited subject. As an example we shall choose a feeling many of you know, which can be described by saying that there are many people to-day who strive to throw overboard old traditions, and create feelings, thoughts and ideas which lead direct to the present time. You will see at once what I mean when I remind you of a picture which many to-day cherish. You can take what attitude you like to the picture, but it is an expression of the contemporary age. I refer to the picture: ‘Komm, Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast’ — ‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ The picture lives not only in its creator, but also in those who would enjoy it; they feel the longing to see the figure of Jesus in their immediate presence, as is represented near the table. One might say that the picture has not only value for this age, but for all ages, that it is there eternally and cannot pass away and that every age has the right to put this figure into its own epoch. These few words alone will indicate the feeling which many have towards this picture.\nNow one might believe that in these things Goethe belonged still to the ancients — a conclusion one would draw from his preference for the old art, with its old, sound, artistic traditions, and his preference for the Greeks; one might believe Goethe had no understanding of the emotion expressed in this picture — ‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ In order to get a glance into Goethe's soul let us refer to a book by Bossi on Leonardo da Vinci's ‘Last Supper.’ Goethe wrote a criticism of this book, and in it there are significant words. Of this picture which is in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie cloister at Milan and in spite of recent restoration looks as if it would soon disappear, Goethe relates how he stood in front of it at a time when it still had a certain freshness. He describes the impression which he once got from this picture in his youth: ‘Opposite the entrance in the narrower wall, in the body of the hall stood the Prior's table, on each side the monks' tables, all raised from the floor on a dais, and now when you had come in and turned round, you saw the fourth table painted on the fourth wall, above the fairly low doors; and at it Christ and His Disciples, just as if they belonged to the company.’ — He, summoned by the Dominicans in their sense and in their place, with the emotional thought ‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ The whole, says Goethe, made a unified picture. And not to leave any doubt as to his meaning he adds: ‘It must have been a significant sight at meal-times, when the tables of the Prior and of Christ looked across at each other like two opposite pictures and the monks found themselves in between. And therefore the painter in his wisdom had to take the monks' tables as his model. And it is certain the table-cloth with its creases, its striped pattern and its open corners, was taken from the linen-room of the Cloister, and the dishes, plates, mugs and other utensils were copied from those the monks used. There was thus no question of approximation to an uncertain, old-fashioned costume. It would have been extremely clumsy to have made the Holy Company lie on cushions. No, it had to resemble the present; Christ was to take his Evening Meal with the Dominicans of Milan.’\nAnd now let us ask whether Goethe had this understanding which we must call a modern understanding. He had it in that comprehensive manner which is another proof of how universal his powers are as against the sometimes one-sided powers which mutually exclude and fight each other.\nWe must put ourselves into Goethe's soul in this way and then we shall understand why Goethe stands so close to us and why we look up to him whenever the current attitude to deeper spiritual questions is under discussion. It was his deep consciousness that it is possible for man to awake in himself spiritual organs in order to ascend to higher conceptions, and thereby to gain something which not merely lives in the human spirit, but at the same time lies deeper.\nWere it possible to enter upon Goethe's scientific studies, as you will find them discussed in detail in my book, Goethe's World-Conception , we should be able to show the working of his whole method. But to-day we want to approach him from another side. Goethe has expressed things here and there which indicate the deep foundation of his philosophy. We shall have to speak of this in the last two addresses of this winter's cycle on ‘Faust.’ [See note on publications at end of book. {There is none! - e.Ed}] He once said to Eckermann concerning Faust, that he had drawn him in such a way that the reader who is content only with externals has some satisfaction in the colourful scenes, but that he can also find behind the words the secrets which lie there. Here Goethe is pointing out in Part II that we have to differentiate between the external and the inner essential secret meaning. In accordance with ancient custom we describe the external as the exoteric and the other as the esoteric.\nNow we shall approach Goethe by considering to-day in an external, exoteric way a work in which he expressed his whole ‘methodical thinking and willing;’ and the day after tomorrow we shall consider it esoterically.\nIt is a comparatively unknown little work of Goethe's to which we must go if we want to look into his deepest secrets of knowledge — we merely describe them as such. It is the little piece at the end of the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants,’ under the title, ‘Legends,’ from which the reader, if he strives to get Goethe's world-conception, will get the feeling that Goethe wishes to say more in it than appears from the scenes. For the thoughtful student this ‘Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’ will provide riddle after riddle.\nAnd now allow me to explain the chief features of this story, for I cannot talk about it unless we recall the important points, if we are to look more deeply into Goethe's philosophy. We shall therefore have to give a moment to the content of this little work; and after that we shall understand each other better in what we shall have to say. I have often had it said to me when I have lectured on this story, ‘I never knew there was a “legend” in Goethe's works;’ and so I repeat that it is contained in every edition of Goethe and constitutes the ending of the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants.’\nNow to the scenes. A Ferryman lives by a River and to him come remarkable forms — Will-o'-the-Wisps. They want to be put across to the other side by the Ferryman in his boat. The Ferryman agrees to take them across. On the way they behave in a curious manner; they are restless and fidgety, so that he is afraid they will upset the boat. But they arrive safely and then they propose to pay him in an odd way. They shake themselves and golden pieces fall from them, and they are the reward for his trouble in taking them over. The Ferryman is not enthusiastic about the golden pieces and says: ‘It is a good thing that nothing has fallen into the river, for it would have surged up wildly. I cannot take this payment; I can be paid only with the fruits of nature.’ And he demands three Onions, three Artichokes and three Cabbages. They had to pay with fruits of the earth. We shall soon see what deep significance every point and every fact has.\nThe Ferryman continues: ‘Now you give me the extra trouble of taking down the river the golden pieces you've thrown about and I must bury them.’ Wherefore he takes them actually a short way downstream and buries them in the crevices of the earth. When they have been thus buried, another remarkable being comes along to them — the Green Snake, who crawls in and on and about the earth and through its crevices. Suddenly she sees the pieces of gold falling down through the cracks of the earth and thinks at first they are falling from Heaven. She therefore devours them and becomes, by thus taking the golden pieces into her own body, more and more luminous. As she comes to the surface she notices that she gives off a peculiar light in a marvellous manner and gleams like emerald and precious stones.\nNow the Snake and the Will-o'-the-Wisps come together, the latter still shaking themselves and throwing away what they shake out, the Snake, having acquired a taste for gold, taking up and swallowing what the others throw about. The conversation between them is significant. The Snake calls herself a relative of the Will-o'-the-Wisps in a horizontal line, the Will-o'-the-Wisps call themselves relations of the Snake in a vertical line. They ask the Snake moreover if she could not inform them how to come to the Beautiful Lily. ‘Oh,’ says the Snake, ‘the Beautiful Lily is on the other side of the River.’ ‘Well, then we've done a fine thing,’ answer the Will-o'-the-Wisps, ‘we've just had a lift across because we wanted to come to the Beautiful Lily. If we could only find a Ferryman who would ferry us back again!’ And now follow very important words. ‘You will not find the Ferryman again, and if you did, be certain that he may indeed take you across, but not back again. If you want to get to the other side of the River, there are only two ways. Either you try at noon, when the sun is at its highest, to find a bridge over my own body, in order to cross’ — The Will-o'-the-Wisps say, ‘We do not like journeying at midday’ — ‘Or you use the second way; for there is another possibility. At dusk you will find the huge Giant at a certain place. He has no strength in him, but when he stretches out his hand and its shadow falls across the river, you can cross over on the shadow. The shadow gives enough support to walk over on it. So if at midday you will not cross over me, you must find the Giant.’\nThe Will-o'-the-Wisps let themselves be told this, but the Snake has returned into the crevices, rejoicing in her increasing light-giving power through swallowing the gold.\nAnd now the Snake notices something extremely odd. On descending again into the earth, she notices that where she had formerly found metals and so on, she now sees remarkable forms. Before, she had perceived them only through the sense of touch; now, being luminous, she can also see the things. She was able to feel pillars and also shapes like human beings, but till then she never really knew what there was in the underground caves. Now she enters again and her radiating light serves to illuminate everything.\nOn entering this large cavern under the earth, the Snake can at once perceive that there are four kingly figures standing in the four corners: a Golden King, a Silver King, a Brazen King, and in the fourth corner a Mixed King, put together in the gayest manner of all kinds of other metals.\nThe moment the Snake enters the cavern and lights up the figures, the Golden King puts the very significant question: ‘Whence comest thou?’\n‘From the crevices, where the gold lives,’ answers the Snake.\n‘What is more splendid than gold?’ asks the Golden King.\n‘Light,’ is the Snake's reply.\nThe King asks further: ‘What is more comforting than Light?’\n‘Speech.’\nNo one will doubt that these words are not meant to give just pictures, but that they also have a significant content.\nAs the Snake enters the cavern a crack opens in the Temple where the four Kings live and there enters the Old Man with the Lamp. He is asked why he comes at that moment, whereupon he says the remarkable words: ‘Do you not know that my lamp may illumine only what is already illumined? that I may not lighten the Darkness?’ After the Snake has lit up the objects in the room he may also come in with his wonderworking Lamp.\nNow a conversation takes place between the Kings and the Old Man with the Lamp. He is asked:\n‘How many secrets do you know?’\n‘Three,’ he answers.\n‘Which is the most important?’ asks the Silver King.\n‘The open one,’ replies the Old Man.\n‘Will you open it also to us?’ asks the Brazen King.\n‘As soon as I know the Fourth.’\nAnd now come the most significant words of the whole story:\n‘I know the Fourth,’ said the Snake, and whispers something into his ear; whereupon the Old Man with a great voice cries out:\n‘The time is at hand!’\nThere are a great number of attempts to solve the riddles of this story, and many people have tried to explain in one way or another what was felt to be a riddle even in Goethe's and Schiller's time. It is characteristic that Goethe and Schiller agreed about it and pronounced it explicitly in the words: the word that solves the story is in the story itself. So the solution has to be sought in the story itself, and in the course of my address it will be found to be so, though in a remarkable way. The Snake whispers something into the Old Man's ear, and what is whispered, but not spoken, is the solution of the riddle. The Old Man then says: ‘The time is at hand!’ So what we have to find out is what the Snake whispered to the Old Man in the subterranean Temple.\nThe Old Man now proceeds to the dwelling-place of his Wife. Through the power of the Lamp's light the most diverse materials are metamorphosed: stones into Gold, wood into Silver, dead animals into Precious Stones, but Metals are destroyed. He finds his Wife in an almost unconscious state. When he asks what has happened, she says: ‘There were quite extraordinary people here. One might have taken them for Will-o'-the-Wisps. They behaved pretty badly.’ ‘Well,’ says the Old Man: ‘considering your age, no doubt they were decently polite.’ Then she relates how the Will-o'-the-Wisps went for the Gold and licked it, so that they could shake it out again. ‘If it had been no worse than that — but just look at the Pug-dog. He ate of the golden pieces, was changed into precious stone, and died. Now he's dead,’ the Old Woman continues: ‘Had I known this before, I should not have promised them to pay their debt to the Ferryman, namely, three Cabbages, three Onions and three Artichokes.’\n‘Well,’ says the Old Man, ‘take the Pug-dog and carry him to the Beautiful Lily, who has the quality of being able to change precious stone into life by touching it.’ So she takes the three times three fruits, to pay off the debt she has undertaken to the Ferryman, and takes the Pug-dog as well.\nNow we come to a very significant point in the story. As she carries the basket, it seems unusually heavy, although anything dead has no weight for her; the basket with the dead dog alone would be no heavier than if it were empty; the living things, the Cabbages, Onions and Artichokes alone weigh down the basket. On the road to the Ferryman, another singular thing happens to her. The Giant holds his arm so that its shadow falls across the River, seizes one Cabbage, one Artichoke and one Onion out of the basket and devours them, so that she has now only two of each kind left. She proposes therefore to pay off only a part of the debt to the Ferryman. But he says that it is absolutely necessary to bring the whole of it at one time.\nAfter considerable argument the Ferryman says there is a possible way out, namely, if she goes bail for the production of the three missing fruits. She must therefore put her hand into the river, as security that she will keep her promise. This she does, but notices that her hand as far as it is immersed in the River has become black and smaller. ‘Now it only looks like it,’ said the Old Ferryman, ‘but if you do not keep your word, it might become a fact. The hand will gradually dwindle and finally disappear, but without your losing the use of it. You will be able to do everything with it, but no one will see it.’ She prefers, however, to have a visible hand, even if it is useless. If she brings the tribute at the agreed time, the Ferryman says everything will be all right.\nOn the way to the Beautiful Lily, she meets a handsome Youth, who, however, as he says, has lost all his former power and strength, and we learn from their conversation how this has happened. The Youth had conceived the active desire to reach the Beautiful Lily. She had become his Ideal. But her lovely eyes had such a baneful effect that they deprived him of all his strength, and still he was ever attracted to her.\nAt length the two come to the Beautiful Lily. Everything, indeed, that surrounds her is highly indicative, but we can now select only a few points. The Beautiful Lily is the image of most perfect Beauty, but her touch possesses the power of killing everything that lives, and restoring to life everything that has gone through life and died.\nThe Old Woman now presents her requests. The Youth has come to satisfy his longing for the Beautiful Lily, but we see that she also feels a longing: she feels herself cut off from all living fruitfulness; in her garden flourish flowers, but only to the point of bloom, not to that of fruit; beautiful she is, but far from all life. The Old Woman then says something significant: she repeats what the Man in the subterranean Temple had said and that gives the Lily new hope. It was indeed the last moment in which she could receive any hope, for she had lost the last living thing, which had been a sort of link between her and the living. She had had a Canary in her neighbourhood, and had taken great care not to disturb it, since that would have killed it. But a Hawk had come near, the Canary fled from it and flew up against the Lily and was killed. And so the Beautiful Lily was reduced to complete spiritual loneliness and isolation from all that human beings have.\nThe Old Woman now gives the Pug to the Lily. The Lily touches him and thereby restores him to life. The Youth tries to calm his longing by embracing the Lily and thereby he is killed. Life is completely annihilated in him.\nThe Snake next forms a Magic Circle; and the Youth and the Canary are put inside it. By this means — and the Snake points this out significantly — what is hopeless is to be quickly altered, and in fact it is so. We learn that the Old Man with the Lamp now approaches and that through him a solution of the whole situation can be actually attempted. For there is still just time when he arrives; the bodies of the Canary and the Youth have not yet begun to decay.\nThe Old Man leads them towards the subterranean Temple, which the Snake had already reconnoitred. He says to the Will-o'-the-Wisps: ‘You are also there to help us. When we come to the Gates of the Temple, you will have to be the ones to unlock them.’ The Snake makes a bridge over the River and the whole company proceeds over it. Then we see, when they have arrived on the other side, that through the contact with the Snake, who now decides to sacrifice herself, the Youth becomes alive again, though not yet in possession of his spirit. And because the Snake is prepared to sacrifice herself, the Youth is translated into a remarkable state. He can see, but cannot understand what he sees. The Snake divides up into numerous wonderful precious stones, which the Old Man sinks in the River and thereby a bridge is formed over it. The procession moves on under the guidance of the Old Man into the subterranean Temple. As they enter we see that questions full of meaning are exchanged between the newcomers and the Kings. For instance: ‘Whence come ye?’ ‘From the World.’ ‘Whither are ye going?’ ‘Into the World.’ ‘What do ye want with us?’ ‘You to accompany!’ (i.e. the Kings.)\nNow the group, with the Temple, begins to move. They go under the River and rise again, with the whole Temple, on the other side, and as when they have risen something that looks like woodwork falls into the Temple. It is the Ferryman's Hut. It changes and becomes a small Temple inside the large one. And now takes place a scene which is important for the Youth, who, you remember was until now alive, but not spiritualized.\nWe have seen that the first, the Golden King, represents Wisdom; the second or Silver one, Illusion, Semblance or Beauty; the third Brazen one, Strength or the Will. We now see a symbolic act taking place. The Youth is presented with three different gifts by the three Kings; the Brazen King with the Sword, accompanied by the significant words: ‘The Sword on the left hand, the right free,’ — Will-power. From the Silver King he receives the Sceptre, with the words, — ‘Tend the Sheep.’ We shall see that the Youth is filled with the feeling of the soul, which expresses itself in Beauty. The Golden King sets the Crown on his head, saying: ‘Recognize, Realize the Highest.’ And the power of imaginative thought enters the Youth. At this instant he is spiritualized, he gains his spirit and may be united with the Beautiful Lily. We are then also told that everything is made young.\nWhat is still specially significant is the part played by the Giant, who has no strength in himself, but in his shadow. He staggers clumsily over the bridge and the King is indignant about it. But it turns out that the Giant's coming has a good meaning. Like the pointer of a great Sun-dial, he is held fast in the middle of the Temple Court. We see what strength we find in the Sun-dial, in the Giant pointing to and harmonizing Time, and we see how the bridge leading to the Temple across the River is made out of the Snake's body. We see also that not only pedestrians, but carts, horsemen and herds can cross to and fro. We are shown how the Youth, on being united with the Beautiful Lily, regains the strength of which her touch had deprived him, how he may now come near to her and embrace her and how happy and blessed they both are.\nWho would not say, when he studies the scenes of the fairy tale: ‘These are riddles!’ For the moment we can get only a slight idea of what there is in this legend. But if we proceed historically, if we consider that it arose in the middle of the year 1800 at the beginning of his friendship with Schiller and what took place between Goethe and Schiller, we shall understand what Goethe set out to do in this story.\nTo this period belongs the production of a work, the fruit of a study of Goethe's world-conception, which became deeply important for the education and cultivation of German spiritual life; Schiller's letters on ‘The Æsthetic Education of Man.’ We can only outline Schiller's intentions in these letters.\nHe asks himself the question how man can succeed in developing his powers higher and higher, so that he can, in a free and perfectly human manner, penetrate the secrets of the world. This work is written in letter-form to the Duke of Augustenburg, and Schiller wrote this significant sentence in it: ‘Every individual human being, one may say, carries in him according to inclination and his destiny, a pure, ideal person, to find agreement with whose unchangeable unity in all its variations is the great task of his existence.’ And then Schiller tries to examine the means whereby man has to develop himself upwards to the higher stages of human existence.\nThere are two things that chain man and prevent a free view of the secrets of existence. One is the control by the senses, and the other is the insufficient development of the Reason. And Schiller explains these things thus: Take a person who is unaware of the compelling, logical part of concepts, or even the concept of duty, and follows only his inclinations and instincts. He cannot freely develop the powers of his nature, he is caught in the slavery of impulses, desires and instincts; he is unfree. But he also is not free who struggles with his desires, impulses and instincts, and follows only a purely conceptual and logical necessity of reason. Such a person becomes the slave either of the necessity of nature or the necessity of reason.\nBy what means can a man develop his inner powers? Schiller answers that he must develop his inner, divine states, strive to cleanse and purify them and make them correspond with what we call logic. When his impulses and instincts are purified so that he does willingly what he considers his duty, when the necessity of reason is no longer felt as compelling, then a man will act reasonably from force of habit, for then reason has led him down to the senses and the senses led him up again to reason.\nConsider a man looking at a work of art. He sees something of the senses: but through every sense organ there is revealed to him something spiritual, for in the physical is expressed the spiritual which the artist has put into his work. Spirit and physical senses in the contemplation of beauty — these become the intermediaries. So art, life in beauty, becomes for Schiller a great means of education, a means of aesthetic education, a freeing of nature, so that it can unfold its own powers.\nHow, therefore, does a man develop himself in Schiller's sense? He must guide his nature down so that it proves true in physical nature, and train the sense up, so that it prove true in rational nature. Goethe uttered wonderful words concerning these letters: ‘Their effect on me is to show what I always lived or wished to live.’\nIt can be proved that Goethe was stimulated to write his fairy tale by Schiller's words in his aesthetic letters. Goethe expresses the same thing in it, in his own way. He did not wish to express the riddles of the soul in abstract ideas. For him they were too rich and too important to be grasped by natural necessity and in logic. Hence the need grew up in him to personify the different powers of the soul in the figures of his story. Goethe answers Schiller's question in this story and we shall see how wonderfully his psychology is revealed in it. We see in the presentation of the Will-o'-the-Wisps how the soul is always taking in and giving out, how certain powers are personified in the Snake, which works only on the ground like human research, human reason, and experience, which remain in the horizontal plane, while the idealist climbs to the heights. The power of the religious mood is characterized in the Old Man with the Lamp, and finally we see by means of the narrative events how Goethe shows the way in which each soul-power must work.\nWe shall see the day after tomorrow that Goethe shows how each soul-power must work together with the others, in order to formulate a complete picture of the soul, so that it can develop itself to human perfection, embracing all things. When man tries to grasp knowledge, but is immature, he is killed, like the Youth. There is such a thing as maturing towards knowledge. In the ‘Fairy Tale’ Goethe presents the evolution of the soul in a correct and pictorial way, by creating a parallel work to Schiller's ‘Æsthetic Letters.’ Goethe was aware that there is a goal for the development of the human soul, which in ancient times was called the ‘initiation into higher secrets.’ He knew such a thing is possible and that there are societies which develop the soul in secret places, in the Temples of Initiation. He shows also that humanity in the newer age must make it more and more possible to attain this Initiation, to develop the soul, and in larger spheres. He shows in the events that take place between the separate people, the progress of initiation up to the highest stages, to the point where the soul is capable of grasping the highest secrets. This is viewed exoterically, and purely historically.\nBy living with Goethe, Schiller experienced what Goethe had done in one of the most important periods of his life. And if Schiller had some difficulty in understanding Goethe, we must admit that what one said in an abstract answer in the Æsthetic Letters, and what the other had to say in a much more comprehensive way, in a way which is attained only by expressing oneself in scenes and persons, is one and the same thing. The Fairy Tale is Goethe-psychology in the deepest sense. We see that Goethe has become so fruitful through this method of his aspiration, that we still gladly take him as guide to-day. He still seems to us a man of the present. We read him as a writer of our time. He is so fruitful, because he has so much that belongs to all time in his work and his whole method. Thus his influence is consistent with that truth which he himself considered the real one, and he once uttered significant words when he said: ‘That which is fruitful alone is true.’\nThe meaning is that man must acquire such truths that when he enters upon life, they find confirmation by proving themselves fruitful. That was his criterion of truth: ‘That which is fruitful alone is true.’\nThese addresses, which are meant to bring Goethe nearer, ought to show us that he tested this saying himself, and those who go deeper into him will feel this. You will feel that there is something of genuine truth in Goethe, for he is fruitful, and what is fruitful is true."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-3",
    "title": "Goethe's Secret Revelation: Esoteric",
    "date": "24 Oct 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/TP1980/19081024p01.html",
    "book_title": "Goethe's Secret Revelation",
    "content": "The objection might easily be raised to an address such as this to-day that symbolic and allegoric meanings are forced out of something which a poet has created in the free play of his imaginative fancy. The day before yesterday we set ourselves the task to explore the deeper meaning of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,’ as it was then presented to our eyes. It will always happen that such an analysis or explanation of a work of fantasy will be turned down with the remark: ‘Oh, all sorts of symbols and meanings with profound applications are looked for in the figures of the work.’ Therefore I want to say at once that what I shall say to-day has nothing whatever to do with the symbolic and allegoric interpretations often made by Theosophists about legends or poetic works. And because I know that again and again the objection has been made to similar explanations which I have given: ‘We are not going to be caught by such symbolic meanings of poetic figures,’ I cannot stress the fact sufficiently that what is to be said here must be taken in no other sense than the following. We have before us a poetic work, a work of comprehensive imaginative power or fantasy, that goes to the depths of things: ‘The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.’ We may well be allowed the question, whether we may approach the work from any particular point of view, and attempt to find the basic idea, the true content of this so poetic a product.\nWe see the plant before us. Man goes to it and examines the laws, the inner regularity, by which the plant grows and flourishes, by which it unfolds its nature bit by bit. Has the botanist, or even someone who is no botanist, but arranges the growth of the plant in his imagination, the right to do it? Can one object: the plant knows nothing of the laws you are discovering, the laws of its growth and development! This objection against the botanist or the lyric poet who expresses the sensations derived from the plant in his poetry would have the same weight as the objection one could bring against such an explanation of Goethe's story. I do not want things to be taken as if I were to say to you: There we have a Snake, which means this or that, there we have a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, who stand for this or that. I do not intend to expound the story in this symbolic, allegoric sense, but more in such a way that as the plant grows according to laws of which it is itself unconscious, and as the botanist has the right to discover these laws of its growth, one must also say to oneself that it does not follow that the poet Goethe was consciously aware of the explanations which I shall give you. For it is as true that we must consider the inevitability, and the true ideal content of the story as it is that we discover the laws of the plant's growth; that the plant grows in accordance with the same inevitability which originated it, though it is itself unconscious of it.\nSo I ask you to take what I shall say as if it presented the sense and the spirit of Goethe's methods of thought and idea-conception and as if he who, as it were, feels himself called upon to put before you the ideal philosophy of Goethe, were justified — that you might find a way to it — in expounding the product of Goethe's invention, in emphasizing the figures, and in pointing out their correlation — just as the botanist demonstrates that the plant grows in accordance with laws he has discovered.\nGoethe's psychology or soul-philosophy, namely, what he considers determinative for the nature of the soul, is illustrated in his beautiful Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and if we are to understand each other in what I have to say it will be a good thing if, in a preliminary study, we make the spirit of his soul-world clear. It has been already pointed out in the previous address that the world-conception represented here starts from the view that human knowledge is not to be looked upon as something stationary once for all. The view is widely held that man is as he is to-day, and being what he is he can give unequivocal judgment on all things; he observes the world with his sense-organs, takes in its phenomena, combines them with his reason, which is bound to his senses, and the result is an absolute knowledge of the world which must be valid for all. On the other side — but only in a certain way — stands the spiritual scientific world-conception which is represented here. This starts from the premise that what is to become our knowledge is continually dependent on our organs and our capacity for knowledge and that we ourselves are, as men, capable of development; that we can work on ourselves, and raise higher such capabilities as we have on a given level of existence. It holds that we can educate them, and they can be developed still further, even as man has developed himself from an imperfect state to his present position, and that we must come to a deeper penetration of things, and a more correct view of the world by rising to higher standards. To put it more clearly, if also more trivially: if we leave out altogether a development of humanity and look only at people as they are around us; and then turn our eyes on those men whom one reckons as belonging to primitive races in the history of civilization, and if we ask ourselves what they can know of the laws of the world around us and compare it with what an average European with some ideas of science can know of the world, we shall see there is a great difference between the two. Take, for instance, an African negro's picture of the world and that, let us say, of an European monist, who has a sense of reality through having absorbed a number of the scientific ideas of the present age: the two are entirely dissimilar.\nBut on the other hand Spiritual Science is far from depreciating the world-picture of the man who takes his stand on pure materialism, and from declaring it invalid. It is more true to say that in these things it is considered that in every case a man's world-picture corresponds to a stage in human evolution, and that man is able to increase the capabilities in him and to discover by means of the increase other new things.\nIt lies thus in the purview of Spiritual Science that man reaches ever higher knowledge by developing himself, and what he experiences in the process is objective world-content, which he did not see before because he was not capable of seeing it. Spiritual Science is therefore different from other one-sided world-conceptions, whether spiritualistic, or materialistic, because it does not recognize an absolute, unchangeable truth, but only a wisdom and truth belonging to a given stage of evolution. Thus it adheres to Goethe's saying: ‘Man has really always only his own truth, and it is always the same.’ It is always the same because what we instil into ourselves through our power of learning, viz., the objective, is the same.\nNow how does man succeed in developing the capabilities and powers that lie in him? One may say that Spiritual Science is as old as human thought. It always took the view that man has before him the ideal of a certain knowledge-perfection, the object of his aspiration. The principle contained in this was always called the ‘principle of initiation.’ This initiation means nothing other than increasing the powers of man to ever higher stages of knowledge, and thereby attaining deeper insight into the nature of the world around him. Goethe stood completely and all his life long, one may say, on this principle of development towards knowledge, this principle of initiation; which is shown us most particularly in his Fairy Tale.\nWe shall understand each other most easily if we proceed from the view which is held most often and most widely to-day, and which is to a certain extent in opposition to the initiation-principle.\nTo-day one can hear in the widest circles those people who think about such things and believe themselves to have an opinion on them representing, more or less consciously, the point of view that in what concerns truth and objective reality only physical observation, or objects of physical observation can be decisive in formulating ideas. You will constantly hear it: that alone can be Science which is based on the objective foundation of observation, and by this one understands so frequently is meant only the observation of the senses and the application of the human reason and capacity to formulate thoughts to these sense-observations. Every one of you knows that the capacity to formulate ideas and concepts is a capacity of the human soul among other capacities and every one of you also knows that these other capacities of the soul are our feeling and our will. Thus, even with this comparative superficial review, we may say: man is not merely an ideating, but also a feeling and willing being. Now those who think they must put forward the purely scientific point of view will always repeat: in science, only the power of thought may enter, never human feeling, never what we know as will-impulses, for otherwise that which is objective would become clouded, and that which the power of thought might achieve by being kept impersonal, would only be prejudiced.\nIt is correct enough that when a man introduces his feeling, his sympathy or antipathy, into the object of a scientific enquiry, he finds it repulsive or attractive, sympathetic or antipathetic. And where should we be if he were to consider his desire as a source of knowledge, so that he could say about a thing, I want it or I do not want it? Whether it displeases or pleases you, whether you desire it or not, is entirely the same to the thing. As true as it is that he who believes himself able to stand on the firm ground of science can confine himself only to externals, so true it is that the thing itself compels you to say it is red, and that the impression you get concerning the nature of a stone is the correct one. But it does not lie in the nature of the thing that it appears to you ugly or beautiful, that you desire it or not. That it appears to you red has an objective reason; that you do not desire it has no objective reason.\nIn a certain respect modern psychology has got beyond the point of view just described. It is not my task here to speak for or against that tendency of modern psychology which says: ‘When we consider psychic phenomena and the soul-life, we must not confine ourselves only to intellectualism, we must regard man not merely in what concerns the power of conception, we must also consider the influences of the world of feeling and will.’ Perhaps some of you know that this belongs to Wundt's system of philosophy, which takes the will to be the origin of soul-activity. In a way that is in some respects fundamental, whether one agrees with it or not, the Russian psychologist Losski has pointed out the control of the will in human soul-life, in his last book called ‘Intuitivism.’ I could say much to you if I wanted to show how concerned the theory of the soul is to overcome the one-sidedness of intellectualism, and if further, I wanted to show you that the other powers also play a part in human soul-power.\nIf you carry the thought a step further, you will be able to say that this shows how impossible the demand is that the power of formulating ideas, limited as it is to observation, may lead to objective results in science. When science itself shows its impossibility, shows that everywhere Will plays a part, on what grounds would you then establish the purely objective observation of anything? Because you prefer to recognize only matter as objective, subject as you are to the tricks played by the will and your habits of thought, and because you have not the habit of thought and feeling to recognize also the spiritual element in things, therefore you omit the latter altogether in your theories. It is not a question, if we want to understand the world, of what kind of abstract ideals we set before us, but of what we can accomplish in our souls.\nGoethe belongs to those people who reject the principle most categorically that knowledge is produced only through the thinking capacity, the one-sided capacity to form ideas. The prominent and significant principle expressed more or less clearly in Goethe's nature is that he considers that all the powers of the human soul must function if man is to unravel the riddles of the world.\nNow we must not be one-sided and unjust. It is quite correct, when the objection is raised that feeling and will are qualities subjected to the personal characteristics of a man, and when it is asked where we should come to if not only what the eyes see and the microscope shows, but also what feeling and will dictate were considered as attributes of things! All the same that is just what we have to say in order to understand someone who, like Goethe, stands for the principle of initiation and development, namely, that, given the average feeling and will in man to-day, they cannot be applied to the acquirement of knowledge, that, in fact they would lead only to an absolute disharmony in their knowledge. One man wants this, the other that, according to the subjective needs of feeling and will. But the man who stands on the ground of initiation is also quite clear that of the powers of the human soul — thinking, representation, feeling, will — the capacity to construct thoughts and to think has advanced furthest, and is most inclined and adapted to exclude the personal element and to attain objectivity. For that soul-power which is expressed in intellectualism is now so advanced that when men rely upon it, they quarrel least, and agree most in what they say. Feeling and will have not had the chance of being developed to this point. We can also justifiably find differences when we examine the region of ideas and their representation. There are regions of the idea-life which give us completely objective truths, which men have recognized as such, quite apart from external experience, and these truths are the same if a million people differ in their opinions about them. If you have experienced in yourself the reasons for it, you are able to assert the truth even if a million people think otherwise. For instance, everyone can find such truths confirmed as those dealing with numbers and space dimension. Everyone can understand that 3 x 3 = 9, and it is so, even if a million people contradict it. Why is this the case? Because regarding such truths such as mathematical truths, most people have succeeded in suppressing their preference and their aversion, their sympathy and their antipathy, in short, the personal factor, and letting the matter speak for itself. This exclusion of the personal in the case of thought and the capacity to formulate ideas has always been called the ‘purification’ of the human soul, and considered the first stage on the way to initiation, or, as one might also say, on the way to higher knowledge.\nThe man who is versed in these things says to himself: It is not only with regard to feeling and the will that people are not yet so far that nothing personal enters into it, and that they can verify objectivity, but also with regard to thought the majority are not yet so far as to be able to give themselves up purely to what the things, the ideas of the things themselves say to him, as everyone can in mathematics. But there are methods of purifying thought to such a point that we no longer think personally, but let the thoughts in us think, as we let mathematical thought do. Thus, when we have cleansed thought from the influences of personality, we speak of purification or catharsis, as it was called in the old Eleusinian mysteries. Hence man must reach the point of purifying his thinking, which then enables him to comprehend things with objective thought.\nNow, just as this is possible, so is it also possible to eliminate all the personal factor from feeling, so that the appeal of things to the feelings has no longer any say, to the Personal, or to Sympathy and Antipathy; nothing but the nature of the thing is evoked, in so far as it cannot speak to mere concept capacity. Experiences in our souls which have their roots or origin in our feelings, and which therefore lead to inner knowledge, and lead deeper into the nature of a thing, speaking however to other sides of the soul than mere intellectualism, can be purified of the personal element as well as thought, so that feeling can transmit the same objectivity as thought can. This cleansing or development of the feelings is called in all esoteric doctrine ‘enlightenment.’ Every man capable of development, and striving after it in no casual way, (that lies in intention of the personality) must take pains to be stirred only by what lies in the nature of the thing. When he has reached the point where the thing rouses in him neither sympathy nor antipathy, where he allows only the nature of things to speak, so that he says: whatever sympathies or antipathies I have are immaterial and are not to be taken into consideration, then it lies in the nature of the thing that the thought and action of the man assume this or that direction — then it is a declaration of the innermost nature of the thing. In esoteric doctrine this development of the will has been called ‘consummation.’\nIf a man takes his stand on the ground of spiritual science, he says to himself: ‘If I have a thing in front of me, there is in it a spiritual element, and I can so stimulate my mode of conception, that the essence of the thing is represented objectively through my concepts and ideas. Hence there is present in me the same thing that works externally, and I have recognized the essence of the thing through my mode of conception. But what I have recognized is only a part of the essence.’ There exists in things something which can speak not to thought at all, but only to feeling, and indeed only to purified feeling or to feeling which has become objective. The man who has not yet developed in himself by this cultivation of the feelings such a part of the essence, cannot recognize the essence along these lines. But for the man who says to himself that feeling as well as the capacity to think can provide a basis of knowledge (not the feeling as it is, but as it can become by means of well-founded methods of the teaching of cognition) for such a man it becomes gradually clear that there are things deeper than thought possibilities, things which speak to one's soul and the feelings. There are also things which reach even down to the will.\nNow Goethe was particularly convinced that this really is the case, and that man really has in him these possibilities of development. He stood firmly on the ground of the principle of initiation, and he has shown us the initiation of man through the development of his soul and the development of the three powers of will, feeling and thought by representing them in his Fairy Tale.\nThe Golden King represents the initiation for the thought-capacity, the Silver King represents the initiation with knowledge capacity of objective feeling, and the Brazen King the initiation for knowledge capacity of the will. Goethe has emphasized that man must overcome certain things if he wishes to receive these three gifts. The Youth in the story represents man in his struggle for the highest. As Schiller in his Æsthetic Letters depicts man's aspiration towards complete humanity, so Goethe depicts in the Youth man's aspiration for the highest, wanting straight away to reach the Beautiful Lily, and attaining then inner human perfection, given him by the three Kings.\nHow that happens is pointed out in the course of the story. You remember that in the subterranean Temple, into which the Snake looks because of the earth's power of crystallization, one King was in each of the four corners. In the first was the Golden, in the second the Silver, in the third the Brazen King. In the fourth was the King who was a mixture of the other three metals, in whom, therefore, the three composite parts were so welded that one could not distinguish them. In this fourth King, Goethe depicts for us the representative of that stage of human development in which will, thought and feeling are mixed together. In other words he stands for that human soul which is governed by will, thought and feeling, because it is itself not master of these three capacities. On the other hand in the Youth, after he receives the three gifts from the three Kings separately, so that they are no longer chaotically mixed, that stage of knowledge is represented which does not allow itself to be ruled by thought, feeling and will, but which, on the contrary, rules over them. Man is ruled by them as long as they flow chaotically and intermingled in him, as long as they are not pure and independent in his soul. Until man has reached this separation, he is not capable of being effective through his three knowledge-capacities. When he has reached this point, however, he is no longer the subject of Chaos, but on the contrary himself controls his thought, his feeling and his will, when each is as pure and unalloyed as the metal of the respective Kings: his mode of Conception, pure as the Golden King (for nothing is mixed in him); his mode of Feeling, where nothing is added or mixed, but pure as the Silver King; and so too the Will, pure as the brass of the Brazen King; Concepts and Feelings no longer govern him, for he stands, in his nature, free; he is capable, in a word, of comprehension by means of thought, of feeling and will as required, making use of each separately. He can grasp according to necessity and the nature of things either by means of thinking, feeling or willing. Then he has advanced so far that the whole pure knowledge-capacity which we see in thought, feeling and will, leads him to a deeper insight, and he really steeps himself in the current of events, in the inner nature of things. Of course only experience can teach that this is possible.\nNow it will not be difficult to agree, after what I said just now, that if Goethe makes the Youth represent striving mankind, we may see in the Beautiful Lily another soul-condition, namely, that soul-condition which man attains when the beings lying in things spring forth in the soul, and he thereby raises his existence by blending the things in himself with the nature of things in the external world. What man experiences in his soul by growing out of himself, by becoming master of the powers of the soul, victor over the chaos in his soul; what man then experiences, that inner blessedness, that unity with things; their awakening in him, is shown us by Goethe in his representation of the union with the Beautiful Lily. Beauty here is not merely aesthetic beauty, but a quality of man brought to a certain stage of perfection. So that we shall also now find it easy to understand why Goethe makes the Youth proceed in his effort to reach the Beautiful Lily, in such a way that all his powers at first disappear. Why is this?\nWe understand Goethe's presentation of such a scene if we hold fast to a thought he once expressed: ‘Everything which gives us mastery over ourselves without liberating us, leads us into error.’ Man must first be free, he must reach the point of being master of his inner soul-powers, and then he can attain union with the highest soul-condition, with the Beautiful Lily. But if he sets out to attain it unprepared, with still immature powers, they are lost and his soul is shrivelled. Hence Goethe points out that the Youth seeks this liberation which will make him captain of his soul. The moment his soul-powers are no longer chaotic, but are purified, cleansed and ordered, he is ready to reach that condition of soul which is symbolized by his union with the Beautiful Lily.\nSo we see that Goethe constructs these figures in free creative fantasy, and if we look upon them as representing soul-powers, we see that they permeate and work in his whole soul. If we look upon them like this, if we are as sensitive to these figures as in a way Goethe was — Goethe who unlike a second-rate didactic poet was not content to say what this or that soul-quality meant, but used it to express what he felt himself, then we shall realize what is expressed in these poetic figures. And therefore the various figures stand in the same personal relationship to each other as the soul-powers of a man stand to each other.\nIt cannot be clearly enough insisted upon that there is no question of the characters meaning this or that. That is certainly not the case. Rather is it that Goethe felt this or that in this or that soul-activity and transformed his feelings in connection with one or the other soul-activity into one or the other figures.\nThus he created the sequence of the story's events, which is still more important than the figures themselves. We see the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the Green Snake, and that the former cross over from the other side of the river and reveal quite peculiar qualities. They absorb the gold greedily, even lick it from the walls of the Old Man's room, and then throw it about prodigally. The same gold which in the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a sign of worthlessness, as we are also shown by the fact that the Ferryman has to refuse it — otherwise the river would surge up 1 and the waves rear up like horses — aufbäumen . Ed. — the Ferryman may take only fruits in payment — this gold — what effect does it have in the body of the Green Snake? The Snake, after taking it, becomes internally luminous! And the plants and other things round her are also lit up because she takes into herself what in the case of the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a symbol of worthlessness.\nBut a certain importance is ascribed even to them. You know that the Old Man at the critical moment calls upon the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the Temple gates, so that the whole train can enter in. Precisely the same thing which happens here in the case of the Green Snake, is to be found in the human soul, a thing we came across particularly clearly two days ago in the conversation between Goethe and Schiller. We saw that Schiller, as he spoke with Goethe about the way in which nature should be regarded, was still of the opinion that the drawing with a few strokes by Goethe of the proto-plant was an idea, an abstraction, which one receives when one omits the differentiating features and puts together the common ones. And we saw that Goethe thereupon said that if that was an idea, then he saw his ideas with his eyes. At this moment there were two quite different realities in opposition. Schiller trained himself completely to take Goethe's way of looking at things; so that it shows no lack of honour to Schiller if he is taken as an example of that human soul which moves in abstractions, and preferably in those ideas of things which are comprehended by the mere reason. That is a particular inclination of the soul, which, if a man wishes to attain a higher development, can, in certain circumstances, play a very dangerous part.\nThere are people whose inclination lies in the direction of the abstract. Now when they combine this abstraction with something they come across as soul-power, this is, as a rule, the concept of unproductivity. These people are sometimes very acute, they can draw fine distinctions, and connect this or that concept wonderfully. But you also often find with such a soul-condition, that the spiritual influences, inspirations, are excluded. This soul-condition, characterized by unproductivity and abstraction, is represented to us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps. They take up the gold wherever they find it; they lack any inventive faculty, are unproductive and can grasp no ‘ideas.’ These ideas are alien to them. They have not the will unselfishly to yield themselves up to things, or to stick to facts or to use concepts only as far as they are interpreters of facts. All they care about is to stuff their reasons full of concepts, and then scatter them about prodigally. They are like a man who goes to libraries, collects wisdom there, and takes it in and then gives it out again correspondingly. These Will-o'-the-Wisps are typical of that soul-capacity which is never able to grasp a single literary thought, or feeling, but which can nevertheless grasp in beautiful forms what creative spirits have produced in literature. I do not mean to say anything against this kind of soul. If a man did not have it nor cultivated it when he was insufficiently endowed with it, he would lack something which must be present when it comes to the real capacity for knowledge. In his picture of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the whole circumstances in which they appear and act, Goethe shows the manner in which such a soul-type functions, in relation to other soul-types, how it harms and benefits. In truth, if someone wanted to climb to higher stages of knowledge and had not this faculty of soul, there would not be the means to open the Temple for him. Goethe shows the advantages equally with the drawbacks of this soul-condition. What he gives us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps represents a soul-element. The moment it wants to lead an independent life in one direction or another, it becomes harmful. This abstraction leads to a critical faculty which makes men learn everything indeed, but incapable of further development, because the productive element is missing in them. But Goethe also clearly shows how far there is value in what the Will-o'-the-Wisps represent. What they contain can become something valuable; in the Snake the Will-o'-the-Wisps' gold turns to something valuable in so far as she illumines the objects round about her.\nWhat lives in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, when worked out in another way, will become extremely fruitful in the human soul. When man strives so to regard his experiences of concepts and ideas and ideal creations not as something abstract in themselves, but as capable of leading to and interpreting the realities round him, so that he thinks as selflessly and willingly of his observations as of the abstract quality of the concepts, then he is as regards this soul-power in the same position as the Green Snake: then he can produce light and wisdom out of the purely abstract concepts. Then he is not brought to be in the vertical line which loses all connection and relation to the horizontal plane. The Will-o'-the-Wisps are the Snake's relatives, but of the vertical line. The gold-pieces fall through the rocks, are absorbed by the Snake which thereby becomes inwardly luminous. He who approaches the things themselves with these concepts absorbs wisdom.\nGoethe gives us also an example of how one is to work on the conceptions ( Begriffe ). He has the conception of the proto-plant. Primarily it is an abstract conception, which, were it worked out in the abstract, would become an empty picture, killing all life, as the gold, thrown down by the Will-o'-the-Wisps, killed the Pug-dog. But just think what Goethe does with the conception of the proto-plant. If we follow him on his Italian journey, we see that this conception is only the ‘leit-motif’ going from plant to plant, from being to being. He takes the conception, goes from it over to the plant, and sees how this is made in one or another shape, taking on quite different shapes, in lower or higher places, and so on. Now he follows from step to step how the spiritual reality or form creeps into every physical form. He himself creeps about like the Snake in the crevices of the earth. Thus for Goethe the conception-world is nothing else but that which can be spun into objective reality. The Snake for him is the representative of that soul-power which does not struggle upward selfishly to higher regions of existence in an attempt to raise itself above everything, but which continually and patiently lets the conception be verified by observation, patiently goes from experience to experience. When man not merely theorizes, not merely lives in the conceptions, but applies them to life and experience, then he is as far as this soul-power is concerned, in the position of the Snake. This is so in a very wide sense. He who takes philosophy not as a theory, but as what it is meant to be, he who regards the conceptions of spiritual science as exercises for life, knows that just such conceptions, even the highest, are meant to be applied in such a way that they merge into life and are verified by daily experience. The man who has learnt a few conceptions but is incapable of applying them to life is like a man who has learned a cooking-book by heart, but cannot cook. As the gold is a means to throw light on things, so Goethe illuminates the things round him by means of his ideas.\nThis is the instructive and grand thing about Goethe's attitude to Science, and his every effort, that his ideas and conceptions have reality and have the effect of lighting up all objects round him. The day before yesterday special importance was laid on the universality in Goethe which gives the reason why we never have the feeling: that is Goethe's ‘meaning.’ He stands there, and when we see him, we find only that we understand things better which before were not so clear. For this reason he was capable of becoming the point of agreement between two hostile brethren, as we saw the day before yesterday.\nIf we wanted to discuss every feature in this fairy tale and characterize every figure in it, I should have to speak not for three hours but for three weeks on it. So I can give you only the deeper principles contained in the story. But every feature shows us something of Goethe's method of thought and his opinion of the world.\nThose soul-powers which are represented in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the Green Snake and in the Kings, are on one side of the River. On the other side lives the Beautiful Lily, the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect life and work. We heard from the Ferryman that he can bring the people ( gestalten , forms) from the other side to this, but can take no one back again. Let us apply this to our whole soul-mood or soul-condition and our improvement.\nWe find ourselves on earth as beings with souls. These or the other soul-capacities work upon us as talents, as more or less developed soul-powers. They are in us; but we have also something else in us. In us human beings if we take ourselves properly there is the feeling, the knowledge that the powers of our soul, which finally interpret the nature of things to us, are closely related to the elemental spirits ( grundgeister ) of the world, with the Creative, Spiritual forces. The longing for these creative forces is the longing for the Beautiful Lily. Thus we know that everything derived on one hand from the Beautiful Lily, strives on the other to return to her. Unknown forces unmastered by us have brought us from the world on the other side over the river-boundary to this side. But these forces, characterized by the Ferryman, and working in the depths of unconscious nature, cannot take us back again, for otherwise man would return, without his work and co-operation, to the kingdom of the divine, precisely as he came over. The forces which as unconscious nature-forces have brought us over into the kingdom of struggling humanity, may not lead us back again. For this other forces are required; and Goethe is aware of it. But he wants to show also how man must set about being able to re-unite with the Beautiful Lily. There are two ways. One leads over the Green Snake; we can cross by it and gradually find the kingdom of the spirit. The other way goes across the Giant's shadow. We are shown that the Giant, otherwise without strength, stretches out his hand at dusk, and its shadow falls across the River. The second road leads over this shadow. Whoever wishes therefore to cross by clear daylight to the kingdom of the spirit must use the way provided by the Snake; and whoever wishes to cross at dusk can use the way leading across the Giant's shadow. Those are the two ways to reach a spiritual picture of the world. The man who aspires to the spiritual world — not with human concepts and ideas, not with those forces which are symbolized by the worthless gold (as spirits of bare sophistry) and the Will-o'-the-Wisps — but by proceeding patiently and selflessly from experience to experience, succeeds in reaching the other bank in full sunlight.\nGoethe knows that real research does not stop at material things, but must lead over beyond the boundary; beyond the river which separates us from the spiritual. But there is another way, a way for undeveloped people, who do not want to take the road of knowledge, but a way represented by the Giant. He himself is powerless, only his shadow has a certain strength. Now what is powerless in a true sense? Take all the conditions possible to man when his consciousness is reduced, as in hypnotism, somnambulism and even dream-conditions; everything by which the clear consciousness of day is subdued, whereby man is subject to lower soul-power than in clear consciousness, belongs to this second way. Here the soul, by surrendering its ordinary daily functional power of the soul, is led into the real kingdom of the spirit. The soul, however, does not itself become capable of crossing into the spiritual kingdom, but remains unconscious and is carried across like the Shadow into the kingdom of spirit. Goethe includes in the forces represented by the Giant's shadow everything which functions unconsciously and from habit, without the soul-powers which are active during clear consciousness taking part. Schiller, who was initiated into Goethe's meaning, once, at the time of the great upheavals in Western Europe, wrote to Goethe: ‘I rejoice that you have not been roughly caught in the shadow of the giant.’ What did he mean? He meant that had Goethe travelled further West, he would have been caught in the revolutionary forces of the West.\nThen we see that the objects of man's quest, the height of knowledge, is represented in the ‘Temple.’ The Temple represents a higher stage of man's evolution. Goethe nowadays would say that if the Temple is something hidden, it is under the narrow crevices of the earth. Such an aspiring soul-force as is represented in the Snake can feel the shape of the Temple only dimly. By absorbing the ideal, the gold, she can illumine this shape, but fundamentally the Temple can be there to-day only as a subterranean secret. But though Goethe leaves the Temple as something subterranean for external culture, he points out that to a further-developed man this secret must be unlocked. In this he indicates the current of Spiritual Science which to-day has already caught up wide masses of people, which in a comprehensive sense seeks to make popular the content of Spiritual Science, of the principle of initiation, and of the Temple's secret. The Youth is therefore to be regarded in this truly free Goethean sense as the representative of aspiring mankind. Therefore the Temple is to rise beyond the River, so that not only a few individuals who seek illumination can cross and re-cross, but so that all people can cross the River by the bridge. Goethe, in the Temple of Initiation above the earth puts before us a future state, which will have arrived when man can go from the kingdom of the senses into the kingdom of the spiritual, and from the kingdom of the spiritual into the kingdom of the senses.\nHow is this attained in the Fairy Tale? Because the real secret of it is fulfilled. The solution of the story is to be found in the story itself, says Schiller, but he has also pointed out that the word that solves it is inserted in a very remarkable way. You remember the Old Man with the Lamp, which illuminates only where there is already light? Now, who is this Old Man, and what is the Lamp? What is its curious light? The Old Man stands above the situation. His lamp has the peculiar quality of changing things, wood into silver, stone into gold. It has also the quality of shining only where there is already a receptivity, a definite kind of light. As the Old Man enters the subterranean Temple he is asked how many secrets he knows. ‘Three,’ he replies. To the Silver King's question, ‘Which is the most important,’ he answers: ‘The open one.’ And when the Brazen King asks whether he would tell it them also, he says: ‘As soon as I know the fourth.’ Whereupon the Snake whispers something in his ear and he says at once:\n‘The Time is at Hand.’\nThe solution of the riddle is what the Snake whispered in the Old Man's ear, and we have to find out what that is. It would lead us too far to say at length what the three secrets mean. I shall only hint at it. There are three Kingdoms which in evolution are so to speak stationary: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal Kingdoms, which are completed, as compared with progressive man, who is still developing. The inner development of man is so vehement and important that it cannot be confused with the development of the other three nature kingdoms. What the secret of the Old Man contains is the fact that one Kingdom of nature has arrived at the present point of a full-stop, and this is what explains the laws of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. But now comes the fourth kingdom, that of man, the secret which is to be revealed in the human soul. The secret which the Old Man must first discover, is of this kind. And how must he discover it? He knows of what it consists, but the Snake has to tell him first. This indicates to ns that man has still to go through something special, if he wants to attain the goal of evolution as the three other kingdoms have done. What this is the Snake whispers to the Old Man. She tells how a certain soul-power must be developed, if a higher stage is to be reached; she says that she has the will to sacrifice herself for this, and she does in fact sacrifice herself. Hitherto she has made a bridge when here and there someone wished to cross; but now she will become a permanent bridge, by falling in pieces, so that man will have a lasting connection between this side and that, between the spiritual and the physical. That the Snake has the will to sacrifice herself must be taken as the condition of revealing the fourth secret. The moment the Old Man hears that the Snake will sacrifice herself, he can even say: ‘The time is at hand!’ It is that soul-power which adheres to the external. And the way to be trodden is not to make this soul-force and inner science the ultimate end but self-surrender. That really is a secret, even if it is called an ‘open secret,’ that is, when any who will can know it. What is regarded in a wide circle as end in itself — everything we can learn in natural science, in political science of civilization, in history, in mathematics and all other sciences can never be an absolute end. We can never come to a true insight into the depths of the world, if we consider them as ends in themselves. Only if we are at all times ready to absorb them and regard them as means, which we offer as a bridge to let us cross over, do we come to real knowledge. We bar ourselves off from the higher, true knowledge unless we are also ready to sacrifice ourselves. Man will get an idea of what initiation is only when he ceases to carve for himself a world-conception out of external-physical concepts. He must be all feeling, with all-attuned soul, such a soul as Goethe describes in his ‘Westöstlichen Divan’ as the highest acquisition of man:\n‘And so long thou hast not this, Death and Birth! Thou art but a sorry guest, on this dark Earth.’\nDeath and Birth! Learn to know what life can offer, go through with it, but surpass, transcend yourself. Let it become a bridge for you, and you will wake up in a higher life and be one with the essence of things, when you no longer live in the illusion that, cut off from the higher ego, you can exhaust the essence of things. When Goethe speaks of the sacrifice of the idea and the soul-material, in order to acquire new life in higher spheres, and of the deepest inner love, he likes to think of the words of the mystic Jacob Böhme, who knows from experience this self-surrender of the Snake. Perhaps Jacob Böhme has pointed out just this to him and made it so clear to him that a man can live, even in the physical body, in a world which otherwise he would tread only after death, in the world of the eternal, the spiritual. Jacob Böhme knew also that it depends on the man, whether he can, in the higher sense, slide over into the spiritual world. He shows it in the saying: ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ A significant saying! Man, who does not die before he dies, that is, who does not develop in himself the eternal, the inner kernel of being, will not be in a position, when he dies, to find again the spiritual kernel in himself. The eternal is in us. We must develop it in the body, so that we may find it outside the body. ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ So it is also with the other sentence: ‘And so death is the root of all life.’\nThus we see that the things of the soul can only illumine a place where light already is: the Lamp of the Old Man can only shine where there is already light. Once more our attention is directed to those special soul-powers, of devotion and religious self-surrender, which for hundreds and thousands of years have brought the message of spiritual worlds to those who could not seek the light by way of Science or otherwise. The light of the different religious revelations is represented in the Old Man, who has this light. But to him who does not bring an inner light to meet the sense of religion, the Lamp of Religion gives no light. It can shine only where light already is and meets it. It is the Lamp which has transfigured man, which has led all mortality across to a life of soul.\nAnd then we see that the two Kingdoms are united through the Snake's sacrifice. After it goes, so to say, through incidents symbolic of what man has to go through in his higher development in an esoteric sense, we see how the Temple of Knowledge is brought by means of all the three human soul-powers across the river, how it rises and each soul-power performs its service. This is meant to show that the soul-powers must be in harmony, since we are told: the single personality can achieve nothing; but when all work together at a favourable moment, when the strong and the weak co-operate in the right relationship, then the soul can acquire the ability to reach the highest state, the union with the Beautiful Lily. Then the Temple moves out of the hidden crevices up to the surface for all who strive in truth after knowledge and wisdom. The Youth is endowed with the knowledge-powers of thought by the Golden King: ‘Know and recognize the highest.’ He is endowed with the knowledge-powers of feeling by the Silver King, which Goethe expresses beautifully with the words: ‘Tend the sheep!’\nIn feeling are rooted art and religion, and for Goethe both were a unity — already at the time when he wrote on his Italian journey concerning Italy's works of art: ‘There is necessity, there is God!’\nBut there is also the doing — when man does not apply it to the struggle for existence, but when he makes it into a weapon for gaining beauty and wisdom. This is contained in the words spoken by the Brazen King to the Youth: ‘The Sword in the left hand, the right free!’ There is a whole world in these words. The right hand free to work the self out of human nature.\nAnd what happens with the Fourth King, in whom all three elements are mingled together? This mixed King melts into a grotesque figure. The Will-o'-the-Wisps come and lick what gold there is off him: man's soul-powers here still want to examine what sort of stages of human development, now overcome, there once were.\nLet us take yet another feature: namely, when the Giant comes staggering in and then stands there like a statue, pointing to the hours: when man has brought his life into harmony, then the subordinate has a meaning for what is intended to be methodical order. It ought to express itself like a habit. The unconscious itself will then receive a valuable meaning. Hence the Giant is depicted like a clock.\nThe Old Man with the Lamp is married to the Old Woman. This Old Woman represents to us nothing else but the healthy, understanding human soul-power, which does not penetrate into high regions of spiritual abstractions, but which handles everything healthily and practically, as, for instance, in religion, represented by the Old Man with the Lamp. She is the one to bring the Ferryman his pay: three heads of cabbage, three onions and three artichokes. Such a stage of development has not passed beyond the contemporary. That she is so treated by the Will-o'-the-Wisps is no doubt a reflected picture of how abstract minds look down with a certain amount of scorn on people who take things in directly by instinct or intuition.\nEvery point, every turn of this story is of deep significance, and if we enter into one more explanation, it must be of an esoteric kind, and you will find that one can really only give the method of explanation. Bury yourselves in the story, and you will discover that a whole world is to be found there, very much more than it has been possible to indicate to-day.\nI should like to show you in two examples how much Goethe's spiritual world-view runs through his whole life, how in things of spiritual knowledge he stands in agreement in extreme old age with what he had written earlier.\nWhile Goethe wrote ‘Faust’ he adopted a certain attitude which harks back to a symbol of a deeper evolution-path of nature. When Faust speaks of his father, who was an alchemist, and had taken over the old doctrines credulously, but had misunderstood them, he says that his father also made\n‘... a Lion red, a wooer daring, Within the Lily's tepid bath espoused.’\nFaust I , Scene II, p. 32.\nThat is what Faust says, without knowing its significance. But such a saying can become a ladder leading to high stages of development. In the Fairy Tale Goethe shows in the Youth the human being striving for the highest bride, and that with which he is to be united he calls the Beautiful Lily. You notice this Lily is to be found already in the first parts of ‘Faust.’\nAnd, again, the very nerve of Goethe's philosophy which found expression in his Fairy Tale, is to be found also in ‘Faust:’ in Part II, in the Mystic Chorus, where Faust confronts the entry into the spiritual world, where Goethe sets down his avowal of a spiritual world-conception in monumental words. He shows there how the ascent on the road of knowledge follows in three successive stages, namely, the purification of the thought, the illumination of feeling and the working out of will. What man attains through the purification of the thought leads him to recognize the spiritual behind everything. The physical becomes a symbol of the spiritual. He goes deeper still, in order to grasp what is unattainable to thought. He then reaches a state at which he no longer regards things by means of thought, but is directed into the thing itself, where the essence of it, and what one cannot describe become accomplished fact. And that which one cannot describe, that which, as you will hear in the course of the winter addresses, must be thought of in another way, that whereby one must advance to the secrets of the will, he labels simply ‘the indescribable.’ When man has completed the threefold road through thought, feeling and will, he is united with what is called ‘eternal womanhood’ in the Chorus Mysticus, the goal of the human soul's development, the ‘Beautiful Lily’ of the Fairy Tale.\nThus we see that Goethe utters his deepest conviction, his secret revelation there also, where he brings his great confessional poem to an end, after rising up through thought and feeling and will to union with the Beautiful Lily, up to that state which finds its expression in the passage of the Chorus Mysticus, which expresses the same thing as Goethe's philosophy and spiritual science, as well as the Fairy Tale:\n‘All things transitory But as symbols are sent: Earth's insufficiency Here grows to Event: The Indescribable, Here it is done: The Woman-Soul leadeth us Upward and on!’"
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-4",
    "title": "The Bible and Wisdom",
    "date": "12 Nov 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19081112p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "There is in our culture certainly no document that has intervened so deeply and so intensively in the whole spiritual life as the Bible. One would have to write a history, not of centuries, but of millennia if one wanted to describe the effect of the Bible on humankind. If one completely wanted to refrain from the influence of this document on the mainstream, one would still find something immeasurable in the Bible concerning the influence and the deep effects on the human soul. Certainly, one may say that just our modern time presents exceptionally many things, because one could show that today not only those who stand on the ground of the Bible are deeply influenced by this human document, but also that those who have turned away from the Bible are subject to its influence. For the Bible is really not only a document, although it is it in the most particular measure, because it fulfils the soul with a sum of images about the world and life giving the soul a worldview, but the Bible was, for millennia, an enormous means of education of the souls.\nIt has meant something not only to the imagination, and means something to it even today, but it is maybe important and more essential what we must regard as an effect on the emotional life, on the ways of thinking. There we must often admit today that the Bible only developed the emotions, the sensations of those who combat the Bible.\nBut who looks around only a little at the spiritual life of humankind, in particular at that of our western humankind and that which is connected with it, that will note what an immense reversal has taken place concerning the position of humankind or, at least, of a big part of humankind to the Bible.\nThose who stand still firmly on the ground of the Bible today could maybe think too little of that to which is pointed with it. They could say, even if there may be some people who turn away from the Bible who state that the Bible can no longer be that for humankind what it was for millennia, it is presumably only a temporary phenomenon. We believe in the Bible; whatever the gentlemen say who believe to stand on the ground of science, it may seem to them fantastic — we rely on the Bible! One could find this judgment among certain personalities very much common, and it is only a matter of course. For someone who is still able to take the happiness, the certainty and the strength of his soul from the Bible cannot put enough in the balance according to his character against those phenomena that exist around him as criticism and refusal of the Bible.\nHowever, such a judgment would be rather careless. It would be even selfish in a certain way, for the human being — if he pronounces such a judgment — says to himself: the Bible gives me this or that; whether it gives the same to other human beings, I do not care about. — Such a human being does not pay attention to the fact that humankind is a whole. What single human beings experience, think and feel at first flows down into the whole humankind and becomes common property.\nSomebody who says, I do not want to hear what the critics and the scholars say about the Bible today, I do not care about it judges only for himself. He does not remember whether also his descendants, whether those human beings who follow him can have the chance to gain such a satisfaction from this document if criticism and science are about to take this document away from humankind. The power of the authorities who are involved in the life of this document is big and strong. It means, actually, to act blind and deaf towards that which goes forward round one if one wants to start only from the just characterised point of view of naive faith, undeterred faith. Today one has to hear what can shake the respect and the meaning of this human document with our fellow men. The shock, the radical changes that took place in the course of the last centuries with reference to this document are enormous.\nStill a few centuries ago, the Bible was believed to be something that enjoyed unconditional authority; it was believed to be of higher divine origin. This belief, this assumption is shaken long-since and will be shaken more and more by always new reasons. At first, neither our modern science nor the present natural sciences turned against the old view of the Bible. Already more than hundred years ago, the more materialistic way of thinking — we are allowed to use the expression, because we have often explained it here — considered the Bible from the purely external point of view. We speak about the Old Testament first. For centuries, it was believed to be — like the New Testament — an inspiration of higher powers. It was believed to be written out of a consciousness that could rise to a sphere of truth to which the sensuous consciousness could not rise.\nThe first to shake this belief in the fact that the Bible was written out of a higher human consciousness, that it is due to another authority than to any authority of a human writer was that one said to oneself: if one reads the Bible, it turns out that it is no uniform document. In the eighteenth century, the French doctor Astruc (Jean A., 1684–1766) wrote, one says, the human beings would have written under the influence of higher powers the chapters of the Bible that we call the history of creation by Moses. However, we read the creation story and find that single parts are not in accordance with each other; we find stylistic and objective contradictions. Hence, we must suppose that not a single author, Moses or anybody else, wrote this document, because somebody who describes the conditions successively as a single person would not bring in inner contradictions.\nI can only outline all these contradictions: old documents would be taken from different sides and combined by various authors. These were the first objections against the Bible. We want now to characterise the spirit of this kind of opposition against the spiritual origin of the Bible, apart from that how the things happened.\nOne sees there how immediately in the beginning in tremendous, overpowering pictures the creation is unrolled. In them, the so-called Six-Day Work is told. One tells further on how within this creation the human being originated, how he came to the sin, how he developed from generation to generation. There one notes that in the first parts, in the first verses, a name is chosen for the divine powers, for God, different from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. One sees there that really these two names of the divine alternate, the Elohim and Yahveh or Jehovah. There somebody must ask himself, should an author have called the divine with two different names? Where from this may come? He says to himself that that or those who put together the document finally found old traditions or also old documents which they interlinked and formed a whole from them. The one may come from this tribe, the other from that tribe, and one interlinked them. This one makes itself noticeable. Starting from this one notes, going on, that similar and other contradictions appear.\nThus, one got around to separating and tearing the original documents in different pieces. If today anybody wanted to put together a Bible from the different pieces and fragments from which one thought that it must be composed, if anybody printed with blue letters everything that one counts among one document, with red letters what among a second, with green letters what among a third and so on, then a strange document would originate. However, it has already come about — the so-called Rainbow Bible!\nThe ancient, venerable document is there, one would like to say, disassembled in the single pieces from which it should be composed. The Bible is, of course, a document of which one believes, however, to be able to prove that it is due not to Moses, but that parts of it originate from this or that clerical council in relatively late time. Other parts of the Bible are put together from legends and myths that one gathered from here and there from religious views of this or that school. What became a whole this way cannot be believed to be something that was brought into history with a raised human consciousness that is able to behold into the spiritual worlds.\nHowever, nobody is allowed to believe that these both talks, which I have to hold today and on Saturday, are intended to lower any way the diligence and the sedulity of the works just only briefly outlined. To somebody who knows the spiritual means that was used to tear the Bible to small pieces and to explain them, the diligence and the sedulity and the skill of the researchers of all these works become apparent. They appear to him as the most tremendous that was maybe performed in science. In relation to the formal, in relation to the industrious research one cannot find anything comparable. If we look closely at the result of this research performed by modern theologists, so just from those, who due to their profession believe to stand on the ground of Christianity, we must say to ourselves, it must cause another relation to the Bible as it was for centuries. If this research comes to fruition, the Bible — many things had to be discussed to reason it in detail — cannot longer exist as the document that comforts and raises the human beings in the saddest problems of life.\nApart from that, numerous human beings have looked around in the fields of scientific research, in geology, in the developmental history of animals and plants, in the history of civilisation, in anthropology and so on. These human beings are hardly able to conceive anything reading the Bible. One has to be also fair in this respect and not position oneself simply on the ground of naive faith and say that this signifies nothing. They are often those who are the most conscientious ones in their feeling of truth, in their thirst for knowledge. They say to themselves, I see that research standing on firm ground has found\n\nThat the earth developed throughout geologic periods, That the earth developed from a mist of higher temperature to the present form, That the inanimate develops and from this inanimate the living being, That everything developed from the simple up to the most complex being, the human being, That the forms of civilisation ascended to the modern complex forms.\n\nNumerous human beings say, if we see which tremendous geological periods were necessary to receive the earth when it had not yet produced amphibians nor mammals, if we survey all that and open ourselves to that, what shall we to do if the Bible tells us that the world was created within six or seven days? We have no use neither for the creation in six or seven days nor for anything else. Which use are we able to make of the Flood, of the miraculous rescue of Noah if we read that Noah brought so many animals in the ark, and so on? — Thus, it happens that some human beings gifted with dignity and serious sense of truth oppose so sharply and vigorously against the Bible based on the modern scientific viewpoint, in so far as it wants to extent to a worldview. All that exists in our worldview. We are not able to deny all that.\nHowever, there the question arises: does one take all things really into consideration that are to be taken into consideration in relation to the Bible if either the first viewpoint, the historical one, or the second, the physical-historical view is asserted? There one has to say that already the third viewpoint exists in relation to the Bible, a viewpoint that develops from that real research method and human viewpoint that is characterised in these talks as the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic one. We have to deal with this viewpoint in relation to the Bible today and the day after tomorrow. What a viewpoint is this? One often says today, the human being is not allowed to rely on external authority, he has to approach world and life without presuppositions and to investigate truth, and one believes to insult just the Bible if one takes up such a viewpoint. Does one really insult the Bible with it? One can compare the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic viewpoint to something that happened to humanity concerning something else, even if less significant, some centuries ago. We come to an understanding of the spiritual-scientific viewpoint concerning the Bible the easiest, if we compare it with the radical changes in relation to the view of the earth.\nThere we see that all schools, the lower and the higher ones, taught about the external nature in the whole Middle Ages following up old writings, indeed, writings of a great personality, of the old Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle. Thus, if you could go back with me to the sites of the spiritual life of the older time, you would find that that was not communicated in the old schools and training centres which was found in laboratories, but which was printed in the books by Aristotle. Aristotle was the authority and his books were the Bible of the natural sciences at that time. Where one only communicated and taught what Aristotle had already said about the matters. Now the times came when a new aurora arose concerning the view of nature, the new way of the physical view of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei and all the others up to now. What was the basic feature of this aurora? While one had taken before Aristotle as a firm starting point, and spoke about nature as he had spoken, now Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei used their own senses of observation and research. They themselves looked at nature and investigated what life could show them. Thus, they wanted to describe and explain nature according to that which they themselves had seen. There they came into conflict with the teachings of Aristotle's strict believers.\nIt is more than a mere anecdote, it means the deep truth of a process that happened at that time: one tells that a believer of Aristotle was asked to have a look at a corpse and to observe that it is not right that the nerves go out from the heart — as Aristotle teaches — but from the brain. The believer of Aristotle was persuaded to look at this. Then, however, he said, if I look at this, it seems that nature contradicts Aristotle. However, if nature contradicts Aristotle, I do not trust nature but Aristotle. — Natural sciences faced tradition that way. The view of the researcher was rejected in the light of that which was reproduced and repeated as tradition for centuries. If we read Giordano Bruno's writings, we see the opposition against Aristotle out of the new spirit that tells and explains what the human being himself should see.\nWe look at the whole matter again differently today. We face the immediate scientific observation and Aristotle differently. We know that a lot of that which was read out from him in the Middle Ages was only an ambiguous interpretation of his writings. Aristotle was a researcher out of the spirit of his time who looked immediately into nature and communicated what he was able to say. If we understand Aristotle correctly, if we can defer to what he said, then he does no longer seem to contradict the immediate scientific observation, as he seemed to contradict at that time. Then we can become his admirers again, because just concerning the origin of the nerves from the heart instead of from the brain, it becomes apparent that he meant something else, namely something that is still correct for our time.\nIn a quite similar way, the spiritual-scientific research faces not only these documents — the writings by Aristotle — but also the western original document, the Bible. What has happened in relation to the observation and investigation of the external nature since the sixteenth century takes place again in relation to the investigation of the spiritual undergrounds of the world. Out of the spirit of that research, I have characterised in the last three talks, how humankind tries to penetrate again into those worlds that are not discernible by the outer senses. However, they are discernible to the higher developed senses of the human being, to the spiritual senses of the human being with which we can behold also in the spiritual world as we can see with the physical senses in the physical world.\nIt is not necessary to keep on explaining because I have often enough said that the human being is able to develop the forces in himself that he can perceive not only the sensuous things, but that he can perceive a spiritual world between and behind the sensuous, a spiritual world that is much more real than the sensuous world. With good reason, humankind had forgotten the methods of spiritual research for a while. The big progress, the big conquests in the physical world were done because the instruments were perfected in such a way, as it was the case during the last centuries. However, if one thing extends in the human nature, other abilities take a backseat. That is why we see how during the last centuries the scientific methods blossomed for the external physical world of facts. Never were instruments that are more stupendous invented to pick up the secrets of nature and to investigate her principles. The concerning abilities were extended and perfected tremendously, but those abilities have withdrawn with which the human being is able to behold into in the spiritual world. Hence, it is not surprising that the human being was convinced that the spiritual could also be explained from the material existence.\nHowever, we stand before the dawn of an epoch today when humankind becomes aware again that there are still instruments and tools different from those in the physical and physiological laboratory where they are used so excellently. Indeed, we have to do it with an instrument that differs thoroughly from the other. We deal with the basic and original instrument that we have to see in the human being himself. We get to know the human being by the methods of concentration and meditation in the course of the winter. These are other methods that the human being can apply to his soul and by which he gets around to seeing the environment unlike he has seen it before. He can get around to saying to himself: I am like an operated blind-born who could deny the colours and the light of the world before. — However, the moment had now come that he himself could see. Now he could see that something else is behind that which the senses and the mind perceive. Now he sees into the spiritual things; now he does not know, not hypothetically, by speculative philosophy that the sensuous, the material is only like a compression of the spiritual, that that which we see with the senses relates to something spiritual behind it as ice relates to water. The water is thin, the ice is solid, and somebody who is not able to see the water, but can see the ice would say, there is nothing round the ice. — Somebody, who can see only with the senses, states that there is nothing but sensuous processes, nothing but sensuous events everywhere.\nHowever, we must penetrate into this supersensible field, into these supersensible events, and then we can recognise and explain the spiritual. Who has not developed spiritual ears and eyes sees nothing but compression — like the ice in the water — all over the world, as well as the primordial mother of substance, the spiritual in which the sensuous is only embedded does not appear to him. If the geologist shows us how, for example, a human being could sit on a chair in the universe and could watch how the world has developed: the external sensuous view would be as the natural sciences describe it. Spiritual science has to object nothing to that which natural sciences have to say in the positive sense. However, it becomes apparent to someone who is in the right know of the physical science that before the first forming of the physical the spiritual was there. There it becomes apparent how the progress became only possible because the spiritual helped, and that the spirit is mostly involved in the development.\nSo this spiritual worldview points to the fact that the human being can make himself the instrument of the investigation of the important bases of the world, and, finally, our view gets around to investigating the spiritual original grounds and beginnings independently. Thus, spiritual science stands there, independently of any document. It says, we do not do research in a document first. We do not do research as it was done once, in the books by Aristotle, we do research in the spiritual world. We adapt ourselves in such a way: what you learn as usual school geometry, the Euclidean geometry, was written down in its first beginnings by Euclid, the great mathematician. Today we can accept it as a document and understand it historically. However, who learns geometry at school today, is he still learning after the elementary book of Euclid? One works, learns, and recognises by the things themselves. If one constructs, for example, a triangle, the internal lawfulness appears to the mind out of the thing itself. Then with that which you have gained in such a way, you can move up to Euclid and recognise what he already wrote in his textbook. Thus, the spiritual scientist does also research, regardless of the books, only with his organs how the world has developed. He finds the development of the world, the development of the earth at that time before the earth crystallised in its present form. He investigates the spiritual processes and finds how at a certain point our mind starts in the earthly existence; he shows that the human being appears first and has not developed from subordinated creatures, but that he was first there as a descendant of spiritual beings.\nWe can go back to former times when still the spiritual primordial grounds existed. We find the human being connected with these spiritual processes, and only later, the lower creatures develop besides the human being. As well as in the development generally certain things remain behind and other advance, the lower also diverted from the higher. The spiritual researcher knows that spiritual organs can be developed by methods that the spiritual researcher is able to show.\nThus, the spiritual research teaches the origin and evolution of the world according to principles which are independent of any document, only out of own principles, as well as one learns mathematics regardless how it has developed in the course of history. In the same way as the researcher has appropriated knowledge of this wisdom, he approaches the Bible. He looks at the Bible. It becomes apparent now, why there are contradictions in the Bible from the viewpoint of the historical-critical biblical studies as well as from the viewpoint of scientific research. Both viewpoints come from one big error that originated from the fact that one thought generally to be supposed to understand the truth of the Bible from the viewpoints of physical-sensuous perception. One thought that it is possible to approach the Bible with such criteria. One did not yet have the research results of the anthroposophic spiritual science.\nI want to show with single examples what I have just said. Spiritual science shows us that we come investigating the earthly creation with the methods of geology et cetera only to a certain point, and that then the human development seems to proceed backwards in the uncertain. Why? The sensuous science, may it hope it ever so much, will never be able to pursue the human being back to the origin, because sensuous science can find the sensuous only. However, the mental and spiritual have led the way of the sensuous in the human being. He was soul first and at even former times, he was spirit, then he descended to the earthly existence. Only as far as the physical life is involved in the descent of the human being in the earthly existence, natural sciences can show this course of development.\nWe cannot investigate the soul life with the usual forces of the sensuous observation. Geology can also be no guide to us. It gives us the investigation of that which remained behind as sense-perceptible matters. It can only say what one would see if anybody sat on a chair in the universe and saw everything that developed on earth. Spiritual science does not defer to this. However, one must have developed spiritual eyes and ears to see the human being as a spiritual being in primeval times. If one does not have these organs, the soul and the spirit of the human being disappear. However, if one has the spiritual eyes, the sensuous disappears, and the spiritual picture originates. One cannot see this, however, in the same way as the sensuous. One must appropriate quite different concepts of knowledge if one wants to go back to such primeval times. What one sees developing there from the human being when it was only a soul does not appear in sensuous concrete perception as the external sensuous world offers it. This appears to us as pictures. Our consciousness becomes a picture consciousness, an imaginative consciousness by the development of the internal forces of the soul. Then the consciousness is filled with pictures. We see in another condition of consciousness, what has happened at that time, now in pictures. Pictorial is that which goes forward inside of the seer.\nThe rudiment that still exists of the seer's gift is the dream. However, it is chaotic. The vision of the qualified seer also exists in such pictures, but these pictures correspond to reality. It corresponds to the condition as the physical-sensuous human being can make a distinction whether his mental images correspond to reality or are only fantasy. Who wants to stop with the sentence: “The world is my mental image” and “the external things only stimulate the mental image,” to that I might propose that he should have a piece of glowing iron in his nearness and feel how it burns. Then he has to leave it and feel whether the mere mental picture still burns in such a way. There is just something that makes a distinction between the mere mental picture and that perception that is stimulated by the external object. Hence, one is not allowed to say that the seer lives only in the phantasms. He has just so developed in this field that he can make a distinction what is a mere speculative fiction, or what is a picture of the reality of a spiritual-mental world. The pictures become the means of expression of a spiritual-mental world. If the seer looks with supersensible senses back at times, before there are sensuous objects, the true spiritual beings and events present themselves. The spiritual researcher speaks not about forces that are abstractions, but about real beings. As to him, the spiritual phenomena become truth and beings, and the spiritual world becomes populated again by spiritual beings.\nImagine the primeval development of the human being when a force or being intervened in his evolution, in his whole figure that this being or force differs certainly from other beings who have intervened even earlier. We can trace back the spiritual-mental of the human being who is quite supersensible even further; we can trace back it in even higher spheres where we find even higher beings. If the spiritual researcher approaches the beginning of the Bible, it becomes apparent to him that the pictures are exactly given which show the mental-spiritual in the development of the human being, before he has come into the physical life. The spiritual researcher is able to say to himself — if he finds his own imaginations again in the external documents — that he recognises them as truth. If he goes back now to the times when the human being was connected with the even higher spheres, he has to choose another name for these basic beings, and he finds really that the passages which lead the way of the fourth verse of the second chapter have another name of God. It complies exactly with the results of spiritual research that a new name of God appears from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. Thus, we are as spiritual researcher in the same position in which today an expert of geometry is. He can find geometry out of himself, and then he appreciates the work of Euclid who found the same. Thus, we see the development in the marvellous pictures of the Old Testament, and now something extremely strange appears. The text of the Bible becomes light and clear, as it could not become with the scientific critics.\nA researcher said: what the elohim did must be due to a side different from that which comes from Yahveh If anyone wants to apply that seriously, it is weird. We want to try it. Imagine this passage in the Bible: “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures the LORD God had made asked the woman: Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree of the garden (Genesis 3:1)?” If you read “God” instead of “Elohim” or “Yahveh,” it is not translated correctly. It is weird. In the original text you read, “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures Yahveh had made.” Where you read, “Is it true that God has forbidden you ... you read “Elohim” in the original text. In the translation, the woman keeps on saying “God.” Then in the eighth verse, one says, “The man and the woman heard the voice of the LORD God.” However, you read in the original text, the voice of the Yahveh God. — Thus, we have now put together the story of the serpent, so that it becomes explicable that those who used the names “Yahveh” or “Elohim” meant different beings. According to the opinion of the Bible critics, this comes from different traditions.\nThe passage “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?” comes from the Elohim tradition. — You see, the Bible is really so composed of pieces that even in the middle of the sentences the different traditions are taken together.\nIf you approach the Bible with spiritual-scientific research, then you recognise that this must also be that way. There is talk of the fourth verse of the second chapter that the world creation goes over from the elohim to the Yahveh God. He is that power which unfolds everything that happens then up to the Fall of Man. Spiritual science shows that Yahveh is that God who speaks within the human being in our ego, he is the I-am. This being of the I-am causes everything that is said from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. This being, Yahveh, who intervenes now, is a being who belongs to a former development, but seceded ... (gap in the transcript). Hence, there is talk of the Yahveh God. However, the serpent knows nothing about Yahveh; therefore, it must turn to that which is of its own substance, up to the moment when this takes place which has just to take place by Yahveh. Only in the eighth verse of the third chapter, the name Yahveh appears again.\nThus, you get the consciousness by spiritual research that the Bible is a document in which nothing is accidental. A modern author may ask himself, why should this God not assume another name? — The ancient initiates do not have these stylistic forms of the modern authors. Where exactly and precisely should be spoken, you cannot talk in any stylistic form. What there is written and what there is omitted has its meaning. If the name Yahveh appears and if it is omitted, this means something highly essential. However, you must carry out the principle to read the Bible extremely exactly. Read the Bible if you have it! Read the Six-Day Work. You find the passage, if you keep on reading from the first verse of the second chapter to the Sabbath, “When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens...” One interprets these verses normally as a hint to the preceding, as if the Seven-Day Work had been told and one still said now, the Seven-Day work was made in such a way. — “This is the story of the heavens and of the earth after their creation,” and then, “When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4).\nWho studies the original text, detects the following: The fourth verse of the second chapter does not refer to the preceding, but to the following; even as later — in the chapter after the Fall of Man — “This is the list of Adam's descendants” (Genesis 5:1) refers to the following, to the next generations, to that which originated from Adam. This is said in the same way as: which follows there, “This is the story of the heavens and the earth after their creation” (Genesis 2:4). Here the same Hebrew word is used. Someone who reads exactly knows that the creation of the spiritual world is described from the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” to the third verse of the second chapter. Then from the fourth verse of the second chapter on it is said: after the heavens and the earth were created the following is described. It is the most wonderful transition if one understands the matter, from the Six-Day Work to the following. Who gets involved in these matters finds that no better composed book exists than the Bible, in particular its oldest parts. The confidence that one is able to approach the Bible without spiritual research, that one is able to approach it with external documents has dissolved this perfect and harmonious work, so that it seems to be composed of nothing but pieces and fragments.\nOne also has to follow up on the principle to read the Bible exactly and to have it. One does not have the Bible if one has only the text that suggests what it depends on. One must have the principle to go into the Bible. It is told to us during the fourth day of the Six-Day Work how the sun and moon originate, how the sun and moon cause day and night (Genesis 1:14–18). Already before, however, it was spoken in the Bible of day and night (Genesis 1, 5). One can deduce from that: day and night, which depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 14–18), cannot be meant with “day” and “night,” which do not depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 5). Here one can see a palpable tip where the Bible speaks of the sensuous solar day and the sensuous solar night. These originate due to the rotation of the earth around the sun. However, we can see, where the Bible points beyond this sensuous day to the supersensible, the spiritual.\nThose who could investigate the Bible spiritually said always to themselves if anyone has the visionary gift and can find the sense of the Bible in reality, this sense of the Bible must have come also from visionary gift. If we are able — because our soul has put itself in another state of consciousness — to look into the tremendous pictures of the Bible, then we know that the writer must also have been under the inspiration of the spiritual world. We may probably say: the time begins when one should understand more and more that there are four levels to look at the Bible today.\nThe first level is that of naive faith. It takes the Bible with undeterred certainty and anticipates nothing of the objections that are made against the Bible today.\nThe second level: these are the clever people, the Bible critics, who find — either by investigating internal contradictions or by the scientific point of view — that the Bible was the primitive legend work of a humankind not yet doing research. They are way beyond the Bible, they do no longer need it, and they attack it from the most different directions and say: it was good for the childish humankind. Now, however, humankind has outgrown the Bible. — These are the clever ones, the freethinkers.\nThen there is the third level: the human being outgrows this cleverness. Indeed, the human beings of this level are also freethinkers, but they are way beyond this second point of view; they see symbolic and mythical covers of inner soul experiences in the stories of the Bible — the Old and the New Testaments. You see what the human soul imagines shown in the Bible in symbols in the abstract. Some freethinkers have been forced to this attitude. They had to transform the viewpoint of the freethinker into that of the mythical symbolist.\nThen there is the fourth point of view. This is that of spiritual science I have characterised today. The day after tomorrow we follow up on this spiritual-scientific viewpoint. It shows the spiritual facts again in simple descriptions, indeed, in such a way as one can see these spiritual facts in imaginations. These are the facts that are described in the Bible.\nSomeone who had to leave the naive viewpoint and has become a clever person or maybe a symbolist as researcher may get to the viewpoint on which the spiritual researcher stands, and then he can become able to take the Bible again literally, to take the words literally in a new sense to understand them really.\nFor centuries, one did not criticise the Bible in reality. The Bible critics have fought against their own imaginary creation, against that which they themselves have made of the Bible. The adversaries of the Bible are such even today; they fight against their own imaginary relation, against that which they believe to understand of it; they do not affect the Bible at all. The Bible can be taken literally, one must only understand the words correctly.\nThere is a certain tendency today that turns against such a remark: not the letter, the spirit must decide. “The letter kills, the spirit brings back to life,,” and you name it from certain relations of the letters.\nI wish we could bring the real Bible letter of the world again as soon as possible. The world would be surprised about the contents of the original text. As something completely new, it will appear to humankind. One is not allowed to peddle the saying around: the letter kills, the spirit brings back to life. It is usually the gentlemen's own spirit that is reflected in the letters (Faust I, v. 578–579) . That applies to the symbolist in particular. If he is trivial, he puts something trivial into the symbols; if he is witty, he puts something witty into the symbols. It is with this word like with Goethe's words:\n\nAnd so long as you don't have it, this: “Die and be transformed!” you will only be a gloomy guest on the dark earth. These words suggest how the human being should come beyond the sensuous view, generally beyond the usual nature. Who would take these words as an instruction to neglect the physical has ignored that the spirit develops bit by bit from the physical. That also applies to the letter and the spirit. You must have the letter first, then you can decipher it, and then you find which the spirit is. Indeed, the letter kills, but it creates the spirit at its death, and this saying corresponds to the other: who does not have it, this “die and be transformed” remains only a gloomy guest on the dark earth. I could draw your attention only to the criticism of the Bible and to the viewpoints, which spiritual science takes towards the Bible. From the few indications I have given today, you may guess that by the work of spiritual science something like a recapture of the Bible can take place. Spiritual science shall find wisdom, independently from the Bible. However, spiritual science comes and recognises then what flowed into this Bible, and then one experiences what many have experienced out of spiritual science towards the Bible. Some things could elevate them, but the most do no longer make sense to them. Only with the help of spiritual science, the human beings understand what is said with this or that in the Bible. However, there are still other contestable passages, and one comes to the viewpoint to say, in the Bible are passages that contain deep spiritual truth, but something flowed into it that was integrated as something inorganic. — If you go on, you discover something again, and you notice that it was due to you yourselves that you were not far enough to understand the matter. You reach the point to say to yourselves, where I have believed once that the sense of the Bible cannot be maintained compared with science, there I see now: I understand the one that I have to consider the Bible with trust and admiration; I do just not yet understand the other. However, the time comes when I understand it, and I find the viewpoint where I can look into it. Spiritual science leads to the right appreciation of the Bible. We have spoken about the beginning of the Bible, about the creation from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. The biblical studies have to go through a crisis. The investigations of spiritual science are coming up to meet them, and in new figure the old light of the Bible shines again to humankind in the future. ˂˂ Previous Table of Contents Next >>\n\nThese words suggest how the human being should come beyond the sensuous view, generally beyond the usual nature. Who would take these words as an instruction to neglect the physical has ignored that the spirit develops bit by bit from the physical. That also applies to the letter and the spirit. You must have the letter first, then you can decipher it, and then you find which the spirit is. Indeed, the letter kills, but it creates the spirit at its death, and this saying corresponds to the other: who does not have it, this “die and be transformed” remains only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.\nI could draw your attention only to the criticism of the Bible and to the viewpoints, which spiritual science takes towards the Bible. From the few indications I have given today, you may guess that by the work of spiritual science something like a recapture of the Bible can take place. Spiritual science shall find wisdom, independently from the Bible. However, spiritual science comes and recognises then what flowed into this Bible, and then one experiences what many have experienced out of spiritual science towards the Bible. Some things could elevate them, but the most do no longer make sense to them. Only with the help of spiritual science, the human beings understand what is said with this or that in the Bible. However, there are still other contestable passages, and one comes to the viewpoint to say, in the Bible are passages that contain deep spiritual truth, but something flowed into it that was integrated as something inorganic. — If you go on, you discover something again, and you notice that it was due to you yourselves that you were not far enough to understand the matter. You reach the point to say to yourselves, where I have believed once that the sense of the Bible cannot be maintained compared with science, there I see now: I understand the one that I have to consider the Bible with trust and admiration; I do just not yet understand the other. However, the time comes when I understand it, and I find the viewpoint where I can look into it.\nSpiritual science leads to the right appreciation of the Bible. We have spoken about the beginning of the Bible, about the creation from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. The biblical studies have to go through a crisis. The investigations of spiritual science are coming up to meet them, and in new figure the old light of the Bible shines again to humankind in the future."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-5",
    "title": "The Bible and Wisdom (New Testament)",
    "date": "14 Nov 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19081114p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "The last talk should suggest with a few lines that spiritual science can investigate the deeper profundities and the truth of the biblical documents and that it can read that in the right sense again which is written in this document. With some simple lines should be shown how concerning the Bible such a right penetration is possible into the deeper sense of the Bible in a quite unexpected way and how it can lead many human beings to a recapture of this document of humankind. What could be said in the last talk about the position of our newer time, about its research, its criticism, its worldview compared with the Old Testament someone can also say concerning the New Testament. In addition, here we are able again to point to the fact that in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries a criticism started which has analysed and cut the Gospel to pieces, a document of such an immense significance for countless human beings for centuries, and attacked its bases. One would have to tell a long story if one paid attention to this biblical criticism of the New Testament in detail. How could it be different, because since that time, after the invention of the art of printing, the Bible has come to all hands, and with it, the materialistic thinking got out of control! How could it happen other than that people recognised clearer and clearer that there are contradictions in the Gospels?\nFor example, you need only compare the genealogies of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel and the Luke Gospel, if one adheres to the external letter of the matter, and you find that already the first chapters of both Gospels are contradictory. Not only that Luke and Matthew differently give the ancestors; also, the names do not comply. If you compare the single facts of the life of Jesus, you can find contradictions everywhere. In particular, people realise how extremely the first three evangelists, the writers of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke Gospels, on one side, and the writer of the fourth so-called John Gospel, on the other side, contradict. The result was that one tried to produce an accordance of the first three Gospels in a certain way. One believed to find that these three evangelists — even if they differ from each other in many details — give a picture of Jesus which is attractive to the whole view and to all ways of thinking of a newer time, at least to many personalities of our time.\nHowever, many people realised long-since concerning the fourth evangelist that there cannot be talk of a historical document at all. Not only that the writer of the John Gospel, who completely brings the facts differently grouped, above all, concerning the miracles that he describes quite differently; it also becomes apparent that his whole standpoint towards the centre of the whole world history is different. This sight has developed more and more. If we want — we cannot go into the details — to turn again to the sense of this research, it is approximately this that one says that the three Gospels could give the image of the superior Jesus, the founder of the Gospel, if one considers them as portrayals of the brilliant time. The fourth Gospel is a confessional document, a kind of hymn of that which the writer wanted to show concerning his faith in the crucified Jesus. He wanted to give no story, but a teaching writing.\nIn particular, in the nineteenth century, this view settled in the souls of numerous people more and more due to the so-called Tübingen School, which the great Bible scholar, the brilliant Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) led. Baur's view is approximately this: the John Gospel is late; it was written very late whereas the other evangelists wrote earlier, still after certain reports of those who, perhaps, themselves had experienced or come to know it from persons who had witnessed the story in Palestine. However, the John Gospel originated only in the second century. Not from the original story, but influenced by the Greek philosophy and by that which had already appeared in the Christian communities, it were written, so that John created a picture of Christ Jesus, which could uplift the human beings in such a way that it is lyrical in certain ways. It teaches how one began to think and to feel like a Christian up to the second century, however, it was no longer able to inform about the events in the beginning of our era.\nIndeed, there were also souls who vindicated the opposite viewpoint. If one must say on the other side that Christian Baur and his students proceeded with tremendously critical astuteness, nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget a biblical scholar like the historian and academic Gförer (August Friedrich G., 1803–1861) who asserts that the Gospel is due to the apostle John himself. With diligence he shows how just this Gospel shows almost in each sentence that an eyewitness wrote it or that somebody who had received his message from eyewitnesses wrote it. Gförer goes so far that he says in his Swabian way that anybody who cannot believe in the fact that the Gospel is due to John is out of his mind. He is also out of sorts with those who say that it is not historical and who bear down on this Gospel with all possible arguments.\nThe question that interests here is this: did really research, history cause this view in spite of all astuteness, in spite of all scholarship, which is never denied a moment? — Someone who can thoroughly explore not only the outside of history, but is able to immerse with his thinking and feeling, and with his whole view in the mental undergrounds of human development, notices something else. It was not only the historical sense, it was not only the so-called objective research, but they were the ways of thinking of the newer time, the beloved views that were spread more and more since the last century.\nThey did not accept that the confidence and the ideas of the figure of Christ Jesus survived which prevailed for centuries, that not only a superior being was included in Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal being, a spiritual-divine being that is not only related to the whole humanity but to the whole development of the world generally. The confidence and the idea got lost that this spiritual-divine being worked in the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we face a unique event there. This contradicts the ways of thinking so much that they had to be directed against such confidence. The critical research slipped in unconsciously to justify what the habitual ways of thinking wanted for the time being. More and more the sense came up, which could not endure that anything topped the normal human-personal, the sense that says to itself, yes, there have been great human beings in the world evolution: Socrates, Plato, or others. Indeed, we have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest. Nevertheless, we must remain within this human level. — The fact that something could have lived in Jesus that one can compare to the normal human being contradicts the materialistic mental images, which settled down more and more. We can see this sense slipping in unconsciously and combining with that which the so-called historical research ascertained.\nWhy did the first three evangelists become more and more the respected ones and the writer of the John Gospel the mere lyricist and confessional writer? Because they could say to themselves, the three evangelists, the Synoptics, describe an ideal human figure that does not top the human level, even if Jesus is an elevated one. It flatters the modern sense if one says what a modern theologian said: if we subtract everything supersensible and spiritual from Jesus of Nazareth, if we take the simple man of Nazareth, we are closest to Jesus.\nThat is not possible with the John Gospel. It immediately begins with the words: “In the beginning the Word already was. The word was in God's presence,” before a material world existed. What there was in the spiritual primeval grounds became flesh; it walked around in Palestine in the beginning of our calendar. — The writer of the John Gospel applies the highest wisdom to understand this event and to bring it to understanding. In view of this matter, it is not appropriate to speak of the simple man of Nazareth. Hence, he was never allowed to deal with a historical document. These are not only scientific reasons, it is the development of the usual thoughts, emotions and sensations which have found their expression in that which the Bible criticism of the New Testament and the historical research claim today to have the unconditional or at least relative authority of these matters.\nHowever, there emerges another question from spiritual science. Let us position ourselves really on the ground on which some new researchers have positioned themselves. The ones wanted to portray an event that took place in the beginning of our calendar. They added mythical and legendary aspects. Assume that we positioned ourselves on this ground. There we must ask ourselves, is it yet possible to speak about Christianity as such under these conditions? Is it possible to speak about Christianity if we understand the documents, which tell about this Christianity, purely materialistically? Is it possible to behave towards the whole Bible in such a way? — Two things should be stated at first that prove that the question cannot be put different than it was put, and that it can be answered in outlines. Let us assume that Christian Baur's view is right that something took place in Palestine that one has to explain as the external historical, and that in the course of time the writers delivered that out of the prejudices of their time to the future generations what was in them. Let us assume that we have to presuppose such a research while we believe in the descent of a spiritual being from spiritual spheres that lived in Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected, won the victory of life over death — what we regard as the real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. One has to break this doctrine, Baur says. One considers this view as a dogmatic one. This view must be cancelled. One has to investigate an event in Palestine like another historical event.\nIs it then possible to speak generally in the true sense of the word of Christianity, of the Bible as such a work which reports what has to appear? On the other hand, I would like to point to two facts. What is the first big and enclosing effect of the Christian worldview based on, an effect that nobody can deny? What is the sermon of Paul based on? Is it based on the interpretations of the Gospels by a new sober research? Never Paul's strength is based on an announcement of that which is to be exhausted by the means of history. Paul's whole efficacy is based on an event that you can understand only from supersensible, never from sensuous causes. Someone who checks Paul's writings sees that his whole teaching is based simply on the fact that he could win the conviction and the experience that Christ has risen, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha the life in spirit carried off the victory over death.\nWherefrom does Paul take his conviction of the true nature of Christ Jesus? He does not take it, as for example the others who were round Christ Jesus, from an immediate instruction. He takes it, as you all know, from the event by Damascus. He takes it from this fact and he could say, I have seen Him who lived, suffered, and died in Palestine, I have seen Him living. — Paul means nothing but that he has seen Christ in spirit and has won the truth from the spiritual view that Christ lives. He announces Christ, whom he got to know in his spiritual view. In addition, he equates this appearance to the other phenomena, because he says to us, after death, Christ appeared to various persons, to the twelve disciples and others, and in the end to me as a mistimed birth. — With it, he thinks that he really beheld Him in a higher view, who carried off the victory over death, and that he knows since that time that Christ lives for someone who rises in the spiritual world.\nHere we already stand concerning the New Testament where the new spiritual science must separate from any only literal view of the Bible. What do you find as a rule in the writings of the so-called new research about the event of Damascus? Saul became Paul in an ecstatic condition, a condition into which one cannot look really. This escapes from the human research. Yes, it escapes from the external human research. We have emphasised this so often in spiritual science that the human being — what we can learn in the following talks — can ascend to the knowledge of a higher world which is round him in such a way, as the colours and the light are around a blind person. The human being can behold this higher world as the operated blind-born can learn to see colours and light. This takes place by the spiritual-scientific methods in the soul of the true pupil of spiritual science and enables him to behold into the spiritual worlds, to behold what is there. What takes place with this pupil, what every pupil can bear witness today and at all time, that took place with Paul. He received it: to hear with ears which are not sensuous ears to see with eyes, which are not sensuous eyes. Then he could also perceive Him who lived in Jesus of Nazareth. So Paul's whole strength extends into the supersensible realm. If you take the whole Paul as he is, you can say, what he said is set aglow by “Christ was raised. Hence, our faith is not futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).\nIf one goes just into the effects of Paul's sermons how he spread that form of Christianity, which went through the world, then one can never say, it does not depend on going back to any supersensible facts to investigate the facts about Jesus. One says that one must apply the usual scientific forms. Then one forgets not only the original facts in Palestine not only that which happened during 33 years, but also what happened for the dissemination of Christianity. One forgets that it is based on a supersensible event, and that this supersensible event is to be understood at first.\nHowever, in quite similar way we also find if we consider the matters only seriously and really that the Old Testament, at least its most important document, the Law, is based on something similar. We find that the whole mission of Moses, the whole strength of Moses by which he provided big services to his people is also based on a supersensible event. We had to say the day before yesterday that if the spiritual researcher develops higher, so that he becomes sighted in the spiritual world and is able to behold into the spiritual undergrounds of the things that he can survey the facts of the spiritual world in pictures, in imaginations. Yes, you can express the processes, which happen in you if you ascend to the spiritual fields, only in pictures, however, you must get clear that somebody who speaks in such pictures does not want to speak about the pictures as those, but thinks that one has these pictures as expressions of his supersensible experience.\nThe supersensible experience by which Moses got his mission was clearly described in the phenomenon of the burning bush. There we see Moses, the leader of the people, facing his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who issued the order to Moses to act for his people what we find happening then as the action of Moses. While we use this, we already face a basic issue of the whole Bible, namely the question: how have we generally to position ourselves in order to penetrate deeper into this document to these two supersensible facts, which make any merely external research impossible? How have we to behave to this basic issue of the Bible in the spiritual-scientific sense? We can penetrate if we bring the contents of the revelation or the experience of Moses home to ourselves.\nThe most important traits are only cited. Moses faces the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God gives him the order at the same time to lead the people from Egypt, to increase it to a certain size and to teach it a certain attitude.\nIf then Moses wants to have something by which he can exculpate himself before the people, so that he can say who he is and who sends him, God reveals his name: “I am the I-am.” Nobody can understand the word who is not able to go into the whole sense and the being of old naming. Old naming is unlike the modern naming. Old naming should absolutely express the being of the personality, the being of that who faces us. In “I am the I-am” the being of the God had to express itself in particular who faced Moses, and who calls himself “the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Why does he call himself the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? There is a secret hidden behind it, which must be unravelled. We can unravel it only if we move up to it with the help of spiritual science. We have to emphasise it over and over again at various places that the human being consists of the members of his being, that we only face one part of the human being as the physical body, that we have higher members which are supersensible, which are the real bases, the creative principles. We must add the etheric body or life body, then the astral body and as the fourth the bearer of the ego.\nThe human being has the physical body in common with the apparently lifeless beings, with the minerals, the etheric body with the plants and all living beings, the astral body with the animals, which can have passions and desires. Because of the ego, the human being towers above all sensuous beings, which surround him. Spiritual science has always recognized these four members of the human being.\nWe have to point to the physical body that also has its spiritual primal ground and is only condensed from the spiritual. As well as ice originates from water, the physical originated from the spiritual. We must go far back in the view of the spiritual development if we want to look for the first spiritual origins of the physical human body. This fourth member is absolutely the oldest of the human members. Today the physical body is the densest. It emanated from the spirit in the distant past. It has become denser and denser, has experienced some changes, and has thereby taken on its physical figure. This is the oldest in the human being. A younger member is the etheric body or life body. It came later; hence, it is less condensed. The astral body is even younger.\nThe ego is the youngest member, the bearer of the human self-awareness. All these members originated from spiritual primal grounds and spiritual beings, from divine-spiritual beings. We can say, spiritual science shows that this ego, by which the human being became the modern self-conscious being, immersed in the body. It was composed, before he became an ego-being, of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. The Bible also distinguishes those beings now who are the creators of these three human members. The teaching of Moses speaks about the creator of the human ego, of the creator of the bearer of the human self-awareness. Hence, the Bible also sees in the God who let the ego flow into the human being, so to speak, that God who was the last to come concerning the evolution of the human being. The divine beings, the Elohim, whom we have strictly distinguished from the God Yahveh or Jehovah, are the creators of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They are exactly distinguished in the Bible from the God appearing last in our evolution, from the Yahveh God, from that who brought the ego to the human being.\nIf we ask, where does the human being find the being of this God, this youngest of the creative gods about which the Bible starts speaking in the fourth verse of the second chapter of the Genesis? Spiritual science shows that where the human being finds his ego in himself, which differs so substantially, already after its name, from all other beings round us, that he there finds a drop of this divine being in himself. This is no pantheistic teaching, also no explanation of the fact that the human being has to find his God in himself. Asserting this would be like someone who asserts that a drop of water is the same being like the sea — and says: this drop of water is the sea.\nIf we speak in the sense of spiritual science, we speak about something infinite, comprising, universal that is connected with the earthly development and the other things that belong to this earthly development. In our ego, we find a spark of this God Yahveh as we find the same being in the drop of water as in the sea. Nevertheless, it was a very long way the human development had to cover, while the God Yahveh started forming the human being in such a way that he could grasp the ego consciously. The strength of the ego had to work in the human being already well before, before he got the consciousness of the ego. Moses became the great precursor bringing the consciousness of the human being to the ego. However, these forces work and form in the human evolution already long before. They form in such a way that we can recognise their way if we deal with the evolution of the human consciousness itself.\nLet us look somewhat back in the development of the human consciousness. One uses the word development very often today, but as drastically, as intensely as spiritual science takes the word development seriously, it is the case with no other science. This human consciousness, as it is today, developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go back far to the origin of the human being, not in the sense of materialistic science, but in such a way, as I have explained it the day before yesterday, then we find that the human consciousness appears more and more different, the farther we go back. The consciousness that connects the various intellectual concepts, the external sensory perception in the known way originated firstly, even if in the far-off past, but it originated firstly. We can find a condition of the consciousness at that time, which was completely different from today because memory was completely different in particular. The memory of the modern human being is only a dilapidated rest of an old soul force, which existed quite differently. In old times when the human being did not yet have the inferring force of his today's mind, when he was not yet able to count in the today's sense, when he had not yet developed his intellectual logic, he had another soul force for it: he had developed a universal memory. This had to decrease, had to withdraw, so that at its cost our today's mind could develop. This is generally the way of development that a force takes a backseat, so that the other can appear. Memory is a decreasing force; mind and reason are increasing soul forces.\nFor those who hear these talks already for some years, it cannot be something especially miraculous what I say now. For the others it will seem absurd if one speaks about the nature of memory in the following way. What is the appearance of the human memory? It is that which remembers yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, until the childhood. Then, however, it discontinues once. The memory did not stop in old far-off past, not in childhood, not even at birth; but like the modern human being remembers what he himself has experienced in his personal life, the prehistoric human being remembered what his father, his grandfather had experienced through whole generations. Memory was a soul force through generations that extended really. For centuries, memory survived in the old far-off past, and another kind of naming was connected with the different formation of memory.\nWe come to the question now: why is talk of individuals in the first chapters of the Bible who become hundreds of years old like Adam, Noah? Because it makes no sense to limit these human beings. Memory reached through generations up to the primal father. One gave this whole generation one name. It would have made no sense to give the name Adam to a single person. Thus, in those days one gave the name to that which remembered, holding on the same recollection, for centuries from generation to generation — Adam, Noah. What was this? It was that which goes through father, son and grandson, but maintained recollection. So faithfully, the biblical document maintains these secrets, which one can understand only with the help of spiritual science.\nIf we look at the consciousness of the ego with which we comprehend the being of the Yahveh God, we see that the ego lives in us between birth and death, and that it maintains its kind between birth and death. Thus, the ego maintained for generations at that time, for centuries. As we speak today about the ego and know that it goes back as far as we can remember, the human being of primeval times said to himself: it makes no sense to call myself an ego. I recall my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.\nHis ego went through generations, and it had even a name. As we find an expression of God in our personal ego if we become engrossed in this ego, the ancient human being said to himself, looking up through the generations: God who lives in the ego lives for generations, — as a divinity which then Moses recognised in the higher worlds. The God was the same who lived as an ego from generation to generation in ancient times. One declared as ego, in the parlance of the past, what reproduced as an expression of the Yahveh God, with the Yahveh word “I am the I-am.” Moses learnt to recognise this in his spiritual revelation. In contemplating the burning bush this was revealed for the first time. The same God once lived from generation to generation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was the force, which lived in the memory and brought everything at the same time that founded the human order. Thus, we look up at the predecessors of Moses. In the biblical sense, we look up at the patriarchs, at those, in whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.\nThese times needed no external commandments, no external laws. For that lived on with the lively memory, quite different from ours, which one had to do. According to what did one act in these primeval times? If you understand the Bible correctly, you find that the human beings did not act after commandments. One acted after that which memory said to one, what the father, the grandfather et cetera had done. With his blood, the human being got the direction to that which he had to do. In these ancient generations was something like a spiritualised instinct that one can compare with “acting instinctively” as we call it today. Not after a commandment the ancient human being acted, no, he acted after the character of his being, after his type. How did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob act? They acted in such a way as the blood running through generations induced them. They had brought down the God Yahveh with their egos, whether they waged war whether they lived in peace. They had no commandments; they had no law. The spiritualised instinct of God lived in them.\nAt the time when Moses appeared, the human personality was on the first level of its development. There its consciousness broke away from this common generational consciousness. There the generational memory had already stopped quite thoroughly. There one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct of action. There something else had to replace it. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob — who in his spiritual physical figure gave Moses the law, the commandments because one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct — had to regulate the external order, the social living together by commandments, by laws. It is the same God who worked before as a natural force, who is now efficient as legislator to found the external order with laws. We see that it has a deep sense to read the words at this point: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. The God who calls himself the God “I am the I-am” is the same as the fourth member of the human being, the same who let flow the ego into the human being. However, the human beings could not take up the spiritual nature of the ego in their consciousness. A longer preparation was necessary to it, and this takes place at the time, which is portrayed in the Bible as the Old Testament, at the time of Moses up to the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence, this time is a time of promise, which the new Gospel shows, the beginning of the “time of fulfilment.” The God announces himself to Moses as the “I am the I-am.”\nHe announces himself in such a way that he orders the external order of the human beings, their living together by laws indirectly by Moses's vision. Humankind lived this way in the pre-Christian time in which the God was creating, in which the Yahveh God was forming, in which the “I am the I-am” lived, in which, however, humankind could not yet live consciously but according to the external law coming from the Yahveh God. More and more the time approached when humankind should become completely aware of the ego. For the whole antiquity, there was only one means for the human beings who could not yet behold, could not yet face God in the physical world. There was only one way how this God could become effective for them. This was the law, the order. This applied to the external world.\nMoreover, there was a supersensible way to get to know this God, and these were the mysteries or initiation. What was initiation? Everything that was delivered to certain personalities which were regarded as suitable to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific research to develop the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, so that they could behold into the spiritual world. Hence, for the confessors of the Old Testament it would be in such a way to behold God spiritually from face to face who lives in the “I-am.” If they applied this method, they were able to see and to hear with spiritual eyes and ears independently what Moses had seen, when the God, the “I-am” gave him his mission. Only in the mysteries, only by initiation this was possible.\nHowever, there were also those who recognised the “I am the I-am,” but they had to go through the procedures, the methods with which the human being is transformed into an instrument of the higher vision, the vision in the spiritual world. So the God who already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was concealed to the physical world. He ordered the world by law. To the initiate, the secret of the mysteries becomes visible in thinking. Then the time came when the Mystery of Golgotha should take place. What happened there, actually? Imagine what the initiate experienced in the old times. Only sketchily, I can describe the process of initiation by meditation, concentration and the other exercises. The soul of the neophyte was prepared for a long time. Then the processes of initiation were finished during three and a half days. There the sages of initiation prepared the neophyte prepared so far, so that he was transported to a state in which his physical body was completely sleeping. It was not only sleeping but it was like dead, so that the neophyte could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes, and ears. For it, however, he beheld with the organs of his spiritual members into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive there if he was outside his body if he was not connected with the physical organs. Then he could behold what lived invisibly in him as the “I am the I-am;” but he could behold it only in the depths of the mysteries. Then he was awoken — as everybody knows who has experienced these things — in his physical body and used the physical senses again. Now he had the full consciousness: I am the I-am, I was in the spiritual world. What has spoken to Moses, the “I am the I-am” faced me, and it is that which refuses eternity to me, which has entered my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine primal bearer of the I-am whose reflection is my I-am.\nThus, the initiate returned to the physical world and bore witness of the fact that something spiritual exists in the ego, because he had beheld it. He could give his listeners news and message of it. However, one could only behold the “I am the I-am” in the spiritual world. By the event of Golgotha, the same being descended to the human beings who had announced himself by Moses in the burning bush with the words “I am the I-am.” This complies completely with the sense of the John Gospel: the ego became flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in it, and walked around among the human beings. This primal force brought the human being to the height on which he stands today. The primal force became a human being; the human being became a divine being and walked around among the human beings. It was possible that on Golgotha that took place as a historical event within the evolution of humankind, which the initiates could behold only in spirit: the fact that the Christ-being carried off the victory over the death of matter.\nThis is the historical-external-real fact, which the initiates often experienced in the mysteries. This was the course of initiation in the ancient times in the deep darkness of the mysteries with those who left their physical bodies for three and a half days, walked around in the spiritual world and recognised that a spiritual-divine being descends into the physical world, and that this event would take place once as a historical fact. This was the course of initiation. However, the time came now when humankind came to the event of Golgotha turning emotions, sensations, and thoughts to it by faith.\nThen the understanding originated from it. It was something new. One got as something external that one could have, otherwise, only by the rapture in the spiritual world. If one assumes this in such a way, we understand why Christ Jesus says: I am the I-am in a completely new figure. He says, look back at the primeval times, at that which lived as the everlasting in the human being that lived in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that made known itself then in the Law of Moses. Now the time has come when the ego becomes aware in the single person, when the human being has to become aware in his ego, in the divine living in him.\nIf it was in the old times in such a way that the human being looked up at the God that he beheld and could say to himself: what lives in me lives for generations, — it is now in such a way that he finds the divine in his ego if he beholds into himself. The divine from which any ego originated was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, and someone understood this who wrote: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word. — By these words, the being of the innermost human nature and at the same time the primary source of this innermost being is meant. He lets Christ Jesus say, what lives in me a spark of which is in every human being existed before the Gospel was. — The significant sentence in the John Gospel was “Before Abraham was, I am.” — Before Abraham was, the “I-am” was, this I-am which is not bound to any time which was before Abraham, was already in the spiritual primeval grounds of the human being. While he calls himself the primary source of this I-am, Christ spoke the significant words: “Before Abraham was, the I-am was.”\nTherefore, we realise how the sense of human development, which flows through these fundamental books of humankind, the Old and the New Testaments, is brought back to life again by spiritual science. In addition, we realise how to us the most important words become readable first if we fathom the sense of these books, regardless of the words, with the help of spiritual science. I give an example that gives something to think to the materialistic sense. I would like to remind you of the resurrection of Lazarus. There such a man like Gförer says: who asserts that the John Gospel is not written by John, helps himself saying, the writer wrote down a lot, as he experienced and understood it, but the Lazarus miracle must have been told to him. He cannot have been present.\nOne must understand the Lazarus miracle only correctly. Let us understand it in such a way that Christ when he entered the world took on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us believe, however, that that which prepared in the Old Testaments became expression in the New Testament. He had to have somebody who could understand him completely, who could penetrate in the deepest sense into what he could announce, and that means that he had to initiate a person in his way.\nInitiation stories are told to us secretly at all times. The Lazarus miracle is nothing else than the miraculous and tremendous representation how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament. Christ waked up Lazarus as an initiate recalled the soul of his pupil to the body who was for three and a half days in a state similar to death, after he had walked around in the spiritual world. Someone can simply see through all that who understands something of it, because it is the language in which generally initiation stories are told. “This illness is not to end in death; through it God's glory is to be revealed and the Son of God is glorified” (John 11:4). This means: external appearance as revelation of the inside; so that one has to translate the sentence in truth: “The illness is not to end in death, but that the God manifests as an external appearance, so that He can also be revealed to the senses.”\nIn Lazarus slumbers the deeper human being who has the ability and the strength that it could be developed in mysterious way in him, could be led up in the spiritual world, so that he could recognise the being of Christ, the Son of God. However, this strength had to develop first. Christ Jesus developed it in Lazarus, so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed, and could reveal the Son of God. Christ Jesus created in Lazarus the first to know from own inner observation who Christ Jesus is real. At the same time, this miracle shows — because it is to someone a real miracle who wants to accept the external physical principles only — what the pupil concerned has to go through during the three and a half days. Because this can be compared to a real death since the etheric and the astral bodies are raised out of the physical body and only the physical body lies there.\nThus, we have understood even such a miraculous event like the Lazarus miracle — miraculous only to anyone who cannot explain it out of spiritual science. All that reveals itself to you in the Lazarus miracle if you have the light only, which illuminates it with the words: “His illness is not to end in death but to reveal the inside.” — If these abilities are woken in the human being, it is like a birth. As a child arises from the womb, the higher is born by the lower human being. In the same way, the illness of Lazarus is connected with the birth of the new life, of the divine human being, so that the divine human being is born in the physical human being, in Lazarus.\nSo we could go through the John Gospel step by step and would experience that that which happens in the spiritual initiation had to be described quite different from that which we see in ancient times when with quite different spiritual powers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is working. If we look into the Bible in such a way, then it is the high universal book again, which lets shine to us what we have now found ourselves. While we must admit — we can say this — that only someone who has developed the higher spiritual forces can come to this truth, we have also to admit and say — if it faces us in the John Gospel — what brought it in these writings. While a new spiritual researcher approached the Gospel and the whole Bible, he learnt to see this and can say: the human beings will come to the true value of this document and recognise that only a materialistic prejudice can speak the words: “the simple man of Nazareth.” However, because of true knowledge we have recognised Christ as an overwhelming world being living in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.\nThe first three Gospels appear to us in relation to the John Gospel possibly, as if three persons stand grouped on a slope of a mountain and every reports what he sees. Everybody sees a part. Someone who looks down from the higher vantage point surveys more and portrays more from this higher vantage point. We come to know not only what the others below describe, but also what can make the three understandable at the same time. That is why it is not difficult to say, who stood on the higher vantage point, but for us it is in such a way that the first three writers were also initiates in certain respects. However, the deep initiate, who could write much deeper, could look much deeper than the three others could and about the true spiritual facts of the matters, which lie behind the sensuous, this is the writer of the John Gospel. So the Gospels combine harmoniously and show that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood as a usual historical event, but is only explicable by a process as we find it with Paul, who says: “the life I now live is not my life, but the life Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). What the external research shows beside becomes also important in the spiritual research. If we look at Christianity, it is important to us to figure the clairvoyance of Moses out which is shown to us in the vision of the burning bush. It is this what one had to explain. I have to emphasise that this new spiritual science is able to form the picture of the world events of its own accord, to look at Christ, so to speak, spiritually from face to face and to find Him again and, hence, to find Him truly in the Gospels. That biblical scholarship is not really without presuppositions, which says, we want to investigate the Bible like any other story.\nFor it assumes the dogma that there can be only usual, sensuous, natural facts. Only spiritual science is really without presuppositions, and this leads to a renewed recognition and high esteem of the Bible in all its parts. A time will come when maybe those are disgruntled who want to say today that only the simple mind is able to grasp the Bible. This wisdom must misjudge the Bible. The time will come when just the wisest wisdom estimates the highest what is given to us in the Bible because clairvoyance will face clairvoyance in the Bible. Then some word, which is written in the New Testament, appears in a new light. It will become apparent that a document like the Bible can lose nothing by impartial research. It would be sad if any research cut this Bible of its reputation, of its name. A research that cuts the Bible of its name has only not come far enough. Research that goes until the end will show the Bible again in its greatness.\nThe human being is allowed to do research freely. Who has the view that by research religion could perish shows with it only that his piety stands on weak feet. The divine being put the impulse of research in the human being, so that he is active. It would be a sin against this impulse if one did not live researching. I recognise God by my research. God recognises Himself in my research. Truth is a good in the human development from which the religious life will never have anything to fear. However, this is a basic truth, which penetrates the New Testament completely.\nYou should not take those into accounts who want to keep away the human beings from the Bible because of comfort, and who say, if you come to philosophers and interpret the Bible, these say, they want to know nothing about it. — However, such a research is based on comfort. However, that research is justified and right which says: we cannot go deeply enough to understand what is written in the Bible. — That research in the Bible is the right one that goes into it in free research and then understands the Bible in the right sense. These researchers understand the truth of the biblical saying: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32)."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-6",
    "title": "Superstition from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science",
    "date": "10 Dec 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19081210p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "Before some time when I stayed in a little town in Germany, I made the acquaintance of a poet, a dramatist, and in the time of our acquaintance, he was just occupied to complete a drama. On an afternoon, he worked on the completion of his drama almost like with steam power, as I could notice in a visit which I had to do. One could not speak at all with him, because he had to further the matter as quickly as possible. In the evening shortly before eight o'clock, I did a walk. I met my good dramatist, when he speeded on a bicycle to the post office and could not be impeded. Nevertheless, it interested me — you will soon see why — why the person concerned speeded so exceptionally fast to the post office just that day. It was shortly before eight o'clock when it was closed. When he came back, he said to me on my question, why he had to go in such haste to the post office just even today, this would be a peculiar matter.\nNow you understand this matter best of all, if I say first that after a just beginning, then prevailing fashion the dramatist concerned belonged to the freest spirits of the present and that he represented his worldview in the freest phrases. He was a very advanced person. Telling the following, I would like to show that I commit no indiscretion. If he were here, he would completely be pleased to hear that I tell this matter. Now we are able to form an opinion about what he said when he came from the post office: “I have gone so quickly to the post office because I wanted to bring my drama to the post office today. Today is the last auspicious day. If I had waited till tomorrow, I would have exposed myself to the danger that the theatre management rejects the drama.” — I asked, “Have you finished it, actually?” For it seemed impossible to me. “No,” he said, “however, I have written a letter, so that one sends the drama back again to alter the last scenes.” This was the free spirit! I had to remember a lady who had worked on a dress many years ago and wanted to have it ready and put on at Thursday. If she had put it on for the first time on Friday, she would certainly experience a misfortune. One normally does not take into consideration sufficiently, what it means for our feeling and thinking in the present if a free spirit makes a post, like the poet speeding to the post office to send off the drama incomplete and then to let it send back again, so that he can finish it. You see that superstition can be something rather strange.\nIt may be something that a person has banished completely from his worldview and it may be that he protests strongly against it in a boasting way to be concerned with such superstition. However, if it depends on it, there are loopholes through which this superstition can slip in. We live in a time in which in the most scornful sense one speaks about all possible forms of superstition. However, at the same time it happens in this present that those who speak about superstition have no idea of it now and again through which loophole slips in just with them. For it does not need to be an old form of, like with this dramatist speeding on his bicycle. New forms of superstition can also appear. Just somebody who speaks scornfully about the old forms of superstition may be exposed worst to some new form of superstition. It is maybe difficult to realise these concepts of superstition anyhow in our time, because in our time the tendency prevails so much to regard everything that one himself believes as the only reasonable and to deny everything that one himself does not believe. Just this way of feeling in our time opens the doors to various new forms of superstition. Hence, it is not sufficient to continue the common talking about superstition, if we want to get involved thoroughly in superstition from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint.\nVarious old traditions have come into our time, various things that our ancestors have believed various things that our ancestors and the scholars of ancient time believed to be strictly scientific and what is expelled to the region of superstition today. We ask ourselves, should not the idea light up in those who face the old traditions with a shrug who seem to be scientifically advanced, that that could be erroneous which is believed today? Could it not be that our descendants may regard this as the biggest superstition some centuries later? Indeed, someone who believes to stand on the firm ground of natural sciences is easily inclined, for example, to cast everything that is pronounced from a viewpoint that assumes a spiritual world beside the physical one, generally in the field of superstition. On the other side, one can easily understand that theosophy — admittedly maybe also unfounded — combats and characterises the superstition of natural sciences. The fact that the one or the other party regards this or that as superstition can never become a characteristic feature of the real nature of superstition. Various things which project from old times just show us if it is real superstition that it depends with such matters much less on the human logic, on human reason than rather on the human ways of thinking, on that which people are used to think today.\nHow many things appear in our popular literature, in our daily press today, which are apparently contrary to the enlightened thinking! For example, there is a city in Germany — it is not far away from Berlin — where you would look for a cab with the number 13 in vain. He who had it once got no passenger. It was ignored, the number 13. Also at hotels you can often experience that the number 13 is absent in the room numbers. You can also find in baths where nothing but enlightened doctors are that the number 13 is ignored with bathing cubicles because nobody wants it. That right in the middle and beside the way of thinking of modern literature and daily press! However, someone who is a soul expert to some degree already finds that superstition is, nevertheless, something that slips into the human thinking and feeling completely quietly.\nThere is a popular booklet about superstition in which something reasonable and something absurd can be found. Then, after the author slaughters what astrology and astronomy and other forms of superstition are, he states that astrologers once existed who cast horoscopes to the human beings and derived their destinies from the moment of birth. Such astrologers would no longer exist as far as he would know; the midwives would do this now. Indeed, it would not take place in Berlin but in remaining Germany. You can really read this sentence in this booklet about superstition. I do not believe that anybody can call it other than superstition, because, otherwise, he would have to say that many astrologers cast horoscopes today. What the man says does not correspond at all to the facts; it is the purest superstition. Every investigation could show him the opposite of his assertion. Similar things slip in the consciousness of the human beings every day if these are also less palpable things and one would regard it as a paradox if I spoke of superstition.\nThe opinion has arisen in certain circles of scientific consideration since some time that one has to look for physical causes of human memory, in particular in the field of sexuality. Not only this, but also the writings and brochures are numerous which examine the mental conditions of great spirits. A Leipzig scholar took great pains till recently to examine a whole group of great spirits, among them Goethe, Schopenhauer, Scheffel (Joseph Victor von Sch., 1826–1886, German poet), and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898, Swiss poet), to what extent they had, actually, this or that insanity and whether their geniuses would be connected with this or that insanity. On the other side, the tendency of physical illness relates to inheritance, and no current event escapes from such an interpretation today. Here we are concerned with a superstition that rises just now, which penetrates, however, our education like a scourge. Future times will not understand that it was possible that science could worship such a superstition for a while. If our descendants repaid this in the same sense, judged in the same sense what science believes and teaches today as one teaches and judges today what our ancestors believed in former times, then those who are active in these fields today would come off the worst. Thus, we already see, while we survey the facts impartially, that the old forms of superstition are rightly thrown to the window and, on the other side, new forms slip in that are not just simply recognised as those.\nWho looks around a little in science knows how many demons of superstition slip in here and there which only have a short existence fortunately, but can be not less detrimental. Sometimes trends are not far from that which one may call superstition. I would like to give an example. During my activity as educator, I could make some observation that was possible only because I could go into a large field concerning the human development. More than twenty years ago, it was standard to give little children red wine, generally wine to drink — possibly in the second, third, fourth years. One could realise how by a certain trend of medicine just children got their glass of red wine at this age every time during dinner. He, who observes such a thing, maybe observes too short periods in relation to the effect of these matters. If one compares those persons who are 20-year-old today and were children of two to five years at that time to others who got no wine at that time for their strengthening, the difference of the present nervous manifests itself to a hair's breadth between those who got wine and those who got no wine.\nThere was in those days the superstition that wine contains a strength in itself. This was a trend of superstition. One offered this opinion like any other superstitious opinion. Now we can refrain from all that and go over to some other fields where one does not speak at all of superstition, although the mental fact of the matter is completely the same one in the human being. If speak of the weird idols, fetishes or catchwords people have in social life which they run after like others run after certain idols in other fields, and we realize how much superstition is contained in it, then you would recognise: if the quantity of superstition does not live it up in one field, it changes over to another field. If the human being towers above superstition on one side, it is swiftly expressed in another field where one does not notice it so much.\nAfter we have characterised the situation a little, we may be allowed to try to come to the real origin of superstition, to the peculiar state of mind in which a superstitious person is. Above all one is allowed to say that with the emergence of this state of mind the bias of a human being plays the conceivably biggest role in this or that school of thought. Someone understands the same fact — depending on his school of thought — in the one or other way. Let us try to bring a concrete case home to us. The French physiologist Richet (Charles R., 1850–1935, Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, 1913) had the following experience: he walked in the street once, and on the other side of the street a person was walking. At this moment, he had the thought: nevertheless, it is strange that professor Lacassagne is in Paris today. However, it is not so strange. Fourteen days ago, professor Lacassagne sent me an article and wrote that he would be here in fourteen days. Richet wanted already to go to the other side and greet him when he said to himself that he wants to go to the editorial office, and the other would probably also come there. At the same moment, he realised that the professor resembled an ophthalmologist known to him. Richet goes to the editorial office, and there appears professor Lacassagne after one hour. Richet says to him, I saw you in the street before one hour. The professor answers: this is impossible. I was not there an hour ago, but somewhere else. — It is no doubt; Richet could not have seen him. It is peculiar how two persons often behave to each other if they have two different lines of thought. Richet saw a person and had the certain impression to see professor L. However, when he faced the professor L., it seemed to him brainless to have taken another person who was big and blond for professor L., who was of medium height and had a dark moustache. However, Richet is a man who believes in occult effects, in telepathy. He said to himself, professor L. is in Paris and thought to go to the editorial office — and at this moment, I saw this thought by telepathy!\nA Danish researcher, Lehmann (Alfred Georg Ludvig L., 1858–1921, psychologist), who has written a book about Superstition and Magic (1898) thinks differently about that. He says, “Richet believes in telepathy; that is why he sees something mystic in this quite usual experience which should prove the correctness of his confidence, however, he overlooks the incidental circumstances completely which explain the matter absolutely naturally. I myself have experienced various such cases, and because I do not believe in telepathy, I have always looked for and found an obvious cause of the phenomenon.”\nThere you have two persons who judge the same event quite differently depending on the school of thought. I myself would like to agree with the Danish researcher Lehmann, because those who approach occult matters by inadequate means overstate the case the easiest and can explain anything in the world to themselves like in this case. However, you see from it how the bias, in which a person is with his line of thought, causes that he colours another person whom he faces in such a way.\nNow think how the things are reflected in the human soul if they are not exactly figured out. There we come to the real nature of superstition in the spiritual-scientific sense. You can read countless writings and discussions about the superstition of alchemy, the hapless art to produce gold to which so many have dedicated themselves. Those who wrote about it were mostly — in the modern view — exceptionally competent, positive researchers in other respect. They occupy an important place with their writings, in which in this or that way the art of making gold is informed. However, what you read there appears to you as sheer madness, as absolute nonsense. Moreover, it appears in numerous cases as such obvious fraud that one can realise very easily how just at that time when the human being believed such a thing in this field fallacy by fallacy was spread.\nEven though chemistry developed from alchemy, we must be infinitely happy that we have, finally, the true chemical science, in contrast to those figments and errors to which our ancestors have abandoned themselves in alchemy. Perhaps we can understand just the easiest what is deception if we consider some simple cases. We want to refrain from the number thirteen, but you know that for some people the number seven causes something dreadful that some regard it as a lucky number, sometimes, however, also as an unlucky number with which magic effects should be connected. I need to mention something only that can lead you to that which is connected with the number seven. I want not only to mention that the number seven is also found in the purely physical nature — seven colours, seven tones et cetera — what has often enough been mentioned here from which one can conclude that this or that is connected with the number seven. However, we want to refrain from that today. We want to turn our attention to something else.\n\nThere is an illness, pneumonia, which increases for seven days and then decreases. Only during the seventh day the crisis occurs, so that someone who has to treat such a sick person has to pay attention in particular to this physical rhythm. There we have the number seven connected to a particular process, something that can be observed in any single case. The modern materialistic science does not get involved with any explanation of this process. If we traced back medicine in ancient times in which you do not have to see a sum of mistakes only as it is shown in the history of medicine, one would understand that the ancient doctors and experts of nature knew how all life proceeds in a certain rhythm. They knew that a rhythmical coherence exists between the processes in the human being and outdoors in the big nature, in the macrocosm. Because the human being is, actually, born out of the macrocosm whose life proceeds in certain external processes, the human life also proceeds in a certain rhythm. He, who knows the rhythm of human life, knows very well that an increasing and decreasing rhythm of 28 days, of four times seven days, in an organ like the lung in which certain functional strengths and weaknesses appear. There it is no longer surprising, as soon as one recognises this basis, that the illness of the lung becomes especially dangerous where it collides, so to speak, with the general rhythm of life phenomena. Briefly, we would see if we considered the facts in the sense of spiritual research and not superstitiously, why after seven days a particular crisis of pneumonia takes place. However, one does not want to come to such things in our materialistic age, which can be pursued only by the means of spiritual science.\n\nThere was a time in which the doctors not only knew that pneumonia goes through this crisis during the seventh day, but in which they also knew why this is so. They knew how this is connected also with the healthy rhythm. However, this spiritual-scientific knowledge is forgotten to the external life. One does no longer know the real lawfulness, it got lost to humankind. The mere number seven remained. One did not know at all, in the end, why pneumonia shows something particular after seven days. Then one takes out such a thing, of course, without being able or wanting to understand it. One applies it because one sees something particular in the number seven as such. One says to himself, something particular is connected with the number seven. One can apply it anyhow here or there. As long as one keeps to formalities, as long as one does not look into the matter, one has no reason to apply the thing here or there. So one applies it where apparently an occasion exists. Above all, a human law is involved, which is only too comprehensible: in all cases where one has arranged such a thing from abstraction where one applies it and sees that it fits the thing works; however, if it does not fit , one overlooks it.\nThus, it also applies to some country lore. Who comes from the country knows for sure that from the first thunderstorm, which appears in the spring, this and that is prophesied. If the prophesied comes true, it is accepted as a rule, if it does not come true, one forgets it. Nevertheless, deep profundities are in some country lore, and one would have to investigate it on its deep wisdom. Then again, one applies not the purely exterior of superstition, but intends to penetrate the thing independently. Indeed, I was pleased rather well if beside other country lore once again that is pronounced, if the cock crows on the dung heap, the weather changes or remains as it is. — A healthy trait appears here that must not be generalised but individualised. On these essentials, the development of our soul and spirit should depend.\nIn a similar way, only not so transparently, many things of alchemy are concerned. Some of you know when I spoke about the Rosicrucian initiation and the philosophers' stone that I showed what one has to understand by the philosophers' stone in the real spiritual science of all times and what can remain in force before our present most modern thinking. Among the various methods that lead up the human being to higher knowledge, in particular to the Rosicrucian initiation, you find one method that one calls “the preparation of the philosophers' stone” downright. Something is understood by this preparation of the philosophers' stone that is connected with a regulation of the respiratory process. Becoming conscious and regulating breathing according to spiritual principles belonged to the different methods, with which the human being works his way up to the higher worlds. After particular instructions, someone breathes who becomes a disciple of spiritual science in the positive sense.\nThis breathing has a particular result for the whole organism that the external science is no longer able to investigate because it knows nothing of the matter. The human being develops something by the instrument of his own body in himself that really appears in his body and enables him to another worldview because by the respiration an effect happens which expresses itself in the mineral composition of the physical body. Thus, we have produced something by the regulation of the respiratory rhythm in the human being that was called the philosophers' stone. It is that which is to be produced inevitably in the human organism if the human being has to grow into the higher worlds. The process can be given, but one cannot impart it to any human being just without further ado. Since only someone can apply this process by its very nature who does it in a completely unselfish way without any personal regard.\nWhen I spoke once in a little circle how one is able to do it today already as I would suggest it also wholeheartedly in one of the talks, a person said afterwards, it would be rather useful, if one publicly announced the method to produce a particular mineral in the human being. For this mineral would be something very useful if one produced it in big masses. — I had to answer: the fact that you put this question gives the reason why it is not allowed to be announced. As long as such questions are put, it is just impossible that it is allowed to be announced. You can find it in the literature, but it is veiled there. It is only comprehensible to that who gets to know the parlance going through a pre-school. “Mercury,” “philosophers' stone,” “silver” mean something else. If one speaks of the union of mercury and its addition to any other product, “mercury” and “philosophers' stone” just mean something else than external matters.\nHowever, these things exist in literature. Those who have no idea what the expressions and the signs in particular signify which are connected with them take the thing simply literally. If one takes them literally, it is the purest nonsense. So, for example, it has happened to a Danish researcher of superstition that he read something about strange personalities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, about Ramon Llull (~1232–1316) and others. It is at everybody's discretion to regard him as a swindler, a charlatan or as the greatest sage of his time, depending on he can understand him. Now, however, it is told that Ramon Llull succeeded in finding the philosophers' stone after a 30-year-study — to most people an uncomfortable matter — and that he thereby became able to make gold, while he transformed a certain amount of mercury by a part of the stone into a powder which still had all qualities of the stone. If one takes a tiny amount of it, it gets the quality again to transform mercury. Then a tiny amount is taken from this again, and so on, until gold originates finally.\nIf one tries this, if he takes what he finds in the book, takes certain substances, mixes them and adds them to the mercury, it is the biggest nonsense that can be done. Everybody is right to mock it. The Danish researcher also does this. He mocks it. Who knows, however, how to interpret the expressions finds that in literature the “philosophers' stone” exists just as in the writings by Ramon Llull, with which he achieved his goal. This is the wonderful of the matter that the sentence has been known for centuries and is right even today. This shows somebody who knows something about it how brilliantly right it is. Then he realises that in Ramon Llull really the soul of one of the wisest of his age lived. However, who sticks only to the external mode of expression gets up to nonsense really. Many people got up to nonsense who believed that the wise alchemist produced external gold, and they also went insane, although I believe that they already went insane a little when they started the matter. Psychiatrists, however, state that they went insane thereby. They may have lost their wealth, because they did not find gold at last. Hence, one must not disagree with the writer so much who calls alchemy nonsense, because — what he could understand of it is nonsense only. However, no nonsense is big enough not to be believed by this or that person.\nThis is connected with an addiction that you can experience in the field of spiritual science day by day. You experience the following: if you face this or that person with a natural phenomenon, which needs clarification, and you try to explain such a phenomenon in connection with its spiritual undergrounds and claim to lead back an everyday phenomenon to its spiritual base, then you excite no special interest with most people today. Many human beings do not search the explicable but the inexplicable. They are happy if they can find anything that remains inexplicable to them. Tell to anybody that here or there, something has taken place that cannot be explained, and then they are pleased with it. People really want to be pointed to the inexplicable. They do not want to penetrate what presents itself to them, but they want to increase the miraculous. Try to explain something about the development of plants to anybody, while he can grasp them from the undergrounds of development and look deeply at nature, so that he is led from the sensuous where one deals with the spirit at one end deeply into the spiritual — then he cannot believe in a spiritual world! However, if you tell such a person that a hand of a statue got lost, was found again in another city, and has been reinserted, he says: no one can explain this, consequently I believe in a spiritual world. — This is in such a way that the persons want to remain without an understanding of the spirit because they believe that one is not allowed to fathom this. With it, they open the doors to superstition everywhere.\nIf the human being does not strive for impartiality with that which is available to him in his reason and logical thinking, he is exposed to all possible forms of superstition when he does not want to rely on this, as soon as something appears that is different from the usual. Thus, one could see, for example — you forgive if I say this, although I stand completely on the ground of spiritual science and theosophy — how often just those who stand on the ground of theosophy reject what could lead to enlightenment in the spiritual-scientific sense. When the theosophical movement had begun in the world, two significant persons lived by whom this wisdom was revealed to humankind at first. Those who have this wisdom have not behaved in such a way as it... (Gap)\nI have characterised this heaps of times. For: how could one have behaved compared with a truth that was received from an unknown side? The first intermediaries of the theosophical worldview said, from personalities who stay in the background we have got the wisdom we committed to this or that book. — There one could have said the following, well, these human beings who bring this wisdom are honourable, but we want to check this wisdom ourselves. — I always emphasise that only somebody can do research in the higher worlds who has attained particular abilities. However, if this wisdom is informed, so that it is verifiable, then what? This wisdom was not checked in many cases. One accepted the matter in good faith because one said to them that it has come from higher beings. The others, however, said, whether it is founded or not, this does not matter; whether the higher beings generally exist, that is the point; and if one does not know for sure whether these higher beings exist or not, we reject the whole theosophy.\nHowever, could it not have happened that anybody said to himself, this wisdom may have come wherever from at first, I check it, whether and how it fits the phenomena of life, whether it proves true in life; above all, I check its relation to the current worldview, to the positive science? — There one could maybe come to the view: how poor is that which the worldview gives us built up on positive science compared with that, which has come from theosophical side. One must not accept it in good faith, but one can check and understand it. The result will be whether those from whom this wisdom has come are greater than those who stand on the ground of the so-called scientific facts. We have no reason to assume that H. P. Blavatsky received her worldview from a rain cloud. Such wisdom that one has found as reasonable must originate from somewhere. Whether one can call it great, this depends on what arises if one compares this worldview to that which one already recognises as great.\nSuch a check would have been reasonable. However, this is the only one that brings honour to the human mind, not accepting on good faith, also not rejecting on good faith, but examining without prejudice. Indeed, not anybody can do research. Those should do it who can develop their mental powers especially. However, everybody can examine impartially, if only he did not search the inexplicable instead of the explicable and were satisfied having found the inexplicable. As long as one says to him, he should try hard to fathom the spirit; he does not want to come along. However, if one informs him of anything that is not to be understood at all, he is present because it is more comfortable. This is especially distinctive of the soul state of the human being.\nThere is another case, which took place ( taken from Lehmann's book ). I talk again not in such a way, as if anything true is behind it, but I talk about the human spiritual condition that has become obvious thereby. One told that in certain regions of Asia human beings existed who can do the following: they spread out a cloth, take a rope, throw the rope in the air, let a little child climb up, until it becomes invisible on top; then they themselves climb up, and after some time the limbs of the child fall down dismembered. Then the fakir also follows, takes a bag, packs the limbs into it, shakes the whole, then he pours out the bag and — the child is recreated completely. I do not want to decide what is behind, but only speak about the way of superstition.\nThe process appears to the human beings as something that is hard to believe at first. A certain S. Ellmore wrote about that in the Chicago Tribune , and a painter drew strange pictures that showed the different stadia quite correctly: the thrown rope, the climbing child and so on. Ellmore himself added photos which were shot especially cunningly, because one always saw the fakir and the spectators only who looked upwards once, then downwards. However, one did not see the remaining. Ellmore explained the whole matter, so that one could easily elucidate it. He meant namely that the person concerned who carried out the matter must be a very significant hypnotist who could suggest the process to a whole company. There people said to themselves that the process was no superstition but suggestion, and it seemed explicable that all people were hypnotised. However, this suggestive process appeared to a person even more incredible than the original process. For he thought that there could be matters in the world, which cannot be explained by our principles, and said to himself: concerning suggestion one already knows something, but concerning the soul forces one must still investigate many a matter. — This person turned to S. Ellmore to find out the place where this was present at such a performance. Now the truth became known. S. Ellmore explained that the whole story was invented, what already his pseudonym points to: S. Ellmore = sell more. He had dressed the matter in this form, because he could not believe the original process and found the form of suggestion acceptable to the modern consciousness.\nYou see that it really depends on the mental constitution that it depends on what takes place in our souls if one wants to elucidate the concept and the being of superstition fairly. Quite different factors must decide whether a matter is correct or is not correct in the end. However, what can protect us from any aberrations which become superstition can be solely the pursuit of real knowledge, of seeing through the matters. Someone is always addicted to superstition who does not want to penetrate really into the depth of the matters. It anyway is in such a way that this longing for a certain quantity of superstition prevails absolutely. With it, I pronounce the basic principle of superstition: as long as the human being remains only in the observation of the physical environment, as long as he does not want to penetrate to spiritual science, to the real knowledge of the spiritual primal grounds of the things, a certain need of superstition lives in him.\nIf you like, take a modern doctor: if he rejects any form of superstition in his thinking ever so much — that who is impartial can easily prove how he covers his requirements of superstition in another form copiously. This is the principle of compensation in the human soul. You see in it how typical the principle is.\nYou have a person who wants to be way beyond the old superstition in every respect, but how much superstition Haeckel (Ernst H., 1835–1919, naturalist, philosopher) registers in his Miracles of Life and in his World Riddles ! Those who know me know that I recognise Haeckel in all because he is the great researcher. Who knows me also knows that I always point to the positive that Haeckel has performed. Because he has thrown out the old superstition and does not want to go back to the spiritual backgrounds of the things, he applies it to another field. He becomes the most superstitious person on the other field. In the field of energy and matter, as he imagines it, there the atoms are dancing and whirling.\nHe calls that his god. He attributes to the dancing and whirling atoms that they can create conditions which simple living beings show, and that these again are made up to more complex things which fit together, in the end, to the form of the human brain. Everything that the human being can feel and want, all ideals, and moral, all religions are for that who can judge the thing impartially only dance of atoms. No difference exists to him between the dance of the atoms and the big fetishes of African savages. Whether the African savage adores his wooden block and looks at it as his god, or whether Haeckel lets his little atoms dance and looks at them as little gods — there is no difference between both concerning superstition. The one and the other superstition stand at the same point of view. There was a time — it is behind us already in certain ways — there one could see how this superstition emerged bit by bit. New discoveries of natural sciences were done in the course of time, in particular in chemistry. New compounds could be explained that one noticed differences of weight of the smallest parts in space. Many a thing was explained by the principle of the atomic weights. The view appeared fertile to construct such an atomic theory. Later, one forgot that one had constructed this atomic theory in spirit. The atoms became real idols which one adored.\nWhen I was a pupil, a headmaster ( Heinrich Schramm, see Steiner's autobiography, chapter II ) made me realise what atomic superstition is. The headmaster calculated all phenomena of physics and chemistry as movements in those days — a long time ago. However, he did not yet calculate the thinking. However, he made calculations up to the chemical phenomena. The booklet, which contained these things, is called The General Movement of Matter as a Basic Cause of All Natural Phenomena . This was something that could fascinate somebody who defers to this issue. I would just give everybody this booklet with pleasure. However, it is no longer available in the book trade for a long time. Perhaps in libraries it may be still to be found. There we see superstition appearing in the omnipotence of the atomic whirl.\nWe saw all possible forms of superstition appearing one by one in natural sciences. Consider once that we really have a certain direction in natural sciences that speaks of the omnipotence of natural breeding.\nEverywhere you can see that everything is gathered that is or is not indicative of the one or the other theory, if once the researcher concerned is fascinated by a catchword that has an effect on him like an idol. We would just see similar cases in our time if we only wanted to have an eye for them. Already at the beginning of the talk, I mentioned how the matters slip in that will become obvious as the dreadful superstition of time in a time not too far away.\nWhere is the cause of superstition now? Always the possibility occurs that superstition replaces what can prevail only as a fertile thought, as a fertile opinion. If we forget the original thought, the original opinion and take the formality presenting itself for it, we forget the essentials like the crisis of pneumonia appearing after seven days. If we pull the number seven out and retain it, the possibility exists that this changes into superstition. There you have the reason why ancient sages could show great natural phenomena.\nSpiritual science wants to bring to the human being: that he does not search the inexplicable, but that he wants to search the explanation. Otherwise, if he stops in the area of the environment and does not want to rise to the higher point of view from which he can see what is justified or not justified in the one or the other field, then he replaces superstition by superstition. Who stops in the physical world leaves the one superstition and comes into the other. Not before he rises above himself and above superstition, he sees the right in the one and in the other. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778, philosopher) already ascertained that it does not make a difference whether one is more or less clever. He said, the clever ones and the prudent ones have their prejudices just as the silly ones, even if the clever and prudent ones know something more and have more prejudices than the silly ones. The silly ones retain to few prejudices the more tenaciously in return. — This is absolute a principle which someone who observes human life can find confirmed in many cases. Thus, we see that a basic healing of superstition can be if one rises to the higher point of view from which the spiritual undergrounds of the world are readily comprehensible.\nVarious sorts of superstition will still emerge, and something slips into our view today. We are developing in such a way that the human beings have no right sense, actually, to eliminate superstition from the public life if it does not just come from old times. Oh, it absolutely applies to our time in various fields what an old story tells us. Call it an anecdote, but it applies, and it shows truth better than something else does. In a certain region of Spain, on the border between two provinces, an epidemic had broken out once. It was close to two universities. One university had a medical faculty in which one swarmed for bloodletting in particular. At the other university, one swarmed against bloodletting. In this region were two doctors. The one doctor was instructed in the one university, the other one at the other university. The one prescribed medicines, and the other venesected. It turned out that the one doctor kept all patients alive, while all patients of the other doctor died. Even if all patients stayed alive and all patients of the other died, nevertheless, both operated correctly according to their theory; one, indeed, wrong in practice, but correctly according to his theory.\nIf one tells such a thing, it may seem stupid. If one sees the things, however, day by day, one finds that the anecdote says nothing wrong, and one finds it even necessary. Therefore, it can only concern — if about superstition is spoken — that spiritual science has really no reason to propagate this or that superstition. It stands on the ground that the spiritual is explorable and that there are means and ways to penetrate into the spiritual world by which one is able to overlook the world from a higher viewpoint. Thereby the human being is led beyond superstition, and beyond that, which superstition can cause as damage in the human life. One can express that with a Goethean word which reveals truth comprehensively even if simply: “Wisdom is eternal, and it will be victorious, and it will raise the human being in us to humaneness in the most manifold tumults.”"
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-7",
    "title": "Questions of Nutrition in the Light of Spiritual Science",
    "date": "17 Dec 1908",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19081217p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "It seems strange to people when spiritual science has something to say about that which is regarded by many with a certain logic as the most material, as the most unspiritual subject: nutrition. There are people who want to indicate their particular idealism, their particular spirituality by saying: oh, we care only about that which is above the questions that are connected with the material life.\nSuch persons also believe — and in certain respects they may be right — that it is irrelevant to one's spiritual development how the human being satisfies his bodily needs.\nThe materialistic way of thinking judges differently. A great philosopher of the nineteenth century had a saying that has often been repeated and that causes many who are idealistically minded to shudder. Feuerbach (Ludwig F., 1804-1872) once said: “The human being is what he eats.” Most people understand it in such a way — and the materialistic sense will absolutely agree with it — that the human being is made up of the substances which he supplies to his body, and from this develops not only the course of his bodily life but also that which presents itself in his mind.\nIf outsiders hear more or less cursorily about spiritual science, they believe that anthroposophists are too concerned with eating, with diet. An outsider cannot understand why the anthroposophists care so much about their diet. It should not be denied that in some anthroposophical circles whose members want to penetrate rather deeply into the spiritual life in an easy way, lack of clarity prevails. Some believe, nevertheless, that they should avoid this or that, should not eat or drink certain things in order to reach certain higher levels of knowledge! This is also a fallacy, like that just characterised view of Feuerbach's saying: “The human being is what he eats.” It is a one-sided view at least.\nHowever, in a certain sense spiritual science can agree with this sentence, only in a rather different way than it is meant by the materialists, differing in two respects. Firstly, we have already stressed on occasion that everything around us is the expression of something spiritual. A mineral, a plant or something in our surroundings is material only with respect to its outer form. As with the limb of a human being, the outer form is the expression, the gesture of the spirit. Something spiritual is behind all material, and this is true of food as well. When we eat we absorb not only what spreads out materially before our eyes, but also that which is spiritual behind it. We come into relation through the material element of the food to the spiritual which is behind it. This is a rather superficial standpoint. However, someone who understands this is able to admit the materialistic sentence in certain respect: “The human being is what he eats.” Only one has to understand that there is a spiritual process within the material process.\nThis is the only way we can orient ourselves to these questions in the spiritual-scientific sense. If spiritual science puts emphasis on and pursues investigations regarding the nature of the foodstuffs, a unique perspective on the relation of the human being to nature appears. The human being comes into relation with nature because he absorbs the surrounding nature in a certain way and composes himself with that which is in it. The question arises, is the human being not subject to the external forces, because he ingests that which is external, and can he free himself from these forces? Is there any possibility that the human being can become free from the effects of his diet, so that he receives a certain power from and a certain influence on the surroundings? Could it not be that the human being, indeed, could be what he eats, through following a certain diet — and could it not be that by another diet the human being gets rid of the compulsion that is exercised on him by diet? So, the question is asked by spiritual science: how has nutrition to be arranged that the human being gets rid of the compulsion of diet, so that he becomes more and more the master of the processes within himself?\nWhen we put this question to ourselves today, something must be said about the whole position of spiritual science in regard to these questions. This question, also about health, must be understood in such a way that in no way spiritual science argues for any particular point of view. Whoever believes that what is said today is agitating for or against this or that diet has an extremely erroneous view. Today nobody should go away from here with the view that I argued for or against abstinence, vegetarianism, meat diet.\nAll these questions about dogmas have nothing to do with the innermost feeling of spiritual science. We do not want to agitate, do not command the human being in this or that way; we want to say only how matters are. Then everybody may organise his life, as he wants, according to these overarching principles of existence. Thus, this talk will solely expound what is real in this field. On the other side, I ask you very much to take into consideration that I do not speak for anthroposophic circles in the narrow sense which want to go through a certain development and have to observe special conditions. Today, the question is discussed in the general-human sense. Because of the vast range of the subject, only single things can be taken out, and, above all, everything must be avoided that is connected with general health. We shall hear about this in the next talk.\nToday, we deal with nutrition in the narrower sense. That is why the respiratory process is not taken into account. The human being has to take up proteins, carbohydrates, fats and salts in order to maintain the life process of his organism. You know that the human being satisfies the needs of his organism with the so-called mixed diet. He takes the main parts of his diet partly from the animal, partly from the plant realm. There are many more defenders of the mixed diet than of a one-sided diet among our contemporaries. We must ask ourselves, how do the laws of our environment dictate how the human being takes his food to the true forces and needs of the human organism? I speak only about the human being today, not about the animals.\nThe human being is easily inclined to understand his organism rather materially according to the so-called scientific results of his time. Spiritual science has to substitute this with the laws of the spiritual connections. Even if not always stated explicitly, the method which is adopted is based more or less unconsciously on the idea that the human organism consists more or less only of the physical body, and the sum of the chemical substances in their interaction with each other. One traces these substances back to their individual chemical elements and attempts — after one has recognised how these substances work — to get an idea how they could continue chemically working in the retort which one regards as the human being.\nIt is not necessary to state that many people are already beyond the view that the human being is only a big retort. It is not a matter of theories, but of the ways of thinking. The true practitioner is not concerned about anybody's thoughts, but about the effects of the thoughts. That is the point. It does not matter so much whether one is an idealist or not, but it is significant for life that one has fertile thoughts which are active in such a way that life prospers and progresses. It is important to bear in mind that spiritual science, even in this direction, has nothing to do with dogma or any belief. Anyone may espouse the most spiritual theories. It is not this which is important, but rather the fact that these thoughts are fertile if he introduces them in life. If one says that he is not a materialist, that he believes in the vital force, even in the spirit, but proceeds in the question of nutrition always as if the human being is a retort, his worldview cannot become fertile. Spiritual science has something to say about these concrete questions only if it itself is able to illuminate the details, and it is able to do so concerning the issues of nutrition and of health.\nWe must come again to clarity regarding the multi-membered human being. For the spiritual researcher the human being is not only the physical being, which one sees with the eyes, can touch with the hands - this physical body is only one part of the human being. This physical body consists of the same chemical substances that are spread out in nature. However, the human being has higher members. Already the next part of the human being is supersensible, has a higher reality than the physical body. It forms the basis of the physical body; it is the whole life through a fighter against the decay of the physical body. At the moment when the human being goes through the gate of death, the physical body is subject only to its own principles, and then disintegrates. In life, the life body fights against the decay. It gives the substances other directions and forces, other connections than they would have if they followed only their own nature. For the clairvoyant consciousness, this body is as visible as the physical body for the eye. The human being has this life body or etheric body in common with the plant.\nWe know from other talks that the human being still has a third member of his being, the astral body. What is it? It is the bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires, impulses and passions, of all that we call our inner soul life. All that has its seat in the astral body. It is spiritually discernible, as the physical body for the physical consciousness. The human being has this astral body in common with the animals.\nThe fourth member is the bearer of the ego, of self-consciousness. The human being is thereby the crown of creation, he towers over the things of the earth, which surround him. Thus, the human being faces us with three invisible members and a visible member. These always work in each other and with each other. They all work on any single member and each single member works on all others. Thus, the physical body — I say once again in parenthesis that all this applies only to the human being — as it faces us, is an expression in all its parts also of the invisible members of human nature. This physical body could not have in itself the members that serve the nutrition, the reproduction, life generally if it did not have the etheric body. All organs that serve nutrition and reproduction, the glands and so on, are the external expressions of the etheric body. They are that which the etheric body creates in the physical body.\nAmong other things, the nervous system is, in the physical body, the expression of the astral body. Here the astral body is the actor, the creator. We can imagine just as a clock or a machine is constructed by a watchmaker or by a mechanical engineer, the nerves are constructed by the astral body.\nThe characteristic of the human blood circulation, the blood activity, is the external physical expression of the ego-bearer, the bearer of the self-consciousness. Thus, the human physical body is also four-membered in certain ways. It is an expression of the physical members and of three higher, invisible members. The senses are pure physical; the glands are the expression of the etheric body, the nervous system of the astral body and the blood of the ego.\nIf we look at the human being in contrast to the plant, the plant faces us as a two-membered being. The plant has a physical body and an etheric body. Now we compare the human being to the plant, while we proceed universally and take the inner, the spiritual, into consideration. We relate the human four-membered organism with the two-membered organism of the plants. In order to support our view we may start from physical, known facts.\nWe can show how the plant builds up its organism. It builds up its body from inorganic substances. It has the strength to compose its body from single inorganic components in the most wonderful way. We need to see only how the plant is in a special interaction with the respiratory process. The human being inhales oxygen and exhales carbonic acid. The plant can absorb what is useless to the human being. It holds the carbon back for the construction of its organism and returns the oxygen for the most part. However, it requires something that is not regarded by many people as something particular: it needs the sunlight. Without sunlight, it could not build up its organism. The light that flows to us and delights us, that can animate us also emotionally, is at the same time the great assistant of the construction of the plant organism. We see how there a marvel takes place, how the sunlight helps to construct an organic being. What makes our eyes effective helps the plant to construct itself.\nThe human being also has the astral body beyond the physical one and the etheric body. The plant does not have it. That which helps the sunlight to build up the plants so marvellously is the etheric body. This is turned on one side towards the substances. The human being could not develop his physical organism if he did not do anything that is in certain ways in the opposite way that which the plant does. Already in the respiratory process, the human being does something contrary. The human being already goes through the contrary process. We can say the same concerning the complete nutrition of the human being. We can say, nutrition must take place in such a way that everything that is built up in the plant is destroyed in the human being again. The process in the human being is very peculiar. If it were only the etheric body that built up a physical body, consciousness or soul sensation would never appear. What the etheric body has built up must be destroyed internally over and over again, must be destroyed. Indeed, the etheric body is a fighter against decay, but, nevertheless, always some decay occurs. The astral body causes the decay that keeps the human being from becoming a plant.\nThe sunlight and the human astral body are two opposite things in certain ways. For one who gets to know the human astral body with clairvoyant consciousness the astral body is an internal spiritual light, invisible to the external eye. A spiritual light body is this astral body. It is the contrast to the external luminous light. Imagine once the sunlight becoming weaker and weaker, until it expires, and let it go even farther to the other side, let it become negative, then you have an inner light. This inner light has the opposite task of the external light that would build up the plant body from inorganic substances. The inner light which initiates the partial destruction, only by which process consciousness is possible, brings the human being to a higher level than the plant, because the process of the plant is transformed into its opposite. Thus, the human being is in a certain contrast to the plant because of his inner light. This is to understand the matter spiritually, and we would see on closer consideration how the destruction caused by the astral body is then continued by the ego. However, today this does not need to occupy us further.\nWe now take the relationship of the human being to the plant, which becomes so real that the human being takes up his nutrients from the plant. He continues within himself what is for the plant a whole world process. What is built up by the sunlight is destroyed by the astral body, indeed, over and over again, but it thereby integrates the nervous system into the human being and makes the human life a conscious one. Thus, the astral body being a negative light body is the other pole that is opposed to the plant. Something spiritual forms the basis of this process of building up the plant organism; spiritual science shows us more and more how that which appears as light to us is only the external expression of something spiritual.\nSomething spiritual shines, through the light, perpetually towards us, the light of the spirits shines towards us. What is hidden behind this physical light, but is separated in parts appears also in our astral body. It appears externally in its physical form, astrally in the astral body. The spiritual light works in us internally on the construction of our nervous system. So wonderfully do the plant and the human life work together.\nWe now examine the human being's relationship with the animal realm as food. Here matters are different. In the animal from which he takes his foodstuffs, the process is already carried out in certain ways. What man takes usually from the plant is partially transformed by the animal, already prepared, Since the animal has an astral body and a nervous system, too. Therefore, the human being takes up something that does not come to him unchanged, but that has already gone through a process that has taken up astral forces. What lives in the animal has already developed astral forces in itself. One could now believe that thereby the human being saves work. However, this thought is not quite correct. Imagine once the following: I build up a house with the help of various pieces of equipment. I take the original equipment. There I can construct the house completely by my original intentions. However, let us assume that three or four other persons have already worked on it bit by bit and now I have to complete it. Does this make my work easier? No, surely not. You read in a widespread literature that work is made easier for the human being if someone has already worked on it. However, human being becomes a more versatile, more independent being just by taking up the original.\nAnother picture: somebody has a balance with two scale pans. The identical weights keep the balance. On both sides there may be fifty pounds. However, that is not always the case. I can take a balance on which the arms are different lengths. Then we only need half the weight at twice the distance. Here the weight is defined by distance. It depends not only on the amount of the forces but also on the delicacy of the materials in particular. The animal processes the materials in a more imperfect sense. What the human being takes up continues to have an effect by that which the astral body of the animal caused in it, and then the human being has to overcome this first.\nHowever, because an astral body has worked so that a process has already taken place in a sentient being, the human being gets something in his organism that has an effect on his nervous system. This is the basic difference between food from the plant realm and food from the animal realm. The food from the animal realm works in particular on the nervous system and with it on the astral body. In contrast, with plant food the nervous system is left untouched by anything external. Then, however, the human being has also to create everything concerning the nervous system by himself. Thereby only that which originates in him flow through his nerves. He who knows how much in the human organism depends on the nervous system understands what that is. If the human being builds up his nervous system himself, it is fully receptive to that which the human being has to expect of it in relation to the spiritual world. The human being owes to the plant foods the ability to look up at the greater connections of things that raise him above the prejudices that arise from the narrow borders of the personal being. Where the human being regulates life, and thinking freely from the great viewpoints, this he owes to the plant foods. Where the human being lets himself get carried away by rage, antipathy, by prejudices, he owes this to his meat-based food.\nI do not agitate for plant foods. On the contrary: the animal food was necessary for the human being and still today it is often necessary because the human being should be firm on earth, should be hemmed in the personal. Everything that brought him to his personal interests is connected with the animal food. The fact that there were human beings who waged wars, who had sympathy and antipathy, sensuous passions for each other originates from the animal food. However, the human being owes to the plant foods that he is not limited to these narrow interests, that he can grasp universal interests. That is why the talents of certain peoples who prefer plant foods are more spiritual, while other people develop more bravery, courage, boldness that are also necessary to life. These qualities are not to be developed without the personal element, and this is not possible without animal food.\nWe speak about these questions from a general human viewpoint today. However, this brings to our mind that the human being can go in this or that direction, can immerse himself also in his personal interests with the animal food. His sense is thereby clouded concerning the larger overview of existence. One mostly does not see how it is founded in the diet when the human being says: now I do not know how I should do this or that, how has he done it?\nThis impossibility of surveying these connections comes from the food. Compare this to someone who can see the larger connections. You can look back at the food of these human beings and maybe at the food of the ancestors. A person who has a virginal nervous system given to him by his ancestry is completely different. This person has a different sense of the larger connections. Sometimes, abuses in one life cannot destroy what the ancestors have founded. Even if such a person, descended from peasants, for instance, stirs up what he has in himself, it has only been stimulated by the consumption of meat because he was more sensitive.\nProgress is made when the human being, as far as the requirement for protein that is not prepared in the human nature itself, confines himself to the animal foods that are not yet set aglow by passions, such as milk. The plant food will take up more and more room in the human diet.\nConcerning single foodstuffs, we can emphasise certain advantages of the vegetable foodstuffs. If the human being gets his protein from vegetable foodstuffs, he has to work harder, but he develops the forces that make his nervous system fresher. A lot of that which humanity would face if the consumption of meat got out of control would be avoided if vegetable foodstuffs would be preferred. We can see in the vegetarian and meat-based food the different effects they have. To illustrate this, we can say the following: look at the physical process under the influence of meat-based food. The red blood cells become heavy, darker; the blood tends to coagulate. Impacts of salts, of phosphates originate easier. If plant food is absorbed, the blood sedimentation is much lower. It becomes possible for the human being not to let the blood take on the darkest colouring. Just thereby is he able to control the coherence of his thoughts from his ego, while heavy blood is an expression of the fact that he is given away slavishly to that which is integrated in his astral body by the animal food. This picture is definitely an external expression of truth. The human being becomes internally stronger by the relation to the plant realm. By meat-based food he integrates something that gradually becomes foreign matter which goes its own way in him. This is avoided if the food consists mostly of plants. If the materials in us go their own ways, they strengthen the forces which cause hysterical, epileptic states. Because the nervous system receives these impregnations from the outside, it becomes susceptible to heterogeneous nervous diseases. Thus, we see how in certain respects “the human being is what he eats.”\nIn details it would be still even more provable, but through two examples we can show that one must not be one-sided. A one-sided vegetarian may say, we are not allowed to enjoy milk, butter and cheese. However, milk is a product in which the etheric body of the animals is advantageously involved. The astral body is involved in it to the least extent. The human being can live in the first times of his life as a baby only on milk. There everything is contained in it that he needs. With the preparation of milk, the astral body comes into consideration only rudimentarily. If one enjoys milk primarily at later age, if possible only milk, one achieves a particular effect with it. Because the person ingests nothing that is processed externally and can influence his astral body, and because he absorbs something in the milk that is already prepared, he is able to develop particular forces of his etheric body in himself, which can exercise curative effects on the fellow men. The healers who want to have a curative effect on their fellow men have a particular aid in the consumption of milk.\nOn the other hand, we want to describe the influence of a luxury that is taken from the plant realm, the influence of alcohol. This has a particular significance. It originates only when the real plant process, the effect of the sunlight, has stopped, namely the opposite that the astral body carries out. Then a process begins in the assimilation of alcohol that takes place on a lower level and impairs the human being even more than animal food. The human being brings the substances up to the astral body, gives them a particular structure with the astral body. However, if that which should be brought to the astral body disintegrates in the way as it is the case with the alcohol, then that happens without the astral body, hat which should happen under the influence of the astral body, namely the effect on the ego and the blood. The effect of the alcohol is to take over that which should happen, otherwise, from the free decision of the ego, by the alcohol. In certain respects, it is correct that a person who enjoys alcohol needs less food. He lets the forces of alcohol penetrate the blood. He provides what he himself should do with something external. One can say in certain ways that in such a person the alcohol thinks and feels. Because the human being provides to the alcohol what his ego should be subject to, the human being places himself under the constraint of something external. He gets a material ego. The human being can say, I just feel a stimulation of my ego thereby. Indeed, but now he is not experiencing the ego, but something else with which he has banished his ego. Thus, we could still show by various things how the human being can get around to being more and more what he eats. However, spiritual science also shows us how he is able to become free from the forces of food.\nThus, I wanted only to describe the relation of the human being to his surroundings along general lines today, how he relates to the realms of nature through the processes of nutrition. Who visits this or that talk further on will see that individual questions can also be answered on other occasions. This talk will have shown you that spiritual science is something that has its effect also on the most material needs of life. Spiritual science is something that can be an ideal for the human future. Today one still says often if one sees the substances combining and separating in the human being: it is like in a retort, and one believes that one can find something salutary in it for the human beings. However, a time is coming when someone who does research in the laboratory will also keep in sight what I have said about the light and the astral body. Is not anybody able to make the usual chemical observations if he says to himself, that here the larger elements have an effect on the smallest things which are penetrated by the external physical sunlight, and those which shine up to the spiritual in the human consciousness? One will explore these things in a light that gives us an overview of the whole.\nBy the spirit, everything is born that is in our surroundings. The spirit is the primal ground of all. If we want to come to truth, the spirit has also to stand with us as we conduct the research. Then we recognise that truth which the human beings need both on the macro cosmic and on the microcosmic scale."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-8",
    "title": "Questions of Health in the Light of Spiritual Science",
    "date": "14 Jan 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19090114p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "The subject that should occupy us today encloses a number of questions, which rightly interest the human being in particular. The issues of health are connected with everything that makes the human being able to cope with life, with everything that helps him to fulfil his determination in the world without hindrance. Therefore, health is indeed for most people something they aim at, as one aims at external goods. However, health is also to be considered as an internal good that is aimed at like the external goods first not for their own sake by the healthily thinking human being but as the means of his working and creating. Hence, we can probably explain why the urge, the longing for getting enlightenment about the riddles and questions of the healthy and ill life are so far-reaching in particular in our present. Indeed, you find that attitude in the general thinking only a little which is suitable to make the human being receptive just to those answers that one needs if one wants to solve such questions connected so intimately with the whole nature of the human being.\nAs already once at a similar occasion, I remind of an old saying, which comes to somebody in mind if one speaks about health and illness: there are so many illnesses and only one health! This saying seems to be natural to some, and nevertheless it is a fallacy, a fallacy in the eminent sense of the word, because there is not only one health, but there are as many healths as there are human beings. We must incorporate that in our attitude if we want to see the issues of health and illness in the right light. We must incorporate in our attitude that the human being is an individual being that every human being is different from the other, and that that which is salutary to the one is noxious and disease causing to the other, that it completely depends on his individual state.\nEach of us can experience every day that these viewpoints are not so widespread. For example, a mother finds out that her child is not quite healthy; she remembers that this or that has helped her in similar cases once, so she cures straight on in such a way. Then comes the father who remembers that something else has helped him once. Then the aunt comes, then the uncle; they maybe say, fresh air, light, or water help. These prescriptions often contradict each other so that one cannot fulfil them at all. Everybody has his remedy by which he swears, and then this must be unleashed on the poor sick person. Who would not have found out that this good advice coming in a rush from everywhere is, actually, a surely awkward thing if the human being lacks this or that! All these things originate from an unrealistic way of thinking, from an abstract way of thinking, from a dogmatism that does not take into consideration that the human being is an individual being, a single being. Every human being is a being for himself, and it depends on it above all: to contemplate this reality “human being” if one deals with the phenomena of health and illness.\nNow arises such a need for help as the ill human being has it indeed from a property of his inner being, which must evoke the sympathy, the compassion of his environment. We can understand that everybody would want to help with pleasure, because this is only an expression of the fact that these questions just cause the deepest interest in the connection with the whole human nature. Indeed, if one contemplates this deep interest on one side, however, looks only a little into that which different views of health and illness prevail in our time, on the other side, then one can be rather saddened possibly. One could say, illness is such an important matter in human life and why it happens that learnt and unlearned people, doctors and laymen, argue not only about the remedies of the single illnesses, not only about the right ways to health, but even about the nature of illness in the most manifold theories. It sometimes seems that in our time of mental and scientific activity the ill human being and maybe the healthy one is exposed more than ever to the biased views asserting from all sides concerning important questions of human development.\nAre we allowed to hope that spiritual science, which I have characterised from the most different sides in these talks, can also bring light into the theories and biased views concerning health and illness, which we see today round ourselves?\nI have many a time emphasised here that spiritual science aims at a higher viewpoint that makes it possible to bridge that which divides the human beings into parties, because they have certain narrower circles of watching and observing only, and to show how one view resists to the other because it is one-sided. We have shown many a time that spiritual science is there just to search the good in the one-sidedness and to harmonise the different one-sided views. It may be one-sidedness — someone must say to himself, who considers the matter not only cursorily — what faces us if these or those dogmas are preached with demanding authority from the side of this or that pathology. You all have come to know how many biased views are opposing each other concerning these questions. Everybody knows that the academic or allopathic medicine — as it is called already, unfortunately, in the contemptuous sense — is on one side and homeopathy on the other side. Then, however, also wide circles have gained confidence in natural medicine that often has another view about illness and health and recommends not only what concerns the ill human being, but also that which is regarded as right for the healthy human being, so that he keeps himself robust and strong. Everything is coloured from this or that side, from the academic medicine or from natural medicine.\nIf we realise from which viewpoint such a quarrel about illness and health comes into being between the supporters of the natural medicine and those of the academic medicine, then we hear the supporters of the natural medicine saying, the academic medicine searches its certain remedy of any illness. It takes the view that illness is something that seizes the human being as an external cause, and that there is also this or that external remedy for the illness. We do not want to forget with such characteristic that that which the one or the other side says often overshoots the goal and do not want to forget that in many aspects both parties do wrong by each other.\nNevertheless, we want to stress single reproaches, which can clarify this. The supporter of natural medicine emphasises that the academic doctor relieves an inflammation in certain cases by ice packs and that he tries to help in articular rheumatism with salicylic acid et cetera. Particular supporters of natural medicine make serious allegations. They say, if the stomach secretes too much acid, the academic doctor tries to neutralise this stomachic acid. The naturopath says, this disregards the deep nature of illness and, above all, the deep nature of the human being. All that does not hit the nail on the head. If we assume that the stomach really secretes too much acid, it may be a proof of the fact that anything is wrong in the organism. In the properly functioning organism, the stomach does not secrete too much acid. Hence, if one neutralises the stomach acid, one does not yet suppress the tendency to create too much acid. One must not pay attention to remove the excess of acid in the stomach.\nThose who polemicise against the academic medicine say this. One would almost stir up the organism — if one removed the stomach acid — to produce quite a lot of acid. One has to go deeper and look for the real cause. Therefore, in particular the naturopath if he becomes fanatic will rail if one gives anybody who suffers from sleeplessness sleeping pills. Sleeping pills remove sleeplessness for a certain time; but you have not removed the cause. However, you must remove it if you want to help the sick person really.\nAmong those who prefer the pharmacological point of view are two parties: the allopaths who state and use < specific remedy against certain illnesses, so to speak, a remedy that has the task to remove this illness. They start from the view that the illness is a disturbance in the organism, and a medicine must remove this disturbance. The homeopaths argue against it that this is not at all the real nature of illness, but the real nature of illness is a kind of reaction of the whole organism against an impairment in it. An impairment has appeared in the organism, and now the whole organism defends itself against this impairment.\nThey say that one has to recognise with the aid of the symptoms, which appear with the ill human being and take into account that that which produces fever et cetera is something like an appeal to the forces in the organism. They can expel the enemy that has crept in. — Hence, the supporters of this method of healing say that one must just take those substances from nature, which cause the illness in the healthy organism. Of course, one must not give the ill organism these substances in heavy doses, which cause certain symptoms in the healthy organism, but just only so much that the relevant substance is sufficient to cause a reaction of the organism against the impairment. This is the principle of homeopathy: what can cause a certain illness in the healthy organism can also make the ill organism healthy again. One applies that remedy, which the organism shows by the symptoms. One imagines that in such a way that the organism shows in the ill state by the symptoms that he tries to overcome the illness\nThat is why the homeopathic doctor applies just the opposite of that in many cases, which the allopathic doctor would apply. The naturopath stands often — not always — on the point of view that it does not matter whether any specific remedy removes an illness but that it matters to support the organism and its activity, so that it evokes its inner forces of recovery to control the illness process. Thus, the naturopath is anxious above all to advise also the healthy human being to support the activity of his organism. He stresses, for example, that it matters less for the healthy one whether a diet gives the human being special opportunity to stuff himself with this or that, but whether a diet gives the human being opportunity to evoke his inner forces in such a way that they become active. The naturopath stresses the function of the organs above all also with the healthy human being. He says, you do not strengthen your heart if you try to spur it perpetually with stimulants, but you strengthen your weak heart activating it, for example, with mountain walks et cetera. — Thus, someone who aims at the activity of the human organs also recommends to the healthy human being to activate his organs appropriately.\nYou have may be seen if you have cared about such questions because they occupy, nevertheless, the present so much, with which fierceness and with which dogmatism is often fought by the one or the other side, how the one or the other side emphasises what it has to argue for its view. Thus, the academic medicine can point to the fact that it made big advances in the field of infectious diseases in the course of the last decades, in particular in the course of the last three to four decades. This academic medicine can point to the fact that it investigated the external pathogenic agents that destroy the human health. It improved the living conditions in such a way that, indeed, in the last time an upturn took place. Just that direction of medicine looks preferably at the pathogenic agents — at the today so dreaded realm of bacteria. That is why it has intensely intervened in the field of hygiene and sanitary facilities — not at all in a transparent way for the nonprofessionals — and has improved the health conditions.\nIt is stressed indeed by some side — again, not completely wrong, but even with one-sided right — that this academic medicine has almost caused a fear of bacteria. However, on the other side the investigations have led to the fact that the health conditions were improved in the course of the last decades. The supporter of this direction proudly points to the fact that the death rate has really decreased by so many percent in the last decades. Those, however, who say that these are not so much the external causes of an illness, but that the causes are in the human being, in his disposition of illness, in his reasonable or unreasonable life, stress again that in the last times, indeed, the death rates have decreased undeniably; however, the numbers of patients have increased in terrifying way. One stresses that certain kinds of illness have increased, for instance, heart diseases, cancer illnesses, kinds of illness, which are not mentioned in the literature of the older time, illnesses of the digestive organs et cetera. Those reasons, which the one or other side alleges, are remarkable.\nOne cannot object from a superficial point of view that the bacteria are not pathogenic agents of the most dreadful kind. However, one cannot deny on the other side that either the human being is strengthened in certain respects and is protected against the influence of such pathogenic agents or he is not. He is not protected if he has cut himself out of his strength by unreasonable life-style.\nIn many a respect those things are admirable which have been performed by the academic medicine in the last time. How subtle are the investigations of the yellow fever concerning the way in which certain insects transfer it from person to person. How superior are the investigations of malaria and the like! However, on the other side, we can see that justified demands of this academic medicine can thwart our whole life very easily, what can lead to tyranny in certain respect. With a certain right one asserts that in the case of stiff neck, an illness often appearing in the last time, the pathogenic agent is not transferred from a sick person to another person, but that quite healthy human beings bear the germs in themselves and transfer them to other human beings. So human beings who walk around among us are the carriers of germs from whom then those who have a disposition of the illness can get it, while others who bear germs do not fall ill.\nThus, it could happen that one demanded to isolate the carriers of germs; for if anybody has fallen ill with stiff neck, he is not as dangerous as those are who nurse him and are perhaps the real carriers of illness. To which consequences this must lead if one impeded the contact to these persons, one may recognise from the following: one can assert — and it has already been asserted — that at any school suddenly a bigger number of children fell ill with this or that illness. One did not know where from the illness came. Then it became apparent that the teachers were the real carriers of the illness. They themselves did not catch the illness, but they infected the whole school. The expression bacteria carrier or bacteria catcher is an expression, which a certain side can use even with a certain right. Already after the few explanations I could give, it is almost a matter of course that the nonprofessional knows just a little in these fields, which face him from this or the other side.\nWe have to say now, just that which we have explained at the beginning of this consideration would have to be a real guide of welfare based on good reasons that are brought forward by the one or the other side. We have to regard, as a principle in the deepest and most significant sense that the individuality of the human being is a single reality, is something that is different from any other human being. We visualise, so to speak, a concrete example best of all. Imagine a human being — I say things which have definitely happened — who had an uncontrollable aversion of meat. He could not bear meat, could not eat it. He could not eat what is connected anyhow with meat, too. He developed quite healthy with his vegetarian diet. This went well as long as benevolent, good friends used all their energy to dissuade him from his paradoxical sensation. They advised him first, urged him, so to speak, to try broth at first. He was driven on and on, up to mutton. Besides, he always felt more and more ill. After some time, a phenomenon appeared with him like a particular abundance of blood. A peculiar hypersomnia appeared, and the good man perished by an encephalitis. If one had not drawn his attention every day once more to what he should eat, actually, if one had left him with his healthy desire, if one had not believed, “every shoe fits every foot,” if one had not adhered to dogmatism but had respected the individual nature of the person, then he would have kept well and fit.\nHowever, from such a case we should only learn to respect the individual nature of the human being. We should not derive a new dogma from it; thereby we would come to one-sidedness. If we consider how the death was caused in this case, we can answer this question in the following way. If you remember what I have said about issues of nutrition last time in the talk, you can infer the following from it: what one calls life processes leads the plant up to a certain point; it processes lifeless material to living organism. This process continues in the human organism. In certain respects is that which the human organism and the animal one do a decomposition of that which the plant has built up. The human and the animal bodies are based in certain respects on the fact that that is destroyed, which the plant has built up.\nNow an organism can be arranged in such a way that it requires, so to speak, just the point for itself to begin where the plant has stopped with its activity. Then it can be detrimental to it in the most remarkable sense if he is relieved of that part of the process, which the animal has already performed with the plant products. The animal leads the plant process up to a certain point, and then the human being can only continue it. If he enjoys animal food, he is relieved of it. If his nature just disposes of the forces, which can absorb the plant food freshly and strongly and continue them, then he has forces in himself, which are not used now for any absorption of nutrients and food processing. These forces are there. We do not get rid of these forces by the fact that we give them nothing to do, for then they turn to something else. They work inside of the human organism. The result is that it destroys the organism as an excess activity inside.\nYou see — if you have a view sharpened by spiritual science — this excess activity occupying the whole human being, turning to his blood and his nervous system. One sees how it has looked in the organism like with a house building where one has used inappropriate material so that one must try to order and to arrange the material. One does not lead the forces for the processing of the nutrients to the inside with impunity. If we realise this, we become tolerant and do not position ourselves against nature. Then we must not stereotype in the opposite direction again and to become fanatics of vegetarianism for every human being.\nJust in such a way as with the above-mentioned man the activity was deflected to the inside and came in a rush, it can be on the other side that there are human beings who do not dispose of this force at all who cannot continue the plant process directly where it has stopped. Such persons would experience if one expected from them to become vegetarians just without further ado that they would have to take the forces that they need there poorly from their own organism. They would consume it and thereby make it starve. This can happen absolutely on the other side. What it concerns is that we turn away our view from these or those dogmas if we talk about conditions of health and illness, turn away from the view to eat this or that only. The point is to get to know the single human being and the necessity of his needs. It depends above all on the fact that this single human being has the possibility to feel and to recognise his needs in certain respects.\nIf a materialistic view looked too very much at the only material, nevertheless, it would be necessary to this materialistic view to move in this direction that I have suggested now. Just to this, it would be actually impossible to stereotype and standardise.\nHow much does one stereotype in our time! There one says, for example, just like that, this or that foodstuff or this or that medicine is detrimental. It has literally broken out an epidemic of stereotyping, and this has to happen if not any one-sidedness is excluded with the controversy of the different methods of healing. An epidemic has broken out under the headword “force,” so that one says, for example, at meetings of naturopaths, this or that is “force.” With it, one believes to have done enough to denounce this or that and to say that they only started from the material. Those who arrogate to themselves above all to consider the human being as an individuality should also consider it. In addition, if one surveys, for example, the other living beings, the word “force” loses any sense. We must modify our views concerning such matters. Who would not assume a particular force of the human being if he hears that, for example, rabbits eat the hemlock without harm, while Socrates died of it? In addition, goats and horses can eat the hemlock without harm, likewise aconite. With all these matters, we must always visualise the individual organism as a rule. If we visualise the individual organism, we get around to saying to ourselves: in single cases something may be right but “every shoe fits not every foot.”\nThe question is, how can the human being gain a criterion for his health in himself? The child could be a certain lighthouse to us. Hence, we must absolutely keep in mind that the child expresses its sympathy or antipathy for this or that food in particular way. The careful observation of these things would be of extraordinary importance to each of us. It proves sometimes absolutely mistaken if anyone who has to educate a child wants to expel the instincts, which appear there with the child and express themselves as a certain desire, if one regards it as misbehaviour. Rather it is in such a way: what the child expresses as desire, as instinct, is a sign how the inner being of the child is natured. What the child feels and tastes, what it longs for, there the sensation, the desire is nothing but the expression of the fact that the organism requires just this or that. Yes, a hint, or, if we want to speak more drastically, a lighthouse for knowledge can be to us this leading instinct of the child. We can wander through the whole life and find the necessity everywhere that the human being must just develop this inner assurance concerning the needs of his organism. This is more uncomfortable than to get the direction dictated from this or that party and to listen to anybody what is good for all human beings. The human beings do not have it as easy as those who come with a certain general prescription, which one needs only to put in the pocket to know what can sicken and what can cure the human being. Just if one looks at such a guide of health, one also has to realise concerning illness that for the different human beings the most different conditions of health and healing exist.\nLet us assume that anybody has migraine. Somebody who stands dogmatically on the viewpoint — even if the academic medicine does no longer want to admit this — that there are specific remedies for this or that illness will say, one gives certain remedies against migraine to the sick person. The sick person will feel finer, and the migraine disappears. — Who stands on the viewpoint of natural medicine and has become a practitioner says, one can only combat the symptom that way and has damaged more with it than it was useful. It depends on the fact that one comes to the deeper causes; then one gets to all kinds of things which come, however, more to the core of the thing, which maybe do not restore the well-being in the single case so fast, which come, however, really deeper to the core of illness.\nOne will combat the one or the other or regard it as useful if one positions himself dogmatically on the one or the other viewpoint. However, it concerns, as strange as it may be, the human being again. There could be a person who says to himself, if I have a violent migraine, indeed, it would be nice to wait until the natural medicine has got to the core of the illness to recognise it in its deeper roots and then to do what removes it. Nevertheless, I have no time. It is much more important to me that I get rid of the migraine as soon as possible and that I can resume my activity. — We assume now that this person has a wholesome occupation, so that he would get rid of the evil also without any remedy. There the remedy for migraine would damage him a little, because he would be torn out a little from his activity that is useful to him. Then, indeed, he would be treated after a prescription, which compares the human being to a machine to be overhauled. However, one has to end this comparison. One must not forget that someone must be there who works like the engineer on the locomotive. We assume that a crank of the locomotive moves with difficulty. There anybody could say, I see that the engineer cannot move the crank because he is too weak; I take another engineer who can exercise more strength to turn the crank. Another could say, perhaps one could file off what obstructs the crank, so that the crank has less difficulty to move; then the engineer can remain. — Therefore, one overhauls the engine. Of course, one must not apply this as a general prescription, because if one wanted to say: if the engine lacks something, one has to file off something, this does not always need to be right. It could be that not anything must be filed off at the concerning place, but that one has to add something.\nWith the person, who had migraine, one simply repaired the harm by the remedy, and if he has the inner strength, the thing will already be in good order if he is not disturbed. Of course, it would be bad eventually if one proceeded in the same way towards anybody who wants to get rid of a migraine, but does not go over to an activity connected with his medical capability. He would have done better to remove the inner causes. Thus, we have to have penetrated this matter completely and have seen that there are specific remedies for illnesses, and that the application of specific remedies is connected in certain respects with the fact that our organism is an independent being and can be mended in many a direction. If one can rely on the fact that after the repair a right efficient strength exists which drives the human being, one does not need to stress that one pursues a cure of symptoms only, for there one thinks again materialistically. The naturopath knows something that would be quite appropriate to remove this or that illness, but it is as true that this or that human being does not have the time and not the strength to carry out it, and that he is concerned above all to compensate for the harm quickly.\nYou see that here must be spoken not in one-sided, but in a universal way and one must accept the inconvenience to be not only a theorist, but to go into the facts and to look at the whole human being. That is the point. If we speak in such a way, we must take stock of the fact that we must consider the whole human being if we want to consider the human being as reality. For spiritual science, the whole human being is not only the external physical body, in particular if our health is not destroyed only by external, but by inner causes. What one has to consider even more is the health of the etheric body that is a fighter against the illnesses, up to death, is the health of the astral body, which is the bearer of passions, desires, impulses and ideas, and, finally, the health of the ego-bearer that makes the human being a self-conscious being. Who wants to take the whole human being into account must take the four human members into account, and if the issue of health is considered, it concerns not only that we remove disturbances of the physical body, but also look at that which takes place in the higher members, the more mental-spiritual members. There we must note that not only this or that party trespasses against that but also our contemporary attitude. You can learn from this that one puts the question very seldom: how is the issue of health connected with the mental-spiritual matters? — Today, you get a lot of approval if you speak about the caloric values of this or that food and about the effects this or that food has. One will also find full approval if one explains how the air is in this or that region where this or that sanitarium is located, how the air and the light work there and there. However, you do not find an echo if you indicate mental qualities as possible causes of certain illnesses.\nWe take the instincts of the child as they express themselves in sympathy and antipathy compared with this or that food. If we take the feelings of disgust with which it rejects this or that as a sign which points to the fact that also the astral body must be healthy. It forms the basis of the healthy physical body, and if one notices a divergence from the healthy condition of the human being, one must pay attention to the recovery of the astral body.\nDoes one still ask today really considering these questions, which experiences the human soul has towards the outside world? The spiritual scientist has to point to the fact that it depends basically a little whether one sends a person who suffers from this or that disease to this or that place, because one believes that the air or the light have a recovering effect on him because of external mechanical or chemical reasons. Another, much bigger question is whether I can bring him in such surroundings that he can experience joy, raise, in certain respects a brightening up of his emotional life.\nIf we look at this on a large scale, we also understand that it belongs to the human health that the human being likes a diet that he has, so to speak, an indicator in his taste, in the immediate sensation of taste, an indicator of that which he should eat. On the other side, he has an indicator in the emerging sensation of hunger when his organism should eat. These are not only influences coming from the material world, which destroy this inner assurance of the human being, these are in the most cases also influences from the mental life which undermine the assurance of the sensation of hunger. Instead of teaching a healthy sensation of hunger at the right moment, the mental influence on the human nature can work in such a way that he feels no hunger but lack of appetite.\nA human being who has developed the needs of his organism in the right way also has the right pleasant feeling to find the right surroundings which serve his health in relation to light and air, so that the sensation of hunger comes to him at the right time afterwards.\nThese are demands that are connected tightly with the medical life, and lead there to that which the astral body and the ego have to contribute to this health. One easily objects: if anybody has hunger, he cannot live on feelings and sensations. It is true that if one serves anybody with a tasty dish, his mouth is watering, but one cannot sate him with it if the real taste of the dish remains concealed to him. This objection is easy. We cannot sate or bring anybody back to health while we influence his soul to let the sensations and mental pictures proceed in the right way; this is a matter of course. However, one ignores something else. We cannot regulate the food explaining it, however, regulating the taste up to the appearing sensation of hunger. Here leads that which is fragmented today, because it is used only from the external material viewpoint, to the spiritual-mental.\nIt is relevant whether the human being takes in this or that food with appetite or aversion, whether he lives in these or those surroundings, whether he does his work with joy or listlessness. The inner disposition of health is connected with it in mysterious ways, more than with something else. As we see with the child that it develops right instincts, and have an indicator of its inner needs, it is also necessary that the adult experiences the spiritual-mental, so that the right needs appear before his soul at the right time, that he feels which relation he has to produce between himself and the outside world.\nLife is appropriate in the broadest sense to mislead the human being concerning his relation to the outside world repeatedly. Moreover, just our today's attitude is the reason of such mistakes in more than one respect.\nIn order to understand each other better I would like to point to the small beginning, which we have done with a certain method of healing. In Munich, one of our spiritual-scientific friends tries a kind of cure or method of healing as it results from the views of spiritual science. Someone who believes today that only material, physical-chemical and physiological influences can have recovering effects on the human being will maybe laugh about the fact that the person concerned is led into especially coloured chambers. There one works on the human soul — indeed, not on the surface — by the forces of a certain colour and other things, which I do not discuss. However, you must see the difference between this impact in the chambers, a kind of chromotherapy, a kind of colour therapy, and that which one calls light therapy. If the human being is irradiated with light, the idea forms the basis to let the physical light work immediately, so that one says to himself if one lets this or that beam of light work on the human being, one works on the human being from without. However, that does not apply to the mentioned colour therapy.\nWith this method of healing taken from spiritual science, which our friend Dr. Peipers has arranged, one does not count on the effect of the beams of light as those, regardless of the human soul. However, one takes that into account, which, for instance, under the effect of the blue colour, not of the light via the mental picture originates in the soul and thereby it reacts on the physical organism.\nOne has to consider this huge difference between light therapy and colour therapy. It happens that certain sick people are filled with the contents of a particular colour image. One has to know that the colours contain forces in themselves, which appear if they irradiate us not only, but work on our soul. One has to know that one colour works challenging, that another colour is something that releases longing forces, that the third colour is something that raises the soul above itself, and another colour is something that depresses the soul beneath itself. If we look at this physical-spiritual effect, the primal ground of the physical and the etheric becomes apparent to us: the fact that our astral body is the real creator of the physical and etheric. The physical is only a condensation of the spiritual, and the spiritual can react again on the physical, so that it is processed and enlivened in the right way. If we visualise the basic idea of such a thing, we can hope to be able to understand that that which lives in the spiritual-mental expresses itself in health and illness in the physical.\nWho realises this can hope for spiritual science concerning the issues of health. One can easily say, with any worldview, you cannot cure a human being — nevertheless, it is also true that the health of the human being depends on the worldview. This is a paradox to the modern humankind; it is a matter of course in future! I want to discuss this still a little more. One can say that the human being must come to the purely objective truth; he must make his concepts precise likenesses of the external physical facts.\nOne can put up such a demand as a theorist. One can put a human being as an ideal who tries to think only what the eyes see what the ears hear and what the hands can touch. — Now there spiritual science comes and says: you can never understand what is real if you look only at that which is externally discernible, what the eyes see, what the ears hear, what the hands can reach. What is real contains the spiritual as a primal ground. One cannot perceive the spiritual; one must experience it by the cooperation, by the production of the spiritual-mental. One needs productive forces for the spiritual. The spiritual scientist is — if he speaks of the single parts of his science — not always in the position of demonstrating quite plainly what leads to his concepts. He describes what cannot be heard with ears, what cannot be seen with eyes, or cannot be seized with hands because it must be pursued with the eyes of the spirit. It is a portrayal of something that does not exist in the sensory world. We consider that as truth which gives an inner likeness of the outer reality. One may put up such a theory, but today we do not want to speak about its logical or epistemological value, we want to speak about its curative value.\nThe point is that all those mental pictures which we abstract only from the outer sensuous reality which are not based on the inner co-operation of the soul creating pictures, have no inner formative forces; they leave the soul dead; they do not invoke the soul to activate its forces slumbering within.\nThe fanatics of the external facts may speak about it ever so much that one should not intersperse reality with pictures of the supersensible world. However, as paradoxical as it may be, these pictures put our mind again in an activity that is commensurate with it. They harmonise it again with the physical organism. Someone who sticks to the purely abstract mental pictures of the merely materialistic science does nothing for his health from his spiritual. Who positively creates abstractions in his concepts only, makes his soul dull and void, and he always is dependent to make the external instrument of the body the carrier of health and illness. Who lives in disordered and wrong mental pictures does not know that he inoculates the causes of destruction of his organism to himself in mysterious way. Hence, spiritual science represents the viewpoint that by its points of view of the supersensible world, of that world which we do not recognise with external senses, but which we have to wake up with strong inner activity, we activate our soul, so that its activity complies with the spiritual world from which our whole organism has been created. Hence, our organism is healed not with petty means, but spiritual science itself is the great remedy.\nSomebody who forms his thoughts from the big viewpoints of the world and enlivens these thoughts causes such an inner activity that also his feelings and sensations proceed harmoniously making the soul happy. Who works on his thoughts in such a way works also on his intentions, and these have a recovering effect. However, they do this only because really a healthy worldview, a healthy harmony of thoughts fulfils our soul. Our sensations, and in connection with them also our desire and listlessness, our sympathy and antipathy, our longing and disgust are thereby, so that we face the world in such a way that we know what to do in every single case, like the child whose instinct has not yet been ruined. Thus, we evoke those feelings, sensations, will impulses, and desires in our souls, which are sure guidelines, which instruct us what to do to cause the right relation between the outside world and us.\nWe say not too much if we say, clear, bright thoughts, comprehensive thoughts, as they are caused only by a comprehensive worldview, considering the whole world and aiming at the supersensible, are a condition of health. Pure feelings and will impulses that correspond to the objective of the spiritual enable the human beings to feel healthy hunger. Even if one cannot feed the human being a worldview, nevertheless, this offers the possibility to find what corresponds to his soul to look for what is suitable to him and to abhor what is not suitable to him. Thoughts that are likenesses of the supersensible world are the best digestive means — even if as a paradox — not because in the thoughts the forces of digestion are, but because the forces are evoked by energetic thoughts which make digestion proceed in a way.\nAs long as the human beings do not hear this call of spiritual science, as long as they believe over and over again that any form of illness finds its recovery if one has found suitable means for it, as long they will not have recognised the significance of spiritual science. They will also not have recognised to what extent health plays a role in the development. In addition, those do not go far enough who say, one should not cure symptoms. They also do not grasp the spiritual core. Who approaches spiritual science finds out that it is a worldview through which internal bliss flows, a worldview of joy and desire, that it is a condition to promote the big remedy for health. It is easier to use this or that means than to enter the current of spiritual science in order to find what makes the human beings healthier and healthier. Then, however, one understands that it is true what an old proverb says: “Sound mind in a sound body,” but that it is wrong to understand this proverb materialistically. Who believes that he has to understand this proverb materialistically should only also say, here I see a house. This house is nice. Therefore, I conclude from it that a nice owner built it. The nice house makes a nice owner. — Nevertheless, someone is a little cleverer who says: here is a nice house; I conclude from it that in it an owner lives who has artistic taste. I consider the owner of the nice house as a person of good taste, and the house as the external sign of the fact that the owner is a person of good taste.\nPerhaps, anybody clever says, because external forces have made the body healthy, the body has formed a healthy soul again. — However, that is not correct, but someone is right who says: here I see the healthy body. This is a sign of the fact that a healthy soul must have built up it. It is healthy because the soul is healthy. — Therefore, one can say, because one sees the external symptom of the healthy body, a healthy soul must form the basis there. A materialistic time may interpret the proverb “sound mind in a sound body” quite materialistically. However, spiritual science shows us that a healthy soul works in a healthy body."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-9",
    "title": "Tolstoy and Carnegie in the Light of Spiritual Science",
    "date": "28 Jan 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19090128p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "The basis of our consideration today may seem a weird arrangement to somebody: on one side Tolstoy, on the other side Carnegie, two personalities about whom probably some say, more different, more opposite persons one can hardly find. On one side, the solver of riddles of the highest social and spiritual problems searching from the depths of spiritual life — Tolstoy; and on the other side the steel tycoon, the rich man, the man about whom one knows literally hardly more than that he thought about how the accumulated wealth is to be used best of all — Carnegie. Then again the arrangement of both persons with spiritual science or anthroposophy.\nIndeed, with Tolstoy nobody probably doubts that one can illumine the depths of his soul with the light of spiritual science. However, with Carnegie some probably say, what has this man to do generally with spiritual science, this man of the only practical, business work? — Spiritual science would be the grey theory, the unrealistic and life-hostile worldview as one regards it is so often, if it does not care a little about the issues of practical life, as one believes sometimes. Therefore, it could appear weird that just such a man of practical life is adduced to illustrate certain issues. If one has understood that this spiritual science is something that can flow into all single fields, yes, into the most mundane fields of practical life, then one does not consider it as something surprising that also this personality is adduced to illustrate something that should be just illustrated within spiritual science. Secondly — to speak in the sense of Emerson — we have two representative personalities of our time before ourselves. The one like the other expresses the whole striving on the one side, the work on the other side typically, as they prevail in our time. Just the opposite of the whole development of personality and soul is so characteristic with these both men on one side for the variety of life and work in our time, on the other side, nevertheless, again for the basic nerve, the real goals of our present.\nWe have, on one side, Tolstoy who has grown out of a distinguished class, of wealth and abundance, of a life sphere in which everything is included that external life can offer as comfort and convenience. He is a human being whom his soul development has brought almost to proclaim the worthlessness of all he got with birth, not only to himself, but also to the whole humankind like a Gospel. We have the American steel tycoon on the other side, a personality that has grown out of hardship and misery, grown out of a life sphere where nothing at all exists of that which external life can offer as convenience and comfort. A person who had to earn dollar by dollar and who ascended to the biggest wealth, who got around in the course of his soul development to regarding this accumulation of wealth as something absolutely normal for the present and to thinking only about it how this accumulated wealth is to be used to the welfare and happiness of humankind. What Tolstoy never desired when he had reached the summit of his soul development he had it abundantly in the beginning of his life. The external goods of life that Carnegie had abundantly acquired last were refused to him in the beginning of his life. This is the expression of their natures, even if in exterior way, however, the characteristic of both personalities to a certain extent at the same time. What can take action with a person in our time, what one can reflect of these external processes in and around the personality shows us with both what prevails in our present in the undergrounds of the social and mental existence generally. We see Tolstoy, as said, born out of a sphere of life in which everything existed that one can call comfort, wealth, and refinement of life. Of course, we can deal only quite cursorily with his life, because today it concerns of characterising our time in these representative personalities and of recognising their needs in a certain way.\nIn 1828, Leo Tolstoy is born in a family of Russian counts about which he himself says that the family immigrated originally from Germany. Then we see Tolstoy losing certain higher goods of life. Hardly he is one and a half years old, he loses the mother, the father in the ninth year. Then he grows up under the care of a relative who is, so to speak, the embodied love, and from her spiritual condition, the marvellous soul condition had to flow in his soul like by itself. However, on the other side, another relative who wants to build up him out of the viewpoints of her circles, out of the conditions of time as they formed in certain circles influences him. She is a person who is completely merged in the outward world activity which later became very odious to Tolstoy and against which he fought so hard. We see this personality striving from the outset to make Tolstoy a person “comme il faut,” a person who could treat his farmers in such a way, as it was necessary in those days, who should receive title, rank, dignity, and medals and should play a suitable role in the society.\nThen we see Tolstoy coming to the university; he is a bad student as he absolutely thinks that everything that the professors say at the University of Kazan is nothing worth knowing. Only oriental languages can occupy him. In all other matters, he was not interested. Against it the comparison of a certain chapter of the code of Catherine the Great (1729–1796) with The Spirit of the Laws (1748) by Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat, Baron de M., 1689–1755) attracted him. Then he tries repeatedly to manage his estate, and we see him almost getting around to diving head first into the life of luxury of a man of his circles, diving head first into all possible vices and vanities of life. We see him becoming a gambler, gambling big sums away. However, he has hours within this life over and over again when his own activities disgust him, actually. We see him meeting peers as well as men of letters and leading a life, which he calls a worthless, even perishable one at moments of reflection. However, we also see — and this is important to him who looks with pleasure at the development of the soul where this development manifests in especially typical signs — particular peculiarities appearing with him in the development of his soul which can disclose us already in the earliest youth what is, actually, in this soul.\nThus, it is of immense significance, what a deep impression a certain event makes on Tolstoy at the age of eleven years. A friendly boy once told him that one has made an important discovery, a new invention. One has found — and a teacher has spoken in particular of the fact — that there is no God that this God is only an empty invention of many human beings, an empty picture of thought. Everything that one can know about the impression that this boy's experience made on Tolstoy shows already how he absorbed it that in him a soul struggled striving for the highest summits of human existence.\nHowever, this soul was weird in other ways as well. Those people who like to state outer appearances and do not pay attention to that in the soul, which emerges from the centre as the actual individual through all outer obstacles, they ignore and do not pay attention to anything in such youth experiences that has different effects on the one soul and on the other one. In particular, one has to pay attention if a soul shows a disposition in the earliest youth that one could pronounce with the nice sentence of Goethe in the second part of his Faust : “I love the man who wants what cannot be.” This sentence says a lot. A soul, which desires, so to speak, something that is obvious foolishness to the philistine view, such a soul, if it appears in its first youth as such, shows the width of the scope of view just by such peculiarities. Thus, one must not ignore it, if Tolstoy tells such things in one of his first writings, in which he gives reflections of his own development.\nWe are not allowed to ignore when he says there things, which were absolutely valid for him, for example, when he shaved off his eyebrows and defaced his not very extensive beauty in such a way for a while. This is something that one can regard as a big outlandishness. However, if one thinks about it, it becomes an indication. Another example is that the boy imagines that the human being can fly if he presses the arms against the knees rather stiffly. If he did this, he would be able to fly, he thinks. He goes up once in the second floor and jumps out of the window, retaining the heels. He is saved like by a miracle and carries off nothing but a little concussion, which compensates one another by an 18-hour sleep again. He proved for his surroundings with it to be a strange boy. However, someone who wants to observe the soul and knows what it means to go out in his soul in the earliest youth from the track, which is predetermined on the left and on the right, does not disregard features in the life of a young person. Thus, this soul seems to be great and to have many talents from the start. Hence, we can understand that he was fulfilled with a certain disgust of himself when he was tired of the debaucheries of life, which were due to his social rank, in particular after a gamble affair.\nWhen he goes then to the Caucasus, we can understand that there his soul becomes fond of the simple Cossacks, of those people whom he gets to know and recognises that they have, actually, quite different souls than all those people whom he had got to know up to now basically. All the principles of his peers appeared to him so unnatural. Everything that he had believed up to now seemed to him so strange, so separated from the original source of existence. However, the human beings, whom he got to know now, were people whose souls had grown together with the sources of nature like the tree by the roots with the sources of nature, like the flower with the liquid of the ground. It impressed him enormously that they were grown together with nature, that they had not become foreign to the sources of existence, that they were beyond good and evil in their circles.\nIn 1854, when he became a soldier, full of zest for action, to take part in the Crimean War, we see him with the most intensive devotion studying the whole soul life of the simple soldier. However, we see now a more specified feeling taking place in Tolstoy's soul, we see him being deeply moved by the naturalness of the simple human being on the one side, on the other side, also by the misery, poverty, the tortures, and depression of the simple human being. We see how he is fulfilled with love and desire to help, and that the highest ideals of human happiness, human welfare, and progress flash as shades in his mind, how he realises completely on the other side that the natural human beings cannot understand his ideals. This causes a conflict in his soul, something that does not allow him to penetrate to the basic core of his being.\nThus, he is thrown back repeatedly from that life he leads and in which he is thrown just with the Danube army from one extreme to the other. A superior says, he is a golden human being whom one can never forget again. He works like a soul that pours out goodness only and, on the other hand, has the ability to amuse the others in the most difficult situations. Everything is different if he is there. If he is not there, everybody hangs his head. If he has plunged into life, he comes back with a terrible remorse, with awful regret to the camp. Between such moods, this great soul was thrown back and forth. From these moods and experiences those views and pictorial descriptions of his literary career come, which caused, for example, the most accepting review even from Turgenev (Ivan T., 1818–1883, Russian author), and which have found recognition everywhere. However, we see at the same time how in a certain way beside the real centre, the centre of his soul, always he looks at the big strength, at the basic spring of life, how he struggles for the concepts of truth and human progress. However, he cannot help saying at a being together with Turgenev: you all do not have, actually, what one calls conviction. You talk, actually, only to hide your conviction.\nOne can say, life made his soul feel low, bringing it into heavy, bitter conflicts. Indeed, something most serious should yet come. At the end of the fifties, one of his brothers fell ill and died. Tolstoy had often seen death in war, had often looked at dying human beings, but he had not yet realised the problem of life to such extent as at the sight of the beloved dying brother. Tolstoy was not so fulfilled at that time with philosophical or religious contents that these contents could have supported him. He was in such a basic mood that expressed itself towards death possibly in such a way that he said, I am incapable to give life a goal. I see life decreasing, I see it running in my peers worthlessly; they do things which are not worth to be done. If one strings up an event to the other and forms ever so long rows, nothing valuable results. — At that time, he could also not see any contents and life goal in the fact that the lower social classes were in distress and misery.\nHe said to himself at that time, such a life whose sense one searches in vain is finished by the futility of death and if the life of everybody and any animal ends in the futility of death, who is generally able to speak about the meaning of life? Sometimes, Tolstoy had already set himself the goal to strive for perfection of his soul, to search contents for the soul. He had not advanced so far that any contents of life could be roused in the soul even from the spirit. Therefore, the sight of death had put the riddle of life in such horrible figure before his spiritual eye.\nWe see him travelling in Europe just in the same time. We see him visiting the most interesting cities of Europe — in France, Italy, Germany. We see him getting to know some valuable persons. He gets to know Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860, German philosopher) personally shortly before his death, he gets to know Liszt (1811–1882, Austrian-Hungarian composer) and still some others, some luminaries of science and art. He gets to know something of the social life, gets to know the court life at Weimar. Everything was accessible to him; however, he looks at everything with eyes from which the attitude looks that has just been characterised. From all that he had gained only one: as well as it is at home, in the circles, which he has grown out of, it is also in Western Europe.\nNow a goal faces him in particular. He wanted to found a kind of model school, and he founded it in his hometown where every pupil should learn after his talents where it should not be a stencil. We cannot get involved with the description of the pedagogic principles, which one used there. However, this must be stressed that he had an ideal of education in mind, which should meet the individuality of the child.\nWe see a kind of interregnum taking place, where in certain way the stormy soul experiences a kind of standstill, that soul in which the problems and the questions followed in rapid succession, into which the sensations and emotions have flowed in contradicting way. A calmer life prevails in it. This time begins with the marriage in the sixties. It was the time from which the great novels come in which he gave the comprising tremendous pictures of the social life of the present and the previous time: War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1873–1877). So much has flowed in from that which he had learnt onto these works.\nThus, he lived until the seventies of the last century. Then comes a time of his life where he faces a crucial decision where all qualms, doubts, and problems come to life again which prevailed once like from dark spiritual depths.\nA comparison, a picture that he forms is rather typical of what his soul experienced. One needs to visualise this picture only and to know that it means quite another matter to a soul like Tolstoy's soul, as for another soul that is much more superficial. You need to visualise this picture only, and you can deeply look into the mind of Tolstoy. He compares his own life to an Eastern fable, which he tells possibly in such a way:\nThere is a man, pursued by a beast. He flees, finds a dried out well and plunges into it to escape from the beast. He holds fast onto the branches, which have grown out on the sides of the well wall. In this way, he thinks he is protected against the pursuing monster. However, in the depth, he sees a dragon, and he has the feeling, he must be devoured by it if he gets tired only a little or if the branch breaks, onto which he holds fast. There he also sees on the leaves of the shrub some drops of honey from which he could feed himself. Nevertheless, at the same time he also sees mice gnawing away at the roots of the shrub onto which he holds fast.\nTwo things to which Tolstoy adhered were family love and art. For the rest, he considered life in such a way that all tantalising worries of life pursue him. He escapes one and is welcomed by the other monster. Then one sees mice gnawing away the few things that one still. — One must take the picture deeply enough to see what goes forward in such a soul, what is shown there and what Tolstoy experienced in all thinking, feeling and willing in the most extensive way. The branches still pleased him. However, he also found various things, which had to gnaw away at the delight in them. If the whole life is in such a way, that one cannot find sense in it, that one looks for the meaning of life in vain, what does it mean to have a family, to build up descendants to whom one transfers the same futility? This was also something he had in mind. And art? If life is worthless, what about art, the mirror of life? Can art be valuable if it only is able to reflect that in which one looks for sense in vain?\nThat just stood before his soul and burnt in him after an interregnum again. Where he looked around with all those who tried to fathom the meaning of life in great philosophies and in the most various worldviews, he nowhere found anything that could satisfy his searching. Recently it was in such a way that he turned his look to those people who were originally connected with the springs of life according to his opinion. These human beings had preserved a natural sense, a natural piety. He said to himself, the scholar who lives like me, who overestimates his reason finds nothing in all researching that could interpret the meaning of life to him. If I look at the usual human being who unites there in sects: he knows, why he lives, he knows the meaning of life. How does he know this, and how does he know the meaning of life? Because he experiences the sensation in himself, there is a will, the everlasting divine will as I call it. What lives in me devotes itself to the divine will. What I do from morning to evening is a part of the divine will. If I move the hands, I move them in the will of the divine. Without being brought by reason to abstractions, the hands move. — That faced him so peculiarly, that grasped him so intensely: if the human is deeply grasped in the soul. He said to himself, there are human beings who can answer the question of the meaning of life to themselves that they can use.\nIt is even magnificent how he contrasts these simple human beings with those who he got to know in his surroundings. Everything is thought out of the monumental of the paradigms. He says, I got to know people who did not understand to give life any meaning. They lived by force of habit, although they could gain no meaning of life, but I got to know those who committed suicide, because they could not find any meaning of life. — Tolstoy himself was before it.\nThus, he studied that category of human beings about whom he had to say to himself, it could not be talk of a meaning of life and of a life with a meaning. However, the human being, who is still connected with the sources of nature, whose soul is connected with the divine forces as the plant with the forces of life, can answer to the question: why do I live? — Therefore, Tolstoy came so far to search for a community with those simple human beings in the religious life. He became religious in certain way, although the outer forms made a repellent impression on him. He went to the Communion again. Now it was something in him that one can explain in such a way: he strove with all fibers of his soul to find and to feel a goal. Nevertheless, again his thinking and feeling impeded him everywhere in certain way. He was able to pray together with these human beings, who were believers in the naive sense and answered to the question of the meaning of life to themselves.\nHe could pray — and this is tremendously typical — up to the point of a uniform way of feeling. However, he was not able to go further when they prayed: we confess ourselves to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. — This made no sense to him. It is generally typical that he was able to come up to a certain point, looking for a religious life, which was based on brotherly feelings. This life in devoutness should produce a unity of feelings, unity of thoughts. However, he could not rise to the positive contents, the knowledge of the spirit, to the spiritual view, which gives reality. The traditional dogmatics meant nothing to him. He could not connect any sense with the words, which are given in the Trinity.\nThus, he came, while all these things flocked together, to the mature period of his life, to the period in which he tried to delve completely into that which he could call true, real Christianity. He strove in such a way, as if he had wanted to comprise, to penetrate the liveliness of Christ's soul with his own soul. With this spirit of Christ's soul, he wanted to penetrate himself. A worldview should arise from it, and from this something like a transformation of all present life should result which he subjected to harsh criticism. Because he believes now to feel in his soul, what Christ had thought and felt, he feels strong enough to issue a challenge to all ways of life, to all ways of feeling and thinking of the present. He criticised harshly that out of which he has grown and which he could see in the farther environment of his time. He feels strong enough to put up the demand, on the other side, to let the spirit of Christ prevail and to get out a renewal of all human life out of the spirit of Christ. With it, we have characterised, so to speak, his maturing soul and have seen this soul having grown out of that which many of our contemporaries call the summits of life. We have seen this soul getting around to harshly criticise the summits of life, and to putting as its next goal the renewal of the spirit of Christ which it finds strange to everything that lives presently, in the renewal of Christ's life which it nowhere finds in reality. Therefore, in certain sense, Tolstoy says no to the present and affirms what he calls the spirit of Christ, which he could not find in the present but only in the first times of Christianity. He had to go back to the historical sources, which came up to him. There we have a representative of our present who has grown out of the present, saying no to this present.\nNow we have a look at the other man, who affirms most intensely, what Tolstoy denies most intensely, who reaches the same formula but applies it quite differently. There we see Carnegie, the Scotsman, growing out of that dividing line of modern times which we can characterise by the fact that trade, large-scale industry and the like sweep away the small trade from the social order. We really see Carnegie growing out of that dividing line of modern life, which a newer poet so nicely characterised with the words (poem by Heinrich von Reder, 1824–1909, Bavarian officer, poet, and painter):\n\nGone to rack on a mule track\na smithy stands in woodland solitude;\nno longer does the hammer blow\naccompanied by merry songs.\nNot far away the buildings rise\nwhere sooted blacksmiths\nare working so hard.\nWith the steam mill's nails\nthe coffin is closed,\nit carries the nail-smith\nimpoverished to grave.\n\nOne needs to wake only such a mood, and one illuminates brightly that dividing line in the cultural development of modern times, which has become so important to life. Carnegie's father was a weaver who had a good living at first. He worked for a factory. This went well up to the time when the large-scale industry flooded everything. Now we see the last day approaching, when Carnegie's father can still deliver the produced to the trader. Then poverty and misery enter in the weaver's family. The father does no longer see any possibility to make a living in Scotland. He decides to emigrate to America, so that both sons do not live in misery and die.\nThe father finds work in a cotton factory, and the boy is employed as a bobbin boy in his twelfth year. He has to perform hard work. However, there is after one week of hard, heavy work a happy day for the 12-year-old boy. He gets his first wage: 1 dollar and 20 cents. Never again — so says Carnegie — he has taken up any income with such delighted soul as this dollar and twenty cents. Nothing made more joy to him later, although many millions went through his fingers. We see the representative of practical pursuit in our present that grows out of distress and misery that is natured in such a way to immerse himself in the present, as it is, and to become the self-made man in it. He struggles. He gains his dollar every week.\nThen somebody employs him in another factory with a better wage. Here he has to work even more, he must stand in the basement and has to heat and maintain a small steam engine with big heat. He feels that as a responsible post. The fear to turn the tap of the engine wrongly what could lead to an accident for the whole factory is dreadful to him. He often catches himself sitting in his bed at night and dreaming of the tap the whole night which he turned taking care of turning it in the right direction.\nThen we see him employed as a telegraph messenger in Pittsburgh after some time. There he is already highly happy with the small wage of the telegraph messenger. He has to work at a place where also books are which he had hardly seen before. Sometimes he also has newspapers to read. He has now only one worry: telegraph messengers are not to be needed in the city if they are not able to know all addresses of the companies by heart, which receive telegrams. He really manages to know the names and addresses of the Pittsburgh companies. He also already develops a certain independence. His consciousness is paired exceptionally with cleverness. He goes now a little earlier to the telegraph office, and there he learns to telegraph by own practicing. Thus, he can aim at the ideal that any telegraph messenger is allowed to have in a young, ambitious community: to become a telegraph operator once. He even succeeds in a special trick. When one morning the telegraph operator was not there, a death message comes in. He takes up the telegram and carries it to the newspaper to which it was determined. There are connections where one regards such an action, even if it succeeds, not as favourable. However, Carnegie thereby climbed up to the telegraph operator.\nNow something else presented itself to him. A man who dealt with railways recognises the talents of the young man and one day he makes the following proposal to him. He said to him, he should take over railway stocks of 500 dollars that had just become available. He can win a lot if he pursues these matters. Carnegie tells now — it is delightful how he tells this — how he raised 500 dollars really by the care and love of his mother, and how he bought his stocks. When he got the first revenue, the first payment of more than five dollars, he went with his fellows out to the wood. They looked at the payment and thought and learnt to recognise that there is something else than to be paid for work, something that makes money from money. That aroused big viewpoints in Carnegie's life. With it, he grew into the characteristic of our time.\nThus, we see him immediately understanding when another proposal is made. It is typical how he grasps with complete presence of mind what appears before his soul for the first time. An inventive head shows him the model of the first sleeping car. Straight away, he recognises that there is something tremendously fertile in it, so that he takes part in it. He emphasises now again by what this consciousness, actually, grew. He did not have enough money to take part in suitable way in the enterprise of the first sleeping car society of the world. However, his ingenious head caused that he got money already from a bank: he issued his first bill of exchange. This is nothing particular, he says, but this is something particular that he finds a banker who accepts this bill of exchange. This was the case.\nNow he needed to develop this only to become completely the man of the present. Hence, we have not to be surprised that he became a steel tycoon when he got the idea to replace the many wooden bridges with iron and steel bridges, that he became the man who set the tone in the steel industry and acquired the countless riches. Thus, we really see the type of the human being in him who grows into the present, the present, which unfolds the most exterior life. He grows into the most outward of appearance. However, he grows into it by his own strength, by his abilities. He becomes the extensively rich person out of distress and misery, while he himself really acquired everything from the first dollar on. He is a pensive person who associates this whole impulse of his life with the progress and life of whole humanity.\nThus, we see another strange Gospel growing out of his way of thinking, a Gospel that follows Christ. However, Carnegie immediately says at the beginning of his Gospel, it is a Gospel of wealth (essay Wealth or Gospel of Wealth , 1889). That is why his book shows how wealth is applied best of all to the welfare and to the progress of humanity. He opposes Tolstoy immediately about whom he says: he is a person who takes Christ in such a way as it is not suitable at all to our time, who regards him as a strange being of old past. One must understand Christ in such a way that one transfers Him to the present life. — Carnegie is a person who affirms the whole life of the present completely. He says: if we look back at the times when the human being were more alike than today, they were still less divided into those who had to assign a job and those who have to take a job, and if we compare the times, we see how primitive the single cultures were in those days. The king was not able in that old time to satisfy his needs in such a way as today the poorest person can satisfy them now. What happened had to happen. That is why it is right that one distributes the goods in such a way.\nCarnegie establishes a strange doctrine of the distribution or application of wealth. Above all, we find with him that ideas of the purely personal efficiency, of the nature of the efficiency of the human being originate in his soul who has worked his way in life up to that which he becomes in the end. At first Carnegie sees outward goods only, then also that the human being must be efficient, externally efficient. Someone has to apply his efficiency not only to acquire wealth but also to manage it in the service of humanity.\nCarnegie intensely draws the attention to the fact that quite new principles would have to enter, so to speak, in the social construction of humanity if welfare and progress should originate from the new progress and the distribution of goods. He says, we have institutions of former time that make it possible that by inheritance from the father to the son and the grandchildren goods, rank, title and dignities go over. In the life of the old time, this was possible. — He regards it as right that one can substitute with routine what the personal efficiency does not give: rank, title, dignities.\nNevertheless, he is convinced by that life he has experienced that it requires personal, individual efficiency. He points to the fact that one had ascertained that five of seven insolvent houses became insolvent, because they demised to the sons. Rank, title, and dignities devolved from the fathers upon the sons, however, never business acumen. In those parts of modern life, where commercial principles prevail, they should not be transmitted simply from the testator to the descendants. It is much more important that someone builds up a personally efficient man, than to bequeath his wealth to his children. That is why Carnegie concludes in the absurd sentence: someone has to make sure that he applies the accumulated wealth to such institutions and foundations by which the human beings are promoted to the largest extent. — The sentence with which he formulates this, which can appear grotesque, which originates, however, from Carnegie's whole way of thinking is this: “Who dies rich dies dishonourably.” One could say in certain sense, this sentence of the steel tycoon sounds even more revolutionary than many a sentence of Tolstoy.\n”He who dies rich dies dishonourably” means: someone dies dishonourably who does not apply the accumulated goods to endowments by which the human beings can learn something, can get the possibility to do further studies. If he makes many human beings efficient with his wealth during his life and does not hand it down to descendants, who can use it their way lacking any talent and only to their personal well-being, he dies not dishonourably.\nThus, we see with Carnegie a very strange principle appearing. We see that he affirms the present social life and activity, that he gains, however, a new principle from it: the fact that the human being has to advocate not only the use of wealth, but also its management, as a manager of the goods in the service of humanity. This man does not at all believe that anything can devolve from the parents upon their descendants. Even if he knows the outward life only, he realises, nevertheless, that inside of the human being the forces have to originate which make the human being efficient to do his work in life.\nWe see these two representatives of our present: that who harshly criticizes what has developed bit by bit and who wants to lead the soul to higher fields out of the spirit. On the other side, we see a man who takes the material life as it comes, and who is pointed to the fact that within the human being the spring of work and of the health of life is to be found. Nevertheless, one may find something just in this teaching of Carnegie that allows me to remark the following. If anybody does not look thoughtlessly and pointlessly at this soul life, but looks at the forces pouring out of the souls bit by bit, does look at the individual, and is clear in his mind absolutely that it is not handed down, — what has one then to look at? One has to look at the real origin, at that which comes from other sources. One finds if one comes to the sources of the present talents and abilities that these are caused in former lives. By the principle of reincarnation and of spiritual causing, karma, one finds the possibility to process such a principle meditatively that it has forced the practical life upon a practical person.\nNobody can hope that from a mere externalisation of life anything could come that the soul satisfies, can bring the civilisation to the highest summits. Never can one hope that on those roads anything else would come than a distribution of wealth salutary in the external sense. The soul would become deserted, it would overexert its forces, but it would find nothing in itself if it could not penetrate to the sources of the spirit, which are beyond the external material life. While the soul is rejected by a material approach to life, it must find the spring, which can flow only from a spiritual approach to life. With such a life praxis, as Carnegie has it, that deepening and spiritualisation coming from spiritual science have to combine, so that the souls do not become deserted. On the one side, Carnegie demands that from the single soul, which makes it fit for the external life, on the other side, Tolstoy wants to give the single soul what it can find from the deep well of the spiritual being.\nAs well as Carnegie grasps the being of the present with sure look from the material life, we find Tolstoy on the other side with sure look grasping the characteristic of the soul. Up to a certain limiting point, we see Tolstoy coming who affects us, indeed, strangely if we compare everything that lives in Tolstoy's worldview to that which faces us in particular in the West-European civilisation.\nOne can examine work by work of Tolstoy and one sees one fact emerging above all. The matters, which one has gathered here in the West with an immense expenditure of philosophical reflection, academic pondering, and moving conclusions from pillars to post, appear to Tolstoy in such a way that they occur in five to six lines like flashes of thought and become conviction to that who can understand such a thing. Tolstoy shows, for example, how we have to find something in the human soul that is of divine nature that can visualise the divine in the world if it lights up in us. Tolstoy says there, around me, the academic naturalists live; they investigate what is real outdoors in the material, in the so-called objective existence. They search the divine primal ground of existence. Then such people try to compose the human being from all principles, substances, atoms et cetera that they search spread out outdoors in the space. Then in the end, they try to understand what the human being is, while they believe to have to combine all external science to find the primal ground of life. Such human beings, he says, appear to me like human beings who have trees and plants of the living nature round themselves. They say, this does not interest me. But there is a wood far away, I hardly see it; I want to investigate and describe this wood, then I also understand the trees and the plants which are around me, and I am able to describe them. — People appear to me that way who investigate the being of the animals with their instruments to get to know the nature of the human being. They have it in themselves; they only need to see what is in close proximity. However, they do not do this. They search the faraway trees, and they try to understand what they cannot see, the atoms. However, they do not see the human being.\nThis way of thinking is so monumental that it is more valuable than dozens of insights and theories that are written out of old cultures. This is typical for the whole thinking of Tolstoy. To such things, he came, and in such things, one must look. To the West European this is extremely unsatisfactory; only by a devious route via Kant he gets around to it. With the assurance of his soul, Tolstoy is driven to pronounce what is not proved, but is true, what is recognised by immediate view and of which one knows if it is pronounced that it is true. His work On Life (1887) shows this monumental original springing of the deepest truth like from the spring of life, which he searched. His last writings just show this and what is in such a way that it can shine like an aurora to a rising future.\nTherefore, we have to say, the less we are inclined to take Tolstoy dogmatically, the more we are inclined to take up the gold nuggets of a primitive paradigmatic thinking, the more he becomes fertile. Of course, those who accept a personality only in such a way that they swear on their dogmas, who cannot allow to be fertilised by it, they do not have a lot from him. Something does not agree with them. However, someone who can allow to be fertilised by a great personality may receive a lot from Tolstoy. We see truth working in him, paradigmatically, and that this truth flows with strong forces onto his personal life. How does it flow in there? It is rather interesting to see that different views live in his family and tolerate each other. How was he able, however, to introduce his principles in the everyday life? By working, and not only with principles. Thereby he becomes a true pioneer of something that only must sprout in future. On the other side, Tolstoy is also a child of his time, even though he is a pioneer of the future.\nPerhaps, one can nowhere feel more impressively how he puts himself in the present than in that strange picture of the year 1848, when he was twenty years old. One looks only at the face of the 20-year-old, which expresses energy and willpower, also reticence at the same time. However, the spirited twinkle in the eyes reveals something that faces the riddles of life quizzically. He is volcanic inside but not able to cause the volcano to erupt. Indeed, we see mysterious depths of the soul expressing themselves in his physiognomy, and we get the expression of the fact that something tremendous lives in him but that he cannot yet express it completely in this hereditary organism.\nIt is also that way with the variety of the forces which live in Tolstoy, and which could not be expressed so really. It is in such a way, as if they are expressed as caricatures, distorted in certain respect. One has also to recognise the character in him that is sometimes distorted grotesquely. Hence, it is quite wonderful if he is able to point to that which one calls something transient with the human beings normally: look at the human body. How often its substances have been exchanged! Nothing material is there that was there in the ten-year-old boy. Compare the usual consciousness to the image life of the fifty years old man: it has become completely different, until the soul structure. We cannot call it permanent, but everywhere we find the centre in it, which we may imagine possibly in the following way. The objects of the outside world are there. There is this, there is that, there a third one. Two human beings face the objects. The eyes see the same things, but they are to the one this way, to the other that way. The one says, I like this; the other says: I do not like this. — If in the outside world everything is the same, and if the one soul says, I like it, and the other says, I do not like it, if the way of life is different, a centre is there that is different from all appearance that remains constant, in spite of all change of consciousness and body. Something is there that was there before birth and is there after birth, my particular ego. This my particular ego has not begun with birth. It is not the point that anybody positions himself with the west-European habits to such a remark, but it matters that one has the sensation: one can do such a remark. Therein the greatness of the soul appears. It becomes apparent that the soul lives and how it lives. Immortality is guaranteed therein.\nTolstoy just approaches the border of that which we get to know as the innermost being of the soul by spiritual-scientific deepening. He is wedged by the world against which he himself fights so much and cannot penetrate to true cognition of that which is there before birth, and of that which comes after death. He does not come to the teaching of reincarnation and karma. Just as little, he gets to the inner impulse of the soul like Carnegie who almost demands it. Therefore, we see whether now a human being is in contradiction to everything that lives and works in the present or whether someone complies with all life forms of the present: he is led to the gates of the anthroposophic approach to life. Tolstoy would be able to find the way to Carnegie, Carnegie never to Tolstoy.\nWith this talk, I wanted to show that a worldview and an approach to life could be given which introduces into the immediate life praxis, which can transfer the newfound to the known, to the performed. Moreover, we see if we familiarise ourselves deeper and deeper with spiritual science that it brings that to the human beings of the one and the other view which, in the end, Tolstoy has found his way and Carnegie has found his way: a satisfying life. However, it does not depend on it that the immediate viewfinder finds the satisfactory life, and that those who search with him can find it. What Tolstoy and Carnegie have found for themselves as adequate, this can be found for all human beings only impersonally and spiritually if true spiritual knowledge of that is found which goes from life to life, which carries the guaranty of eternity in itself."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-10",
    "title": "Practical Training in Thought",
    "date": "11 Feb 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19090211p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "The anthroposophic spiritual science that is represented here — of course, always only piecemeal — is regarded by a lot of people who do not know or do not want to know it as a field of daydreamers and of such human beings who, as one says so easily, are not in the real, in the practical life. Indeed, someone who wants to inform himself cursorily with this or that brochure or with a single talk about the contents and the goal of spiritual science can easily get to such a judgment. That applies, in particular if he — like many others — is less willing on penetrating into the real spiritual fields or if he has all prejudices and suggestions which arise from our civilisation so numerously against such a field of research. Moreover, it is not so seldom today that the bad will is added, no matter whether consciously or unconsciously, then the judgement is ready: oh, this spiritual science deals with matters which the practical human being who wants to stand firmly with both feet on the ground of life should not care about!\nHowever, spiritual science feels intimately related with the most practical fields of life, and where it is appropriately pursued, it places the greatest value on the fact that thinking, the most certain guide, experiences a practical development with the real practical life. Because firstly spiritual science should not be anything that hovers unworldly and otherworldly anywhere in the cloud-cuckoo-land and wants to deduct the human being from the usual everyday life. However, it should be something that can serve our life with all that we think, act, and feel at every moment. Secondly, spiritual science is in a certain sense a preparation of our soul for those levels of knowledge, by which the human being himself penetrates into the higher worlds. One often stresses that spiritual science has a value not only for the human being who already has open eyes to penetrate in the spiritual world, but that the healthy human mind, the unclouded reason and power of judgement are able to understand what the spiritual researcher knows about the higher worlds. For the acceptance of his communications has an infinite value for the human being, long before he himself can penetrate into the spiritual fields. One can say, spiritual science is for everybody a preparation to develop the higher organs of knowledge bit by bit slumbering in the soul by which the spiritual worlds become discernible to us.\nWe have already spoken partly; we will have still to speak partly about the different methods and performances, which the human being has to carry out in order to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. However, there is always an unconditional requirement: who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, who wants to apply the methods exactly given by spiritual research, so that the spiritual senses are opened to him, that should never ever venture this way to the higher fields of life without standing on the ground of a healthy, a practically qualified thinking. This healthy thinking is the guide, the true leitmotif, in order to reach the spiritual worlds. Someone reaches them best of all using the methods of spiritual science who does not disdain to educate himself strictly to a thinking bound to reality and its principles. Indeed, if one speaks about the real practical thinking, one easily is contrary to practice, and probably practice of thinking in our world. One has only to remind of something that I have already often suggested here in order to characterise this. Many a person attributes practice to himself in our world. What is, however, practice about which today the so-called practical human beings talk? There is somebody apprenticed to a master. There he learns all those performances and measures which were carried out for decades, maybe since centuries and which are strictly compulsory. He appropriates that all, and the less he thinks, the less he forms an independent, free judgement, the more he goes beaten tracks, the more the world considers him as practical, in particular those consider him who are active in this field. One calls this often impractical what differs only in the least sense from anything that one practises since long time. Maintaining such a practice is mostly not bound to reason, but only to force. Someone who has any position in life and has to carry out things in a way, which appears to be correct for him, insists that every other who is active in this field must do this just as he does it. If he has the power, he pushes everybody out who wants to go forward differently.\nLife praxis consists of such conditions in many cases. Then the right also results, as for example in the case where a big progress should be implemented: The first German railway should be built from Fürth to Nuremberg. One consulted an eminently practical board, the Bavarian Medical Council, whether generally this railway should be built. One can read this judgement, even today. It reads, one should build no railway because the driving would ruin the nerves. However, if one wanted to build railways, one should fence them on the left and on the right with high wooden walls, so that passing persons would not get concussions. This is a judgement of practitioners. Whether one would consider these practitioners as practitioners even today, this is the question. Probably not.\nAnother example, which can show us whether progress originates from those who call themselves practitioners or from other people: you find it certainly very practical that one has no longer to go to the post office with any letter where the postage has then to be determined according to distance and weight. Only during the forties of the nineteenth century, the uniform letter postage was introduced in England. However, not a practitioner of the postal system invented it, but such a practitioner said when the matter should be decided in the parliament, firstly he did not believe that such an advantage arose, as Hill (Sir Rowland Hill, 1795–1879) calculated, and secondly the post-office building had to be extended. He could not imagine that the post-office building has to comply with the postal traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office building. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, a practitioner said, namely that who let two stagecoaches go to Potsdam for many years: if people wanted to throw their money out of the window, one could build the railway. Because this practice of the so-called practitioners is so impractical, if the big issues of life are considered, one can become contrary to these practitioners if one speaks about the practical development of thinking. Something presents to the impartial observer in all fields of life that can show how it is with the real life praxis.\nOnce I experienced a quite vivid example, what practical thinking can prevent. A friend of my study time came once excitedly with red head to me. He said, he must immediately go to the professor and inform him that he has made a great invention. Then he came back and said, he could speak the expert only in one hour, and then he explained his invention to me. It was a device, which set a machine in motion expending a very small quantity of steam power only once supplied, and then this machine perpetually performed an immense work. My friend himself was surprised that he was so clever to make such an invention, which exceeded everything and made good economic sense. I said to him, he should trace back the matter to a simple thought. I said, “Imagine, you stand in a railroad carriage and you try to push against the walls of the carriage in order to move it. If you succeed in moving the carriage standing and pushing in it, your engine is good, because it is based on the same principle.”\nAt that time, I realised that a main obstacle of all practical thinking can be called with a technical term: one is a “carriage pusher from within!” This fits the thinking of many people; they are “carriage pushers from within.” What does that mean? That one is only able to survey a certain narrow field and to apply to this field what one has learned to this field. However, one is also forced to stop within this field and cannot see at all that everything changes substantially, as soon as one exits from the “carriage.”\nThis is one of the principles, which one has to follow above all with a practical development of thinking: that every human being who is active in any field must try to connect it with adjacent fields regardless of his own activity. Otherwise, it is impossible that he gets to a practical thinking. For this is a peculiarity which is connected with a certain internal sluggishness that the human thinking likes to be encapsulated and forgets what is outdoors, even if it is palpable.\nI have recently stated in other connections that one wants to prove the Kant-Laplace theory: Once the universal nebula was there. This started rotating by any cause; the single planets of the solar system separated bit by bit and received the movement, which they have still today. One makes this very clear in a school experiment, the so-called Plateau (Joseph P., 1801–1883, Belgian physicist) experiment: one gives an oil drop in a vessel with water. Then one cuts out a disc of cardboard as the equator. One lays this under the oil globule. Then one pierces it with a needle, rotates the needle — and small oil globules separate in the equator area like planets, and they move around the big globule. One has committed something very impractical in intellectual respect: the experimenter has forgotten himself what is sometimes rather good; he has forgotten that he himself has turned the thing. For one is not allowed to forget the most important of the matter. If one wants to explain an experiment, one has to invoke all things in the field to which it comes down; these are the essentials.\nThe first that must exist with that who wants to experience a practical development of thinking is that he confides in reality, in the reality of thoughts. What does this mean? You cannot scoop water from a glass without water. You cannot take out thoughts from a world without thoughts. It is absurd if one believes that the whole sum of our thoughts and mental pictures exists only in us. If anybody disassembles a clock and reflects the principles of its construction, then he must suppose that the watchmaker has joined the parts of the clock first according to these principles. Nobody should believe that one could find any thought from a world, which is not created and formed according to thoughts. All that we learn about nature and its events is nothing else than what must be put first into this nature and its events. It is no thought in our soul, which has not been outdoors in the world first. Aristotle said more correctly than some modern people did: what the human being finds in his thinking last exists in the world outdoors first.\nHowever, if anybody has this confidence in the thoughts, which are contained in the world, then he sees very easily that he has to educate himself at first to a thinking full of interest in the world. He has to educate himself to that great, beautiful ideal of thinking as it distinguished Goethe: the concrete thinking, that thinking which isolates itself as little as possible from the things, that sticks to the things as intensely as possible. Heinroth (Johann Christian August H., 1773–1843, physician, formed the term “psychosomatics”), the psychologist, used a sentence concerning Goethe that his thinking is a concrete one, where the thoughts express nothing else than what is included in the things themselves and that in the things nothing else is searched than the real creative thought. If anyone has this confidence, this faith in the reality of thoughts, he easily realises that he can educate himself in harmony with the environment, in harmony with reality to a practical, healthy thinking not receding from the things.\nOne has to take into consideration three ways if the human being really wants to take on an education to practical thinking: firstly, the human being must and should develop an interest in the surrounding reality, interest concerning facts and objects. Interest in the environment, this is the magic word for the education of thought. Secondly, desire and love of that which we do. Thirdly, the satisfaction of that which we reflect. Who understands these three things: interest in the environment, desire, and love in the activities and the satisfaction of contemplation soon finds that these are the main demands of a practical development of thinking. Indeed, the interest in our environment depends on matters that we discuss with the next talks when we speak about the invisible members of the human nature and about the temperaments.\nThe biggest enemy of thinking is often thinking itself. If anybody thinks that only he himself can think and the things would not have any thought in themselves, he is hostile, actually, to the practice of thinking. Imagine that a person would have formed some narrow mental pictures of the human being, would have made a few stereotyped schematic concepts of the human being. Now any human being faces him who has roughly the qualities, which fit his pattern. Then he is ready with his judgement and does not believe that this human being can tell him anything particular. If we approach anything that surrounds us with the feeling that any fact can tell us something particular, that we are not entitled at all to let judge something else about the things than the things themselves, then we soon notice which fruits such concrete sense bears. The confidence that the things can tell us much more than we are able to say about the things is again such a magic ideal of the practice of thinking. The things themselves should be the educators of our thinking, the facts themselves.\nImagine once that a person brings himself to use the following two important means of education for his practical development of thinking: he opposes himself with any fact, for example, that somebody has done a walk to this or that place just today. He experiences that at first. Now the person concerned wants to educate his thinking. There it is good if he says to himself, I have experienced this and that, now I want to contemplate how the today's event was caused yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on. I go back and try to form a view from that which goes forward to that which could have been. If I have selected such an event and the cause of it after my intellectual imagination, then I can investigate whether the real cause complies with my thoughts. I have something very important from such compliance or non-compliance. If my thoughts comply with that which I can know as the cause, then it is good. In most cases, this will not be the case. Then one investigates in what one was deceived and tries to compare the wrong thoughts with the right course of the events. If one does this repeatedly, one notices that one no longer makes mistakes after a shorter or longer time, but that one can liberate such a thought from a fact, which corresponds, to the objective course of the events.\nAlternatively, one does the following: again, someone takes an event and tries to construct in thoughts what can result tomorrow or in some hours from this event. Now he waits quietly whether that happens which he has thought himself. In the beginning, he experiences that this is not right which he has thought. However, if he continues this, he sees thinking immersing itself in the facts that it does not form any mental pictures for itself, but that the thoughts proceed as the things proceed. This is the development of the factual sense. If he even forbids to himself to form abstractions, then he experiences that he grows gradually together with the things and that he obtains a sure judgement.\nThere are people who are directed by a certain sure instinct to such a thinking. This is because they are already born with special dispositions to develop such a thinking. Such a person was Goethe. He had grown together with the things so that his thinking did not proceed in the head, but in the things inside. Goethe, who was once a lawyer, had a healthy power of judgement and a sure instinct to tackle the things. There was no long referring to documents and reviewing of documents if a case had to be undertaken. Goethe did not allow that. It was a practitioner.\nIf once all documents of the Weimar minister Goethe are published — I have seen big parts of them — then the world will recognise Goethe as an eminently practical nature, not as a quixotic human being. One knows that he accompanied his Grand Duke with the training of recruits to Apolda (small town near Weimar). He observed everything that took action — and, besides, he wrote his Iphigenia . Compare to it what disturbs a modern poet at work. Moreover, Goethe was a much greater poet than anyone was who is not allowed to be disturbed today. Because of the eminently practical thinking, he could also say, for example, if he looked through the window: today we cannot go out, because it will be raining in three hours. — He had done cloud studies, but had put up no theory. It was in such a way that from his thinking developed what developed in nature outdoors. One calls this concrete thinking. One obtains such concrete thinking if one does such exercises in particular as I have just stated them. However, this is connected with a certain unselfishness, as strange as this sounds. However, there are principles also in the soul, and someone will not attain very much who thinks only of himself if he does such experiments. If he looks, for example, at a fact and says then immediately, ah, have I not said it? Therefore, this is the most certain obstacle of practical thinking. Thus, we could state many things to show how one can systematically develop the sympathetic adherence of the thoughts to the things, so that one learns to think in the things.\nThe second is desire and love of all we do. They really only exist if we can renounce success. Where it depends only on success desire and love are not undimmed. Hence, not anyone who is dependent on success can develop that rest in trying which is necessary, so that desire and love of activity can inspire us bit by bit. By nothing, we learn more than by lending a hand to everything possible and renouncing the so-called success. I knew somebody who had the habit to bind his schoolbooks himself ( Steiner himself ). It looked bad, but he thereby learnt enormously. If he had looked at the success, he would have maybe refrained from it. However, just in the activities we develop the qualities, the talents that enable us to become dexterous up to the movements. We never become dexterous if we look at the success of our activities in particular. If we are not able to say to ourselves, the failures in our activities are as dear to us as our results, we never reach the second level, which is necessary if one trains thinking.\nThirdly, we have to find satisfaction in thinking itself. This is something that appears so unambitious and is mostly combated today. How often does one hear saying, why have our children to learn this and that? They cannot need this in the practical life. — This principle to think only what one can need is the most impractical principle. There must be areas for a human being if he wants to think practically where the mere activity of thinking grants satisfaction to him.\nIf a human being does not find time, may it be only short, to do something that he does purely intellectually and that satisfies him intellectually, he can remain always only on beaten paths. If he finds, however, such a thing that he does only because of his inner interest, then he has something that has a big, strong effect on him, on his finer organisation, on the finer structure of his organism. Never work the things on us creatively, which captivate us to life, which enslave us; they wear out our talents, they take vitality from us. The things, however, which we do intellectually only to our satisfaction create vitality, new talents and they go into the subtlest organisation of our being and increase the subtle structures of our organism. Not by working for the benefit of the outside world, but by working to our satisfaction we create something by which we advance a developmental step. If we approach practice with this finer organisation again, this affects the practice, and everybody can see that it is right.\nTake a painting, for example, the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, and put a human being and a dog before it. The painting makes a different impression on the human being and the dog. The same applies to the life praxis. If one remains captivated in life, the things always make the same impression on us, and one is not able to intervene creatively. If anyone develops a level higher in his activity of thinking, he faces the impressions as the same being in two different forms. He faces it once with that on which he has not yet worked, the other time with that on which he has worked. He becomes more and more practical because the impressions, which make the things on us, are raised more and more. Hence, there is loss of time, indeed, if one does such a thing that does not belong to life praxis directly, however, it promotes life praxis extraordinarily indirectly.\nThese are the three levels of any practical development of thinking: interest in the environment, desire, and love of all trying and working, and perpetually controlling oneself. You see, for example, such an astute man like Leonardo da Vinci already describing the way in which one can advance just while trying. He does not despise to say how one can appropriate the art of drawing bit by bit. He says, draw on tracing paper, put what you have drawn on the template, and look at that in which the drawn differs. Then make it once again and try — doing so — to do the right thing at the wrong places. — Thus, he shows how it depends on working with desire and love. The third is the satisfaction within contemplation that refrains from the external world and can quietly rest in itself. These are such things that can show us first that we grow into a real practice of thinking by the trust in the thoughts in nature, in the world building of thoughts. However, if we also believe that thinking itself is a creative force, we advance. Someone does much for the practical development of his thinking who does the following systematically: he thinks about something, for example, about what he has to do or about a question of the worldview, it may be anything usual or anything of the highest. If he is out now to find a solution quickly, then he develops no practical thinking as a rule. This rather means saying to himself: you are as little as possible allowed to interfere, actually, in your own thoughts. — Besides, most human beings can imagine nothing at all if one says this. This is a main requirement: that we open ourselves to the thoughts in ourselves that we get used to becoming the scene of the work of our thoughts. We could think, there would be only one single way to accomplish a certain thing, or only one single answer to a question. Nevertheless, we are no dogmatists to whom only one single answer is right.\nIf we want to learn practical thinking, we have to try to give ourselves also another answer, maybe also a third one, or a fourth. There are things to which one can think ten sorts of answers. One has to imagine them all carefully, of course, only such things where this is possible, not with such ones, which must be made quickly; one often makes them rather badly than too slowly. If one has ten possible solutions, one carries out each in thoughts with love. Then one says, I want to think no longer about it, I wait until tomorrow and open myself to the thoughts. These thoughts are forces that work in my soul, even if I am not at all involved with my consciousness. I wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and then I cause this thought again in myself. — Maybe I do this still a second or a third time, and each time I survey the single things much clearer and can then decide better than before. This is an incredible schooling of practical thinking presenting different possible solutions of a thing in thoughts to oneself, to allow them to rest and to take up them later again.\nWho does this for a while notices that his thinking becomes versatile, that he develops presence of mind and repartee by a certain practice. Then he grows together with life until the most usual things and recognises what is clever and clumsy, what is wise, and what is foolish. It does not come into his mind to behave in such a way as often so-called practical persons behave. I already had to know many practical persons who can use the beaten paths of their occupation very well; if you see such persons in other situations, for instance, at travelling, their practice is often rather odd. The proof that the practical development of thinking can lead to real life praxis is founded in experience. This works up to the hands, up to the way to seize something. Much less, you drop plates and pots than other persons if you work in such way on your inside. Practical thinking works up to the limbs. If it is carried out actively and not in the abstract, it makes pliable and flexible.\nHowever, impractical thinking is most obvious where the practice of thinking should work, for example, in science. I have stated the hypothetical astronomic experiment as an example. One often experiences, how frightfully impractical just the scientists of today are. I do not attack the real methodical work, the excellent activity of our science in the slightest. Nevertheless, the thoughts, which the modern human beings form, are often almost dreadful. Our microscopes and the photograph are very well developed. One can observe all possible mysterious facts in the various little beings. One observes plants and sees certain strange things in these plants, possibly faceted organs like the eyes of a fly, and one even sees a sort of lenses in some plants at this or that place.\nOne observes with other plants that certain insects are attracted, and then the plants close their leaves and catch the insects. One has excellently observed that all. How does the present impractical thinking explain these phenomena? One confuses the human soul, which reflects the outer processes internally, with that which one observes purely externally in the plants. One talks about the ensoulment of the plant, and one throws plant soul, animal soul and human soul in a mess. One throws this in a mess. Indeed, I object nothing to the marvellous observations of nature, which are popularised in the world. However, the thinking of our contemporaries is confused if anybody says, certain plants have their stomachs at the surface with which they draw in the food and devour it. This thought is approximate in such a way, as if anybody says: I know a being, this is organised artfully and has an organ in itself by which something like a magnetic force is exercised on little living beings, so that they are drawn in and are devoured; this being, which I have in mind, is the mousetrap! This thought is completely the same as that which assumes the ensoulment of the plant. You could speak in the same sense of an ensoulment of the mousetrap as you talk about the ensoulment of the plant if you really thought in this peculiar way.\nThe matter is that one is able to penetrate into the very own nature of thinking, and that one becomes no “carriage pusher from within” in such fields. Something else is important for the practical development of thinking and this is that one has confidence in the inner spiritual organ of thinking. With most human beings, the benevolent nature provides that this spiritual organ of thinking is not ruined too very much because the human being must sleep.\nBecause the spiritual does not stop then, because it is there always, this organ of thinking works for itself and the human being cannot ruin it perpetually. However, it is quite another matter if the human being allows nature to take care of thinking with important and serious facts of life only, or if he himself takes this in hand. It is a very important principle to let the organ of thinking work in yourselves. You are practicing this best of all if you try not to think for a while, howsoever short. A big, immense decision belongs to it to sit or to lie somewhere without letting thoughts go through the head. It is much easier to let your thoughts surge up and down in yourselves, until you are released from them by a good sleep than to tell yourselves: now you are awake and, nevertheless, you do not think, but you think nothing at all. If you are able to sit or to lie quietly and to think nothing with full consciousness, then the organ of thinking works in such a way that it gains strength in itself, accumulates strength. Who puts himself in the situation over and over again not to think with full consciousness notices that the clearness of his thinking increases, that in particular repartee grows because he does not only leave his apparatus of thinking to itself by sleep, but that he lets this apparatus of thinking itself work under his guidance.\nOnly somebody who has taken leave of his spiritual senses can believe that then it is not thought at all. Here the word applies that Goethe says about nature: “She has thought and thinks continuously.”\nIn addition, the innermost nature of the human being has thoughts, even if the human being is not present with his conscious thoughts. Nevertheless, in the case where he is not at all with his thinking, something thinks in him of which he is not aware. At these moments, if he lies there without his own personal thoughts, something higher really thinks in him, and this higher works tremendously educating on him. This is essential and important that the human being also lets the superconscious, the divine work in himself, which does not announce itself directly but in its effects. You become a clear and glib thinker gradually if you have dedicated yourselves to such exercises of thinking. A certain energy belongs to it to carry out such exercises of thinking.\nYou realise at the single examples, which I have given today, how one can develop this thinking with own strength. I could only give some examples of self-education of thinking, but these examples have shown that one is able to point to real remedies of thinking whose fruits life and experience can give only.\nWho exercises his thinking that way experiences that — on the one side — he can go up to the highest fields of spiritual life, that he can use this thinking — on the other side — also in the everyday life. What one gains with the overview of the big spiritual facts one should apply to practical life. All fields of the everyday life, education in particular, could experience a tremendous fertilisation because of this, and another view of life praxis would make itself noticeable all around us. In addition, someone who wants to develop the qualities slumbering in him in order to penetrate to the spiritual fields would have a sure base and stand firmly in life. This is something that one has to demand absolutely, before anybody penetrates to the higher spiritual fields. In addition, the usual science would be able to attain tremendous knowledge if it is fertilised by spiritual science.\nThe carriage pushers of thinking who fancy themselves often as great practitioners do not have this practical thinking; they lack it. They are not able to lead back something to a simple, comprising thought. Spiritual science gives us this: it enables us to survey what is usually small and detailed in life, with big, comprising viewpoints. The human being thereby gets the survey because he is able to think from great viewpoints into the details; then he is led to real life praxis.\nWe can take Leonardo da Vinci as an example, who was a practitioner in many fields. He said, theory is the captain, and practice is the soldiers. — Who wants to be a practitioner without controlling the viewpoints of practical thinking is like someone who goes on board a ship without compass, he does not have the possibility to steer the ship correctly. Goethe showed repeatedly from his practical way of thinking how just scholarship gets by impractical thinking to infertile fantasising. There are people, who lead the outside world back to atoms, and others who lead them back to movements; others deny any movement. On the other hand, the most practical thinkers point to the fact that simplicity comes from the greatness of the worldview. Goethe's dictum is suitable, and we can put it before our eyes:\n\nSome hostile may occur, Keep quiet, remain silent; And if they say There is no movement, Walk around right Under their noses."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-11",
    "title": "The Invisible Elements of Human Nature and Practical Life",
    "date": "18 Feb 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19090218p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "If there is talk of the practical significance of the invisible, particularly of the invisible in the human being, I would like to illustrate by a comparison what I meant. Those people are practical who turn their look, their view to the supersensible view of existence, and those are impractical who stop at the only exterior, at the mere physical. Is anybody, actually, the true practitioner who has a horseshoe-shaped iron as a magnet before himself and uses this thing for anything that appears useful to him by all appearances? On the other hand, is such a person not impractical in the true sense of the word, and practical only someone who says to himself: in this piece of iron something rests that makes a lot of higher, nobler application possible to me than the mere inspection allows to suppose. — This is, of course, only a comparison, because we are not allowed to compare the higher forces about which we speak today with any natural force. However, practical is only someone who chooses the internal forces from the things and can use the things corresponding to their true values. Compared with those who can be led by a certain practical sense one could quote Fichte's word of the practical significance of ideals. Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762–1814) tried to explain the determination of the human being using high ideals.\nIn the introduction to his lectures on The Vocation of the Scholar (1794), he protests that none who speaks from such high idealistic viewpoints knows what can be objected to it, namely, that ideals cannot be shown directly in practical life. Perhaps, those who put up these ideals know this better than the opponents do. “We state only that reality has to be assessed and modified according to them by those who feel sufficient strength in themselves. Assumed, they could also not convince themselves, they lose very little, after they are once what they are; and, besides, humanity loses nothing. It becomes thereby only obvious that one does not count on them in the plan of the improvement of humanity. This will continue its way without any doubt; the benevolent nature may provide for them rain and sunshine, wholesome food and undisturbed circulation of humours at the proper time and — clever thoughts as well!” I want to point to this in particular. We briefly want to imagine the invisible members of the human nature. Spiritual science speaks of these invisible members of the human nature, but not as of anything that is there, as of an adjunct of the visible, but it speaks just of the spiritual as of the creative of the visible.\nAn almost obvious example is the following: everybody — also someone who cannot see into in the workshop of spiritual life — should imagine the senses of shame and anxiety repeatedly, so that he learns to believe that the supersensible is the reason of the sensuous. What are they? They are soul experiences undoubtedly to someone who does not think complicatedly. Anything, we must say, is there that threatens us; the soul feels threatened. This expresses itself as sensations of fear. Indeed, we could state various physical mediations. This would be easy, of course, and the modern researcher would hardly be able to state anything that the spiritual scientist would not know, too. Nevertheless, the matter is that the blood is forced back from the surface of the body to the centre.\nWe have a material process resulting from a soul process. The same is the case with the sense of shame. Again, we have a rearrangement of the blood, a change of the circulation caused by something spiritual. What one sees here in microcosm and what one can observe to a bigger extent, if because of a sad event tears are shed shows that the soul can cause bodily processes. Today, of course, there are people under the influence of our not evidently but latently materialistic way of thinking who also assert materialistic views here. I have also quoted the sentence of a certain worldview: one cries not because one is sad, but one is sad because one cries. This sentence came, actually, from somebody who thought idealistically, but one interpreted it wrong.\nThese are full-grown materialistic ways of thinking. Who has retained a piece of healthy thinking from the materialistic basis of our time sees in such evident connections between physical facts and spiritual-mental facts something that can make him gradually understand that spiritual science must say from its point of view: everything material has a spiritual origin.\nThus, something mental forms the basis of that which we see in the human being, what we can seize with hands with him. It is not the influence of the physical but just the primal ground of the physical. We call that a physical body in the human being, which he has in common with all beings surrounding him, which he has in common with the mineral world. The next, supersensible human member is the etheric body or life body. It prevents the physical body to being a corpse during the whole life, to following the principles of the physical only. Plants and animals also have such an etheric body, which one can deduce by thinking of someone who thinks philosophically only. It is real to the clairvoyant like the physical body.\nA spiritual way of thinking defends itself with pleasure to understand the human body as a machine, however, does not need to defend itself if one is not a “carriage pusher of thinking from within.” One can absolutely say, the human body is a complex mechanism if one wants to include the physical and chemical in the mechanic. However, behind any machine, a builder and preserver must be, so also here, and this is the etheric body or life body, that is a loyal fighter against decay. Only at death, it separates from the physical body, and then the physical body follows as a corpse its physical laws. Then it is a corpse. The etheric body is something more certain than the mere physical body.\nIf we keep on studying the human being, we get to another member of his being, which every human being could already realise if he said to himself, I face a human being, a physical body, and an etheric body. Is there nothing else included in this human being than what one can see from without, what physiology et cetera disclose to us? Oh, there is something else: the sum of emotions, sensations, desires and wishes, pains and sufferings, impulses and passions.\nAll that represents the astral body. Now one could say, nevertheless, one cannot imagine that these things form a concluded reality. However, the spiritual scientist can perceive this clairvoyantly. There the astral body exists as the physical body exists. Nevertheless, the healthy human mind could also already say to itself that such a thing as an astral body must be there. Why could it say that to itself? I want to give you an example where, so to speak, with hands is to be seized how the astral body works, actually. There are people who say when the human being enters the physical world; he is not yet as developed as later. The external science can determine that, indeed, the senses and their organs exist in the brain that, however, the connections of the single senses in the brain develop relatively late. One can really study how the connecting nerve cords develop from the hearing to the facial sphere and make the human being the thinker finally. So — the materialist concludes — one sees how the internal parts develop bit by bit and then the world of sensations, images, sufferings, joys, complexes of thought et cetera flashes in the human being. — Imagine this development of the human brain. The complex lines of thought, which solve the world riddles, develop bit by bit. Are we then allowed to call that a mere mechanism which has developed, which builds itself up?\nOne can also admire a marvellous construction, as for example that of a clock. However, he would be a fool who wanted to believe that the clock has originated by itself. Who is able to do something, can develop only what he is able to do. Someone who had seconds, minutes, the principles of the clock in himself has joined it; one has thought ahead what we then reflect. Is there nothing that joins these connecting cords in the brain in such a way that you become a thinker finally? I mean, a healthy thinking would have to realise that for that which develops a master builder must exist who joins the cords, so that you can become a thinker. We are loyal only to ourselves and to our healthy human mind if we say, an astral body has to have constructed the physical brain. In the first weeks, months, years of the child, the astral body constructs the instrument only, which is able later to solve the world riddles. Who does not believe this, acts just as anybody who wants to use a machine, but denies that a constructor was there who has built it. The time will already come when again healthy judgments prevail in the human being, when they say to themselves that first the spiritual master builder must be there if anything should originate. This master builder has been already there before the human being is born.\nThe third human member is this astral body, that which forms the basis of the material again. The fourth human member is the ego, which makes the human being the crown of creation. The human being has the physical body in common with all minerals, the etheric body with all plants, and the astral body with the animals. He rises above the three physical realms by the ego. Therefore, all religions have probably directed their attention to the fact that there is only one name, which differs from all other. There is one thing that can be never called from the outside: this is in us as our core. No name can come from without that signifies us. Therefore, “I” was in the old Hebrew religion the inexpressible name that was inexpressible for all others.\nThese are the four lower members of the human nature from which only one is visible. The three others are real, are the primal grounds of the real. Any member is a basic being and cause for the next lower body; the ego-bearer for the astral body, the astral body for the etheric body, the etheric body for the physical body. Any experience of the ego imprints itself on the astral body. Here all experiences of the ego express themselves. Any momentary imagining, judging and feeling originate in the human being that way.\nWhat lives in the astral body, expresses itself, imprints itself on the etheric or life body, and thereby it becomes permanent, not momentary, but keeps itself in a certain way. Let us assume that we pass momentary judgment; we make a mental picture about this or that. If we form a mental picture repeatedly, it becomes a habitual mental picture. Because it becomes a habitual image, it imprints itself in the etheric body. What lives in our memory, what we keep in mind from day to day, lives in our etheric body or life body. The fact that we play a piano piece once is in our astral body; the fact that we acquire the talent, the habit of playing is in the etheric body. All habits are in the etheric body or life body. If we pass moral judgment, it is again an action of the astral body. If a certain direction of judging imprints itself on us by repeated judgments, the moral judgment becomes a permanent once, it becomes conscience. The moral judgment is an experience of the astral body; the conscience is an experience of the etheric body or life body. Thus, we see how by the interaction of the higher members with the lower ones the whole human life builds itself up from within outwardly.\nAs far as the human being is a mere physical being, he has the etheric body or life body in common with the plants. What allows the humours to ascend in the plants, what causes that they subsist, reproduce, this causes the same in the human being. However, on this etheric body or life body custom, skill, conscience is imprinted top-down. Something mental-spiritual is imprinted on the human beings top-down. The experiences of the higher members are transferred more and more to the lower members. It is important for the human being to know that the higher members work into the denser members. Thus, the human being can work into the lower members in healthy, practical way.\nThe human being can ruin again, what nature has given him. As with the plant only malformation could originate if the etheric body or life body did not regulate what goes forward, an internal malformation originates in the human being if he works wrong inside, from the ego on the lower members. The astral body must be penetrated by the experiences of the ego in a healthy way. Who does not admit that an astral body builds on the brain of the child will also not realise how important it is that the ego has a proper effect on the astral body. Who realises this, however, says to himself, you are able to keep on working where nature has stopped. If you allow the whole scale of sensations to take place in healthy way, this continues working on your physical body, on your brain, and thus you build up your physical body during your whole life.\nHow many human beings walk around today with writer's spasm? The human body is wonderfully constructed. The human being adjusts his hand with everything that he does to the world outdoors. This cooperation of the hand with the outside goes adrift in certain ways from him if he is not able to set his hand aglow, to invigorate it with his inner life. This is a similar process, as if one gets artificial teeth. It is essential that all that we can get as our own is set aglow and invigorated by our ego. You get trembling hands only if the hands go adrift from the remaining forces to some degree. These are matters which one takes into consideration most intensely again in a not so distant future, and then one will realise what it means to grasp the spirit of the human being again.\nI want to make clear this at an example. We remain in our field. It will become apparent how that which happens in the spirit really seizes the human being and makes him suitable or unsuitable for life, practical or impractical. Let us take a person who is impractical for life because he suffers from certain sensations of anxiety, so that thereby nervousness originates. This word already sounds the whole sum of lacking practice. Any human being who does not control himself completely in any respect is characterised as nervous, or one uses the catchword of genetic predisposition if anything is absent or exists that makes the human being impractical for life. All these things do not originate from a careful observation of the real facts, but because one has no palate for the spiritual due to the materialistic way of thinking.\nIt is important to pursue whether in the first times of life, when the invisible works so intensely on the visible, everything proceeds properly and is not disturbed. What is omitted here cannot be corrected later. If something is not formed well enough, the manifold discrepancies originate in the whole life. The human being, who is not able to let harmonising experiences surge up and down in the astral body, will always make himself impractical for life in certain ways. Instead of searching for genetic predispositions of fear and anxiety, we should rather look for something that is formed by this or that experience which has a solidifying effect on the physical body. It could be, for example, — however, it needs not always be in such a way — that a considerable part of claustrophobia was caused possibly by a particular way of parenting in the human being. He does not get loose from this evil because he lacks the means to stir it up again. Imagine children who recognise all festivities, actually, all the year round, only because they are showered with presents! They receive more than they can destroy. This abundance of undeserved gifts immobilises certain striving forces, which would generate healthy self-assurance. Such a thing can slumber in the human being during the time when the external education fulfils him or a new occupation absorbs him; but this appears once in the form of claustrophobia.\nOne cannot realise this if one does not understand what it means that the astral body changes itself bit by bit into that which the human being is in his physical, discernible behaviour. On the other hand, we can find — if particular states of unsuitability appear anyhow — that something presses on his soul. He cannot say it, cannot confess it, and thinks to have to conceal it. Because the human being does not find the way to the word, it seizes the lower members and works on them. What a soothing effect experiences the human being if he can confess such a thing! Then he has the feeling, now it is no longer lying on my heart like a stone, and this feeling of relief works recovering. Confession is an important remedy in this respect. The denominations have known this well. There we realise how the invisible inside of the human being works on the visible. Even certain reasonable doctors already realise that one cannot cure unsuitability for practical life by systematic application of cold water (Kneipp cure), but in such a way that one has to induce a kind of confession, has to detach something from the human being if healing should take place.\nWe want to look at the reverse now. There are reasonable doctors who say to themselves, one has to turn to the soul of the human being if one wants to know how the human being becomes unsuitable in certain respects. These doctors know that joy and desire are remedies, that they work recovering, that they soften again, what is solidified and ossified, and bring it under our control. However, this is not enough, just as little as it is enough if anybody says, the concealed secret must be detached from the soul of the human being. They do not know that everything that is experience of the inside has a big significance even if it appears wrong. Should we cancel everything mysterious in the human nature because it appears wrong with some persons? Should we make the doctors father confessors, as it one demands here and there? It can also be infinitely recovering for the soul if it is able to draw the veil of secret about some things. A Persian saying says, one saves the time that one uses for silent reflection, before one says something, in relation to the time of remorse about that which one has said thoughtlessly! Goethe pronounced the word of the “obvious secret” not without reason. In everything sensuous that surrounds us, we can realise something mysterious, something that lies so deeply in the things and that one cannot pronounce; however, it still flows from soul to soul. Health spreads out if the human being can feel the secret of life that way.\nSpiritual science maintains this secret of life. Indeed, it does not make it easy for the human beings to approach the things. It is not so comfortable to approach them. Spiritual science can only stimulate, only say, this and that exists. Then the human being has to approach and co-operate. It may be uncomfortable, but it is infinitely healthy. The innermost member of the human being is thereby stimulated; spiritual science works immediately on the ego. If we hear anything about the evolution of the planets, if to us is told about the invisible members of the human nature, what goes from life to life with the human being — with all that one appeals immediately to the ego. All these world-enclosing ideas do not remain dry ideas and abstractions. They emit warmth and bliss; warmth and bliss irradiate and penetrate the astral body of the human being. Contentment and bliss originate from that which spiritual science offers. What sets the human being aglow as warmth, as fire keeps moving to his life body. The forces of spiritual science itself penetrate all forces of the etheric body, and the etheric body transfers the forces again to the physical body, it transfers it as a skill, in such a way that, for example, the hand becomes dexterous and practical if the great, elated ideas of spiritual science flow into the physical body.\nSpiritual science makes the brain a flexible, pliable tool, so that it can get away from prejudices. Spiritual science works strongly down until the physical body of the human being. Up to the practical movements, he can be immersed in spiritual science. I want to give you an example of that. It helps, indeed, if one makes gymnastics possible to the child. This is an exceptionally healthy exercise if one makes it properly. Already in the talk on education, I have drawn your attention to the fact that it is important to remain aware that the human being is not only a physical apparatus, but is spiritualised by higher members. One should be able to project oneself completely into doing gymnastics to share any emotion of the etheric and the astral bodies. I knew a gym teacher, who was a big theorist. He knew the human physical body to a hair's breadth. He also had to give theoretical physical education. It does not matter that one knows the physical exactly, but that he experiences an increase of the inner ease with any exercise. One should experience purposefully what should be the single exercise. Who has a living feeling, not only an abstract idea of the physical body knows that one can have a living feeling for everything that the child experiences, for example, while climbing up a ladder.\nA sort of gymnastics is imaginable that works so harmoniously on the cooperation of the etheric and the physical bodies that the best basis is laid of a good memory in old age. In addition, that which takes action visibly is properly understood only if it is understood from spiritual science. We would have the best means against the dwindling memory in old age in gymnastics if one wanted to do physical education from spiritual science.\nSpiritual science is no theory, nothing dogmatic, but bestows something living to life. Once one will realise that only by spiritual science the human being can become a true practitioner of life. Someone only is a practical person who can use this life who is not its slave. The human being should always control his outer nature with his invisible members. The human being becomes a practitioner only down to the last detail of his life if he is the guide of the bodily. That human being is a practical person who can understand out of a true understanding of his members what Fichte said, but what is often misunderstood. This will be the ideal of the human being if he controls the visible from his invisible again: “The human being can what he has to do; and if he says: I cannot, he does not want it.”"
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-12",
    "title": "The Four Temperaments",
    "date": "4 Mar 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/Singles/19090304p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "It has frequently been emphasized that man's greatest riddle is himself. Both natural and spiritual science ultimately try to solve this riddle — the former by understanding the natural laws that govern our outer being, the latter by seeking the essence and purpose inherent in our existence. Now as correct as it may be that man's greatest riddle is himself, it must also be emphasized that each individual human being is a riddle, often even to himself. Every one of us experiences this in encounters with other people.\nToday we shall be dealing not with general riddles, but rather with those posed to us by every human being in every encounter, and these are just as important. For how endlessly varied people are! We need only consider temperament, the subject of today's lecture, in order to realize that there are as many riddles as there are people. Even within the basic types known as the temperaments, such variety exists among people that the very mystery of existence seems to express itself within these types. Temperament, that fundamental coloring of the human personality, plays a role in all manifestations of individuality that are of concern to practical life. We sense something of this basic mood whenever we encounter another human being. Thus we can only hope that spiritual science will tell us what we need to know about the temperaments.\nOur first impression of the temperaments is that they are external, for although they can be said to flow from within, they manifest themselves in everything we can observe from without. However, this does not mean that the human riddle can be solved by means of natural science and observation. Only when we hear what spiritual science has to say can we come closer to understanding these peculiar colorations of the human personality.\nSpiritual science tells us first of all that the human being is part of a line of heredity. He displays the characteristics he has inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and so on. These characteristics he then passes on to his progeny. The human being thus possesses certain traits by virtue of being part of a succession of generations.\nHowever, this inheritance gives us only one side of his nature. Joined to that is the individuality he brings with him out of the spiritual world. This he adds to what his father and mother, his ancestors, are able to give him. Something that proceeds from life to life, from existence to existence, connects itself with the generational stream. Certain characteristics we can attribute to heredity; on the other hand, as a person develops from childhood on, we can see unfolding out of the center of his being something that must be the fruit of preceding lives, something he could never have inherited from his ancestors. We come to know the law of reincarnation, of the succession of earthly lives and this is but a special case of an all-encompassing cosmic law.\nAn illustration will make this seem less paradoxical. Consider a lifeless mineral, say, a rock crystal. Should the crystal be destroyed, it leaves nothing of its form that could be passed on to other crystals. 1 Translator's note: The reader may conclude from this remark — for it was, after all, a remark, not a published claim — that Steiner was ignorant of the concept of seed crystals. However, a likelier explanation is that Steiner, whose audience was very likely not a scientifically knowledgeable one, was simply indulging in a bit of rhetorical hyperbole. He doubtless knew that a seed crystal will hasten the crystallization process in a saturated salt solution, but this fact is not really relevant to his point, which comes out only gradually in this paragraph. His point is not that a newly-forming crystal cannot receive some contribution from a previously existing one, only that it need not; this is in contrast to living things, which require a progenitor. A new crystal receives nothing of the old one's particular form. When we move on to the world of plants, we notice that a plant cannot develop according to the same laws as does the crystal. It can only originate from another, earlier plant. Form is here preserved and passed on.\nMoving on to the animal kingdom, we find an evolution of the species taking place. We begin to appreciate why the nineteenth century held the discovery of evolution to be its greatest achievement. In animals, not only does one being proceed from another, but each young animal during the embryo phase recapitulates the earlier phases of its species' evolutionary development. The species itself undergoes an enhancement.\nIn human beings not only does the species evolve, but so does the individual. What a human being acquires in a lifetime through education and experience is preserved, just as surely as are the evolutionary achievements of an animal's ancestral line. It will someday be commonplace to trace a person's inner core to a previous existence. The human being will come to be known as the product of an earlier life. The views that stand in the way of this doctrine will be overcome, just as was the scholarly opinion of an earlier century, which held that living organisms could arise from nonliving substances. As recently as three hundred years ago, scholars believed that animals could evolve from river mud, that is, from nonliving matter. Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, was the first to assert that living things could develop only from other living things. 2 Francesco Redi, 1626-1697. Refuted spontaneous generation of living beings out of mud. For this he was attacked and came close to suffering the fate of Giordano Bruno. 3 Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600. Italian philosopher, Dominican monk, burned at the stake as heretic. Taught that the world is infinite in space and time and filled with innumerable suns. Today, burning people at the stake is no longer fashionable. When someone attempts to teach a new truth, for example, that psycho-spiritual entities must be traced back to earlier psycho-spiritual entities, he won't exactly be burned at the stake, but he will be dismissed as a fool. But the time will come when the real foolishness will be to believe that the human being lives only once, that there is no enduring entity that unites itself with a person's inherited traits.\nNow the important question arises: How can something originating in a completely different world, that must seek a father and a mother, unite itself with physical corporeality? How can it clothe itself in the bodily features that link human beings to a hereditary chain? How does the spiritual-psychic stream, of which man forms a part through reincarnation, unite itself with the physical stream of heredity? The answer is that a synthesis must be achieved. When the two streams combine, each imparts something of its own quality to the other. In much the same way that blue and yellow combine to give green, the two streams in the human being combine to yield what is commonly known as temperament. Our inner self and our inherited traits both appear in it. Temperament stands between the things that connect a human being to an ancestral line, and those the human being brings with him out of earlier incarnations. Temperament strikes a balance between the eternal and the ephemeral. And it does so in such a way that the essential members of the human being, which we have come to know in other contexts, enter into a very specific relationship with one another.\nHuman beings as we know them in this life are beings of four members. The first, the physical body, they have in common with the mineral world. The first super-sensible member, the etheric body, is integrated into the physical and separates from it only at death. There follows as third member the astral body, the bearer of instincts, drives, passions, desires, and of the ever-changing content of sensation and thought. Our highest member, which places us above all other earthly beings, is the bearer of the human ego, which endows us in such a curious and yet undeniable fashion with the power of self-awareness. These four members we have come to know as the essential constituents of a human being.\nThe way the four members combine is determined by the flowing together of the two streams upon a person's entry into the physical world. In every case, one of the four members achieves predominance over the others, and gives them its own peculiar stamp. Where the bearer of the ego predominates, a choleric temperament results. Where the astral body predominates, we find a sanguine temperament. Where the etheric or life-body predominates, we speak of a phlegmatic temperament. And where the physical body predominates, we have to deal with a melancholic temperament. The specific way in which the eternal and the ephemeral combine determines what relationship the four members will enter into with one another.\nThe way the four members find their expression in the physical body has also frequently been mentioned. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood. For this reason, in the choleric the predominant system is that of the blood. The astral body expresses itself physically in the nervous system; thus in the sanguine, the nervous system holds sway. The etheric body expresses itself in the glandular system; hence the phlegmatic is dominated physically by his glands. The physical body as such expresses itself only in itself; thus the outwardly most important feature in the melancholic is his physical body. This can be observed in all phenomena connected with these temperaments.\nIn the choleric, the ego and the blood system predominate. The choleric thus comes across as someone who must always have his way. His aggressiveness, everything connected with his forcefulness of will, derives from his blood circulation.\nIn the nervous system and astral body, sensations and feelings constantly fluctuate. Any harmony or order results solely from the restraining influence of the ego. People who do not exercise that influence appear to have no control over their thoughts and sensations. They are totally absorbed by the sensations, pictures, and ideas that ebb and flow within them. Something like this occurs whenever the astral body predominates, as, for example, in the sanguine. Sanguines surrender themselves in a certain sense to the constant and varied flow of images, sensations, and ideas since in them the astral body and nervous system predominate.\nThe nervous system's activity is restrained only by the circulation of the blood. That this is so becomes clear when we consider what happens when a person lacks blood or is anaemic, in other words, when the blood's restraining influence is absent. Mental images fluctuate wildly, often leading to illusions and hallucinations.\nA touch of this is present in sanguines. Sanguines are incapable of lingering over an impression. They cannot fix their attention on a particular image nor sustain their interest in an impression. Instead, they rush from experience to experience, from percept to percept. This is especially noticeable in sanguine children, where it can be a source of concern. The sanguine child's interest is easily kindled, a picture will easily impress, but the impression quickly vanishes.\nWe proceed now to the phlegmatic temperament. We observed that this temperament develops when the etheric or life-body, as we call it, which regulates growth and metabolism, is predominant. The result is a sense of inner well-being. The more a human being lives in his etheric body, the more is he preoccupied with his internal processes. He lets external events run their course while his attention is directed inward.\nIn the melancholic we have seen that the physical body, the coarsest member of the human organization, becomes master over the others. As a result, the melancholic feels he is not master over his body, that he cannot bend it to his will. His physical body, which is intended to be an instrument of the higher members, is itself in control, and frustrates the others. This the melancholic experiences as pain, as a feeling of despondency. Pain continually wells up within him. This is because his physical body resists his etheric body's inner sense of well-being, his astral body's liveliness, and his ego's purposeful striving.\nThe varying combinations of the four members also manifest themselves quite clearly in external appearance. People in whom the ego predominates seek to triumph over all obstacles, to make their presence known. Accordingly their ego stunts the growth of the other members; it withholds from the astral and etheric bodies their due portion. This reveals itself outwardly in a very clear fashion. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that famous German choleric, was recognizable as such purely externally. 4 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814. German Idealist philosopher. His build revealed clearly that the lower essential members had been held back in their growth. Napoleon, another classic example of the choleric, was so short because his ego had held the other members back. 5 Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821. French ruler and emperor 1804-1814 and 1815. Of course, one cannot generalize that all cholerics are short and all sanguines tall. It is a question of proportion. What matters is the relation of size to overall form.\nIn the sanguine the nervous system and astral body predominate. The astral body's inner liveliness animates the other members, and makes the external form as mobile as possible. Whereas the choleric has sharply chiseled facial features, the sanguine's are mobile, expressive, changeable. We see the astral body's inner liveliness manifested in every outer detail, for example, in a slender form, a delicate bone structure, or lean muscles. The same thing can be observed in details of behavior. Even a non-clairvoyant can tell from behind whether someone is a choleric or a sanguine; one does not need to be a spiritual scientist for that. If you observe the gait of a choleric, you will notice that he plants each foot so solidly that he would seem to want to bore down into the ground. By contrast, the sanguine has a light, springy step. Even subtler external traits can be found. The inwardness of the ego, the choleric's self-contained inwardness, express themselves in eyes that are dark and smoldering. The sanguine, whose ego has not taken such deep root, who is filled with the liveliness of his astral body, tends by contrast to have blue eyes. Many more such distinctive traits of these temperaments could be cited.\nThe phlegmatic temperament manifests itself in a static, indifferent physiognomy, as well as in plumpness, for fat is due largely to the activity of the etheric body. In all this the phlegmatic's inner sense of comfort is expressed. His gait is loose-jointed and shambling, and his manner timid. He seems somehow to be not entirely in touch with his surroundings.\nThe melancholic is distinguished by a hanging head, as if he lacked the strength necessary to straighten his neck. His eyes are dull, not shining like the choleric's; his gait is firm, but in a leaden rather than a resolute sort of way.\nThus you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle. Only when one seeks to encompass reality in its entirety, which includes the spiritual, can knowledge bear practical fruit. Accordingly, only spiritual science can give us knowledge that will benefit the individual and all mankind. In education, very close attention must be paid to the individual temperaments, for it is especially important to be able to guide and direct them as they develop in the child. But the temperaments are also important to our efforts to improve ourselves later in life. We do well to attend to what expresses itself through them if we wish to further our personal development.\nThe four fundamental types I have outlined here for you naturally never manifest themselves in such pure form. Every human being has one basic temperament, with varying degrees of the other three mixed in. Napoleon, for example, although a choleric, had much of the phlegmatic in him. To truly master life, it is important that we open our souls to what manifests itself as typical. When we consider that the temperaments, each of which represents a mild imbalance, can degenerate into unhealthy extremes, we realize just how important this is.\nYet, without the temperaments the world would be an exceedingly dull place, not only ethically, but also in a higher sense. The temperaments alone make all multiplicity, beauty, and fullness of life possible. Thus in education it would be senseless to want to homogenize or eliminate them, but an effort should be made to direct each into the proper track, for in every temperament there lie two dangers of aberration, one great, one small. One danger for the young choleric is that he will never learn to control his temper as he develops into maturity. That is the small danger. The greater is that he will become foolishly single-minded. For the sanguine the lesser danger is flightiness; the greater is mania, induced by a constant stream of sensations. The small danger for the phlegmatic is apathy; the greater is stupidity, dullness. For the melancholic, insensitivity to anything other than his own personal pain is the small danger; the greater is insanity.\nIn light of all this it is clear that to guide and direct the temperaments is one of life's significant tasks. If this task is to be properly carried out, however, one basic principle must be observed, which is always to reckon with what is given, and not with what is not there. For example, if a child has a sanguine temperament, he will not be helped if his elders try to flog interest into him. His temperament simply will not allow it. Instead of asking what the child lacks, in order that we might beat it into him, we must focus on what he has, and base ourselves on that. And as a rule, there is one thing we can always stimulate the sanguine child's interest in. However flighty the child might be, we can always stimulate his interest in a particular personality. If we ourselves are that personality, or if we bring the child together with someone who is, the child cannot but develop an interest. Only through the medium of love for a personality can the interest of the sanguine child be awakened. More than children of any other temperament, the sanguine needs someone to admire. Admiration is here a kind of magic word, and we must do everything we can to awaken it.\nWe must reckon with what we have. We should see to it that the sanguine child is exposed to a variety of things in which he has shown a deeper interest. These things should be allowed to speak to him, to have an effect upon him. They should then be withdrawn, so that the child's interest in them will intensify; then they may be restored. In other words, we must fashion the sanguine's environment so that it is in keeping with his temperament.\nThe choleric child is also susceptible of being led in a special way. The key to his education is respect and esteem for a natural authority. Instead of winning affection by means of personal qualities, as one does with the sanguine child, one should see to it that the child's belief in his teacher's ability remains unshaken. The teacher must demonstrate an understanding of what goes on around the child. Any showing of incompetence should be avoided. The child must persist in the belief that his teacher is competent, or all authority will be lost. The magic potion for the choleric child is respect and esteem for a person's worth, just as for the sanguine child it was love for a personality. Outwardly, the choleric child must be confronted with challenging situations. He must encounter resistance and difficulty, lest his life become too easy.\nThe melancholic child is not easy to lead. With him, however, a different magic formula may be applied. For the sanguine child this formula was love for a personality; for the choleric, it was respect and esteem for a teacher's worth. By contrast, the important thing for the melancholic is for his teachers to be people who have in a certain sense been tried by life, who act and speak on the basis of past trials. The child must feel that the teacher has known real pain. Let your treatment of all of life's little details be an occasion for the child to appreciate what you have suffered. Sympathy with the fates of those around him furthers the melancholic's development. Here too one must reckon with what the child has. The melancholic has a capacity for suffering, for discomfort, which is firmly rooted in his being; it cannot be disciplined out of him. However, it can be redirected. We should expose the child to legitimate external pain and suffering, so that he learns there are things other than himself that can engage his capacity for experiencing pain. This is the essential thing. We should not try to divert or amuse the melancholic, for to do so only intensifies his despondency and inner suffering; instead, he must be made to see that objective occasions for suffering exist in life. Although we mustn't carry it too far, redirecting the child's suffering to outside objects is what is called for.\nThe phlegmatic child should not be allowed to grow up alone. Although naturally all children should have play-mates, for phlegmatics it is especially important that they have them. Their playmates should have the most varied interests. Phlegmatic children learn by sharing in the interests, the more numerous the better, of others. Their playmates' enthusiasms will overcome their native indifference towards the world. Whereas the important thing for the melancholic is to experience another person's fate, for the phlegmatic child it is to experience the whole range of his playmates' interests. The phlegmatic is not moved by things as such, but an interest arises when he sees things reflected in others, and these interests are then reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child. We should bring into the phlegmatic's environment objects and events toward which “phlegm” is an appropriate reaction. Impassivity must be directed toward the right objects, objects toward which one may be phlegmatic.\nFrom the examples of these pedagogical principles, we see how spiritual science can address practical problems. These principles can also be applied to oneself, for purposes of self-improvement. For example, a sanguine gains little by reproaching himself for his temperament. Our minds are in such questions frequently an obstacle. When pitted directly against stronger forces such as the temperaments, they can accomplish little. Indirectly, however, they can accomplish much. The sanguine, for example, can take his sanguinity into account, abandoning self-exhortation as fruitless. The important thing is to display sanguinity under the right circumstances. Experiences suited to his short attention span can be brought about through thoughtful planning. Using thought in this way, even on the smallest scale, will produce the requisite effect.\nPersons of a choleric temperament should purposely put themselves in situations where rage is of no use, but rather only makes them look ridiculous. Melancholics should not close their eyes to life's pain, but rather seek it out; through compassion they redirect their suffering outward toward appropriate objects and events. If we are phlegmatics, having no particular interests, then we should occupy ourselves as much as possible with uninteresting things, surround ourselves with numerous sources of tedium, so that we become thoroughly bored. We will then be thoroughly cured of our “phlegm;” we will have gotten it out of our system. Thus does one reckon with what one has, and not with what one does not have.\nBy filling ourselves with practical wisdom such as this, we learn to solve that basic riddle of life, the other person. It is solved not by postulating abstract ideas and concepts, but by means of pictures. Instead of arbitrarily theorizing, we should seek an immediate understanding of every individual human being. We can do this, however, only by knowing what lies in the depths of the soul. Slowly and gradually, spiritual science illuminates our minds, making us receptive not only to the big picture, but also to subtle details. Spiritual science makes it possible that when two souls meet and one demands love, the other offers it. If something else is demanded, that other thing is given. Through such true, living wisdom do we create the basis for society. This is what we mean when we say we must solve a riddle every moment.\nAnthroposophy acts not by means of sermons, exhortations, or catechisms, but by creating a social groundwork, upon which human beings can come to know each other. Spiritual science is the ground of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of a life enhanced by it. Thus spiritual science may claim to lay the foundation for humankind's most beautiful goal — a true, genuine love for man."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-13",
    "title": "The Riddle in Faust: Exoteric",
    "date": "11 Mar 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/TP1980/19090311p01.html",
    "book_title": "Goethe's Secret Revelation",
    "content": "It was in August, 1831, that Goethe sealed up a packet and handed it to his faithful secretary Eckermann and prepared his testamentary directions for the editing of this sealed-up treasure. This packet contained in a comprehensive way the whole striving of Goethe's life. It contained the second part of Goethe's Faust; which was not to be published until after Goethe's death. Goethe was aware that in this work he had given the contents of his rich, many-sided, far-reaching and deeply-penetrating life to human existence, and the importance of this moment for him may be gathered from the words he uttered at the time, ‘I am now finished my life's true work, anything I do further and whether I do it or not, is all the same!’ If we permit a fact such as this to work on the soul we can say: It would not be easy for a human life to become fruitful for the rest of humanity in a more beautiful, harmonious way, or indeed to become fruitful in a more conscious manner. There is something deeply affecting in the thought of Goethe's life at this point of time — for he lived barely one year longer — in that he should have visited Ilmenau once more and there re-read the beautiful verse he had written on the 7th of September, 1783, when he was still a comparatively young man.\n‘Above all heights Is rest, In the tree tops Thou feelest Scarce a breath, The birds are silent in the woods, Only wait, soon Thou too shalt rest.’\nOne may well ask whether these lines may not have signified at that time a frame of mind regulating Goethe's ideas in a new way as he re-read them in the evening of his life with affecting tears.\nGoethe's Faust is truly a testament of the very first order when considered with reference to its literary and intellectual standpoint.\nIn 1831 Goethe finished the work which had occupied him from his earliest youth, having worked energetically from the year 1824 at the second part of Faust. We find that Goethe knew from the beginning of 1770 that he had what may be called the Faust disposition and that he began in 1774 to write down the first part of Faust, returning again and again to this poem in the most important moments of his life.\nNotably he took the first part of Faust with him when he went to Weimar and owing to his position there entered the great world. Certainly it was not produced there. But because one of the Weimar Court ladies, Fräulein von Göchhausen, preserved a copy of the Faust which Goethe took with him to Weimar, we to-day possess the form in which it was when he took it there. We therefore know the form in which Faust was printed for the first time and published in 1790, and further we know the setting in which the whole of Goethe's works appeared in 1808 in the first edition. All that we have of Faust, including that very important document which Goethe left as his testament, shows us the different stages of Goethe's growth. It is endlessly interesting to observe how these four stages of Goethe's Faust-creation appear to us in different ways, according to its inner nature, and how they represent a crescendo in the whole of Goethe's life-endeavour. What Goethe took with him to Weimar is a literary work of a quite personal character into which he had poured the feelings, the degrees of knowledge and also the despair of knowledge, as they went with him through the Frankfort time into the Strassburg time and also into the first Weimar period. It is the work of a man hotly striving after knowledge, striving to feel himself into life, experiencing every despair that an upright honourable man can go through, and all this he had poured into this work. All this is in the first part of Faust. But when Faust appeared in 1790 as a fragment, it was recognized that Goethe had worked at it and transformed it out of a longing lying deep in his soul and inner life which had become enlightened through his contemplation of Italian nature and of Italian works of Art. Out of this personal work of one who had been tossed to and fro in life's storms there emerged the work of one, who to a certain degree, had become unshackled and who had a very clear view of life before his soul.\nThen came the time of Goethe's friendship with Schiller. The time when in his inner being he learned to know and experience a world which had long become rooted within him. A world of which one can say that he who experiences it has had his spiritual eyes opened, so that he can see into the surrounding spiritual world. And now Faust's personality becomes a being placed between two worlds, between the spiritual world to which man can raise himself through purification, through the ennobling of himself and that world which drags him down. Faust becomes a being placed between the world of good and the world of evil. And while previously we saw in Faust the life of the single striving personality, now we see before us a great conflict carried on between the good and evil powers around man. Man is thus placed in the centre as the worthiest object for which the good and evil beings fight in the world. Though in the very beginning Faust is seen as a man doubting all knowledge, he now comes before us as one placed between heaven and hell. Thus the poem reaches an essentially higher stage and a higher existence.\nIn the form in which Faust appears in 1808 it seems as if thousands of years of human development resound. We are reminded of the great dramatic representation of man's life produced in ancient times in the Book of Job, where the evil spirit went among men and stood up before God, and God said to him: ‘Thou hast been to and fro on the earth, hast thou considered my servant Job?’ What is here said we find in the poem, ‘The Prologue in Heaven’ where God speaks with Mephistopheles, the messenger of the evil spirituality:\nThe Lord: Know'st Faust?\nMephistopheles: The Doctor Faust?\nThe Lord: My servant, he —\nSo out of what Goethe wrote in order that his Faust Mystery should appear in its right light there sounds an echo of the Book of Job, ‘Dost thou know my servant Job?’\nThen Goethe's fine, full life continued further, going ever deeper into the human existence of which the world to-day knows so little. And having brought to expression in many different ways what he had experienced in his soul, in 1824 he looked back on his whole life, and once more sat down and described Faust's passage through the great world, but in such a way that the second part is a complete character picture of the inner human development of the soul.\nLooking back to the first part we can see how completely true to life and to the reality of life is this description of a striving soul. Everything that meets us in the first part, especially in the beginning, is full of deep truths regarding nature, but much in it resembles a kind of theory of art — as if someone spoke of things that his soul had not yet fully experienced.\nAnd the second part: Here everything is the inward experience of his own soul. Here are the highest experiences of a spiritual kind by means of which man climbs the stages of existence, passes through the physical world and penetrates to the place where the human soul is united with the spirituality of the world, dissolves together with it and knows wherein it finds peace and at the same time that which gives freedom, dignity and self-dependence. All this is given in the second part of Faust as his own inner experience. The time will come when Goethe's Faust will be understood in quite another way from what it is to-day, when people will understand what Goethe wished to say when he said to Eckermann on 29th Jan., 1827: ‘All in Faust is of the senses, material, thought out in terms of the theatre to please everyone and I wished for nothing more than that. If the crowd of onlookers takes pleasure in its appearance, the higher meaning will not escape the observation of the initiated.’\nThough the first part in many ways appears to be theoretical and not worked down into life, the second part is one of the most realistic of those pieces of world literature which go most deeply into reality; for everything in the second part of Faust is experienced, though not with the physical eye, because to have such experiences, spiritual eyes and spiritual ears are necessary. It is for that reason that the second part of Faust has been so little understood. People merely saw symbols and allegories in what is for the spiritual inquirer, who can experience it in the spiritual worlds, something far more true and real than anything that can be seen with the outer physical eyes or heard with the outer physical ears. From such a work we can promise ourselves much, and the task of the lectures to-day and tomorrow will be to consider something of what lies in it. To-day we will consider the matter more from the outer side, but tomorrow we will show how Goethe's Faust poem, in the true meaning of the word, is a picture of an inner esoteric life and intuitive vision of the world. Step by step we will endeavour to penetrate into that which is within and to look behind the curtain where the deepest secrets of Goethe's life lie hidden.\nThe Faust mood was in Goethe even when he was a student at Leipzig, and we know that at that time he had a very serious illness, bringing him very near death. Much that a man's soul can grasp at such a time passed before Goethe, but many other things had already preceded this. He had learnt to know the way in which outer science looked at life. Certainly he had troubled himself very little about his own profession at Leipzig, but had occupied himself with many other sciences, more particularly with natural science. A strong faith never left Goethe that it would be possible to look into the deeper secrets of life through natural science; but at Leipzig at that time he stood full of despair before all that an outer knowledge could give him, in many ways a mere jumble of ideas and disconnected observations of nature. Nowhere could he find what he had already looked for as a boy, when at the age of seven he took a writing desk, placed on it some minerals and other geological products and plants, a wax taper and a burning glass. Then waiting for the morning, as the first rays of the sun came in, he took the burning glass, let the sun rays fall through it on to the wax taper and in this way lighted a fire on the altar which he had erected to the ‘great God’ of Nature, a fire which should have come from the foundation and source of life itself. But how far away were these sources of life from what Goethe met in the different branches of knowledge of the High School ( Hoch-Schule ), how far these ‘sources of life’ were removed from all such striving!\nGoethe then went to Frankfort and came into touch with thoughtful, sensible men who possessed above all things through their developed soul life, something of the flowing together of the human inner life with the spiritual weaving and living in the world; men who in the fullest meaning of the word, felt in themselves what Goethe expresses in the words: ‘The self in them expands to a spiritual universe.’ At that time at Frankfort he had the feeling, ‘Away from the mere striving after ideas! Away from the merely perceptive sense observation! There must be a path to the sources of existence!’ and he came into touch with what one can call alchemistic, mystical and theosophical literature. He himself attempted the practice of alchemy. He relates how he came to know of a work through which many sought for similar knowledge at that time, Welling's ‘Opus Mago-Cabalisticum et Theosophicum.’ This book was much thought of then as giving a knowledge of the sources of existence. Goethe studied by degrees Paracelsus, Valentinus and above all a work which from its whole method must have produced a deep impression on all those who strove after such knowledge, ‘Aurea Catena Homeri.’ This was a representation of nature the Mystics in the Middle Ages believed to see. The study of these mystical, alchemistic, theosophical books must have had a similar effect on Goethe to that which a man striving to-day after the same things would experience if he took up the books of Eliphas Levy or any other thinker on the same lines. Indeed at that time these things must have had an even more bewildering effect upon Goethe because these different writers no longer really understood the magic, theosophy, etc., of which they wrote. It was impossible to speak in direct way of the real grandeur and meaning of these things, proceeding from an ancient wisdom which had lived in human souls, for the meaning was hidden under an outer garb which included all kinds of physical and chemical forms. For those who merely saw what appeared outwardly in these books it was the greatest nonsense, and at that time it was most difficult to penetrate behind these secrets and arrive at the real meaning. But we must not forget that Goethe from his deep striving for knowledge had developed an intuitive mind. He must have been greatly pleased when on opening the ‘Aurea Catena Homeri’ he saw on the first page a symbol which had a deep effect on his soul; two triangles interlaced; in the corners the signs of the planets, drawn in a wonderful way, a flying dragon wound round in a circle, beneath which another dragon had fixed stiffening itself, and when he read the words on the first page, saying that the flying dragon symbolizes the stream which sends those forces which stream down from out of the Cosmos to the stiffened dragon, showing how heaven and earth hang together, or as it is expressed there: ‘How the spiritual forces of heaven pour into the earth's centre.’\nThese mysterious signs and words must have made a great impression upon Goethe. For instance, those which depict the whole growth of the earth: ‘From chaos to that which is called the universal quintessence’ — a remarkable sentence, curiously mixed up with signs of a chaotic nature, still undifferentiated right through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, right up to man and to that perspective to which man is developing in ever greater refinement. But it was not easy to find a way of penetrating to the deeper meaning. So Goethe left Frankfort in a frame of mind which can be described in the following words: I have found nothing. These seekers into nature can only give me dry, empty ideas; anything that can be squeezed out of them is but life's water. I have busied myself with much that has come down to us from the past from those who declare that they saw into the secrets of life. But the way, the way drives one to despair!\nThis was sometimes the mood in Goethe's soul. He was not to be bewitched by easy speculations or philosophizing, or by confused symbols and explanations from those old books, which worked so wonderfully and forebodingly on him. They looked at him with their mysteries as something to which he could find no way. But anyone who knew Goethe's soul, knew the seed was already sown in his soul which was to germinate later. But he felt himself as one who was rejected and unworthy to unravel the secrets of life. Then he went to Strassburg.\nThere he met people who must have interested him in one way or the other. He got to know Jung-Stilling with his deeply mystical soul, who owing to the development of peculiar forces generally found sleeping in men, had looked deeply into the hidden side of existence. He met Herder at Strassburg, who had gone through similar moods and who in times of desperation had often been at the point of a denial of future life. In Herder he learnt to know a man who suffered from a surfeit of life and who said, I have studied much, discerning sundry things connected with men's works and men's strivings on the earth. But he was unable to say to himself, I have had one moment when my longing after the sources of life has been satisfied. This was when he was ill and inclined to deny everything with bitter irony. Yet it was Herder who pointed out many depths in the riddles of life, and Goethe found in him a truly human Faust. But that side of negation which is not the outcome of mockery and scorn Goethe learnt to know later through his friend Merck. Goethe's mother who disliked criticism of people and all moralizing said of Merck, he can never leave Mephistopheles at home, in him we are quite used to it. In Merck Goethe found a disclaimer of much that is worth striving for in life. Over against all these impressions which Goethe received from the Strassburg people, it was through Nature and his observation of Nature that many of life's puzzles were cleared up for him.\nAt the same time we must think of Goethe as a man possessed of a sharp, penetrating mind; he was not an unpractical man. He was an advocate, but only practised for a short time. Those who knew Goethe's work as an advocate and later as a Minister, were acquainted with his eminently practical mind. As advocate he knew little more than what he had learnt by heart from law books. But he was a man able to decide very quickly on any point laid before him; such a man can also map out clearly life's course.\nSo Goethe comes before us with, on the one side, faculty for the clearest thinking with relation to the world; and on the other, for feeling in the deepest way the sorrow attached to an unsatisfied pursuit of knowledge, seeking for the deepest things and yet defeated by them.\nAnd then there came something else. Goethe had learnt to know that frame of mind which we can only characterize as the feeling of guilt! He felt guilty in respect of the simple country girl, Friederike at Sesenheim, in whose soul he had awakened so many hopes and desires and whom he had all the same to forsake later. All this was mixed up in Goethe's soul in the most remarkable way and out of these feelings there grew within him a poetic figure, which had its rise in the perception of a form which at that time followed him step by step. This was the figure of Faust, that remarkable character who had lived in the first half of the sixteenth century. This Faust had been the object of innumerable folk-plays and pantomimes and through Christopher Marlowe had reached a literary significance and had become a living problem for poets, especially for Lessing and Goethe. How did it happen that Goethe connected his own sorrow and his own feelings with this figure of Faust?\nIt is related that Faust lived in the first half of the sixteenth century, at a time when for history much had been decided. If we compare this time with the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when studious lives were led, we find a great difference. In the twelfth century it was possible for those minds to unite the knowledge of what the times offered them with what they could find in their own souls. When they raised their spiritual vision to the creative power of the world, enthroned in the heights, and out of it formed their ideas, they were able to unite them with what they had learnt to know through external Natural Science. What they learnt was like a natural process. On the lowest step they studied what they called physical knowledge, on the next step they learnt to know what was taught of the higher mysteries of life, the hidden mysteries of existence, which could be reached through the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear; and on the highest step they reached to the recognition of the sublime, through ideas which were fine and transparent as crystal, but full of life, and working powerfully on the soul. These were the steps to the divine knowledge and were all connected with each other. Man may shrug his shoulders and look down on the minds of that time, but their way was one which never suffered intermission. If for instance we take up the ‘Way of Knowledge’ by Albertus Magnus, we find it begins with a description of the lowest part of nature and ends in a vision of God. You find here no dry, empty ideas, but ideas which enlighten the heart and warm the soul. When Faust lived this time had passed. Ideas then became dry and empty; though they had the stamp of the theologian, they were abstract or drawn from thought. They were ideas which could be studied by men and into which the reasoning of the understanding could sink, but no connection could be found by reason between these ideas and the living existence lying around us, or any possibility of enlightening the soul or bringing warmth to the heart. And then it came to this, that the science of that time — a mysticism, a magic, a theosophy, treating of things which are only to be perceived through spiritual eyes and spiritual ears — was caught in a complete decline, chiefly because much that was previously hidden in handwriting, was now published in print, and thus read by minds understanding nothing of it and who merely copied it. Humbug and nonsense of all kinds went on in the laboratories. What should have been experienced in a spiritual manner, was understood merely according to the words appearing in the books, although they were really only an outer form, but possessing a very deep meaning. Through formulae and retorts all kinds of stuff was made, with the result that what at that time was called theosophy, magic and the occult, came very near to being what we should now look upon as swindling and imposture. In a certain sense the way to the spiritual is connected with danger. Those whose striving has not been honest, whose understanding and reason has not been purified, who are unable to arrive in thought at ideas freed from the physical, may easily stumble and easily fall into the abyss. Therefore it was possible for those who still knew something or who studied the writings of the mystics with great pains, to miss the way and being unable to find it to be deceived by the swindling and charlatanism then prevalent. But it could also happen that the opposite view was taken by many people. This striving for higher things was denounced as witchcraft, and men such as Sponheim, Agrippa von Nettesheim and many others who sought honourably and blamelessly for the spiritual forces in nature, were branded as black magicians and swindlers, as men who had quitted the right path given them through religion. Faust lived during this time in the sixteenth century, a time when many saw the setting of an old spiritual movement as a rosy evening which at the same time became the rosy dawn of a new time bringing out such stars as Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus and others. Such times are called periods of transition. But of all these periods, none deserves the name so much as the time of Faust.\nFrom what we know of Faust he appears as one who felt very deeply the insufficiency of the knowledge of that time concerning the spiritual world. Theology he had studied and had turned away from it. He sought for the sources of existence from the mediaeval remnants of magic and similar things from the Middle Ages; and because Faust was a brilliant figure oscillating between an honourable striving after knowledge and those limits which passed over into charlatanism, it is better to consider him in this way and not attempt to understand him with sharper outlines. As he really was, the spiritual tendency at that time failed to understand him, and the general popular striving of the time was regarded as the outer garment of this Faust-figure in the sixteenth century. So he meets us as a legendary figure or dramatically as a man fallen away from the old traditions of religion and theology, who had given himself up to an endeavour, which owing to the narrow-minded ideas of that time could not possibly lead to any good in life. The opinion of the world between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is expressed in the words from a popular book of that time on Faust: ‘He has for a time put the Holy Scriptures behind the door, and laid them under the bench, and wishes to hear no more of Theology, as he has become a man of the world and calls himself a D. Medicinæ.’\nWhat was felt and thought about Faust was expressed in such words. It was felt that he sought in his own breast for the source leading to the depths of life and his own origin, and that he wished to free himself in his own way from the old traditions. Anything in the old folk-plays or pantomimes referring to this figure of Faust was little adapted to give more than his outward appearance. But all that had remained as the tradition of Faust influenced Goethe, and he entrusted to this character his life's striving and his urgent desire for knowledge. So we find him in his 70th year beginning to see himself in the character of Faust. In this character he expressed all the dissatisfaction, and all the sorrow proceeding from the desire for knowledge which remained unsatisfied. And when we look at the first monologue in ‘Faust’ we see clearly what was described at the beginning of to-day's lecture. We see a man who having occupied himself deeply in outer science had reached a state of despair which threatened to shatter his life completely. We see how he seizes on the old book — Goethe called it the Book of Nostradamus, but anyone acquainted with the literature of magic also known to Goethe, will clearly recognize the book to which he referred — in which Faust perceived the sign of (lie macrocosm and of which he says:\n‘Like heavenly forces rising and descending, Their golden urns reciprocally lending, With wings that winnow blessing From Heaven through Earth I see them pressing, Filling the All with harmony unceasing.’\nFaust , Scene I.\nand then added to these words a description of feeling, a kind of rapture that passed through him at the sight of this page.\nThrough all this we see what at that time worked on Goethe. It was possible for such moods and ideas to flow into Goethe's soul, that he could truthfully describe them. When he stood before the remarkable sign of the two interlaced triangles and the two dragons — the upper one representing the spiritual and the lower one the physical — with the signs of the planets in the corners of the interlaced triangles, such forces penetrated through them that he really had the shining planets before him as the golden urns, with the forces flowing between them and filling the All with harmony unceasing.\nWhen we consider Goethe's soul with its deep and honest striving for knowledge, we begin to doubt whether it is possible to have clear ideas or to speculate much about it. We can only try to place the fact before our souls so that any feeling for such things may be satisfied. But anyone understanding life and the way in which it develops through age, knows that in spite of such battles, Goethe was a man in whose soul a germ had been laid which would ripen and bear fruit very much later, in years to come. We see too how the germs which developed later so wonderfully in Faust were really there, and much can be gained from the study of this life by those who have a distinct leaning to spiritual science.\nTo-day unfortunately such striving is very superficial. We see many people taking it up in a hurry, but they drop it again after having acquired a few ideas. The riddles that exist are only known to one who can look back to a time twenty or thirty years previously when a fluid was poured into his soul and then stored over by the events of the following years and by many experiences, so that only thirty years later he is able to give an approximate answer respecting what was poured in his soul so long before. From this point of view we cannot look too deeply into Goethe's life. We see the echo of his feeling in relation to the ‘Aurea Catena Homeri’ or ‘The Golden Chain of Homer.’ We see it expressed when Faust breaks forth into the words, ‘What a show!’ Yes, a very powerful show, when the soul sinks deeply into these pictures, without even a guess of what they will become in the future. It is a show. But does it stop at mere guessing?\nThen these words necessarily follow:\n... but only a show! ...\nAt that time Goethe did not understand the deep meaning of these words, but a shade of that feeling already lived in his soul, for ‘All that is transient is but a semblance!’ and having these remarkable pictures before him, he could say as if in pain, ‘However artistically these characters are drawn, they are but outer symbols!’\n‘How grand a show! But, ah! a show alone. Thee, boundless Nature, now make thee, my own.’\nEach line is deeply felt: — only a show, something which copies the great world. But Goethe had studied the many problems of natural science and had learnt the deep experience given to man, when he has to say to himself: ‘Thou art guilty!’ Having experienced this, he could hope for more depth of feeling on perceiving other signs closely connected with man's life. This feeling is expressed by Faust: — The book is turned over and in place of the sign of the great world, there appears the sign of the little world, the pentagon, and its surroundings. Then the magic word, which if rightly applied can awake certain slumbering forces, appears before Goethe's soul. Goethe certainly had a premonition that there is something, characterized here as slumbering forces in man, and that through gazing at certain symbols and images these forces could be awakened, so as to make it possible for him to look into the spiritual world. He could believe that he came into contact with that which stands very near to man's soul and expresses itself in the signs of the microcosm, the little world. He expresses this through his ‘Faust’ when he says that if man gives himself up to deeper inner meditation certain inner experiences develop and the ‘earth spirit’ appears, that spirit which quickens the earth and which sees to it, that out of the general life and stream of the world man comes to be and increases. Goethe understood in a marvellous way how to compress into a few words what are the secrets of the earth spirit, and in what way he belongs to the whole earth — just as each human soul and human spirit is related to the physical body of man — who is, we might say, the ruler of all the natural development, increase and historical growth of man. This ruler has no visible form, but can appear to a man whose spiritual eyes are opened, so that he can perceive and know that there is such a spirit of the earth. Goethe has characterized Him in a wonderful way:\nSpirit: ‘In the tides of Life, in Action's storm, A fluctuant wave, A shuttle free, Birth, the Grave, An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing Life, all-glowing.’ ‘Thus at Time's loom 'tis my hand prepares The garment of Life that the Deity wears!’\n‘Thus at Time's loom 'tis my hand prepares The garment of Life that the Deity wears!’\nIf we could penetrate every word of this formula we should find that what is described by Goethe, can be really experienced by anyone whose development has brought his soul to the requisite stage of existence. But all know what comes to pass: Faust does not feel himself and cannot feel himself as developed to what thus presents itself. He has not found the way to the secret depths of life. What ‘flows in life and lives and weaves in action's storm’ exists for him as a ‘terrible face.’ He turns away and hears the words:\nSpirit: ‘Thou'rt like the spirit thou comprehendest, Not me!’\nOut of the old traditions he gained the belief that he was the exact image of the Divinity, and now he had to say to himself, ‘Not even thee!’\n‘Thou resemblest the mind thou canst grasp.’ If only people could once feel this sentence! That it was felt by Goethe can be seen from the whole situation in the first part of ‘Faust.’ Man can understand nothing beyond that point to which he has developed himself.\nOn another occasion Goethe said, ‘As one is, so is one's God,’ and this resembles a confession on Goethe's part, that he had not, up to that time, found the way to the source of life. A confession which he here connects with Faust. When we consider Faust in this first form, we see what difficulties Goethe had to contend with in order to connect his world with the spiritual world towards which he was striving. We find in this first ‘Faust’ immediately afterwards, and without any real transition, the meeting of Mephistopheles with the student.\nWhat is Mephistopheles? Anyone who knows the way into the spiritual world, knows that there really is a Mephistopheles, that he is one of the two tempters who meet man when he desires to enter the road to the spiritual land, when he seeks the way to the spiritual world. There are two potencies or powers whom man meets. One power we call Lucifer. He lays hold of man in a more inward way, in the centre of his soul, seeking to drag him down through his passions, desires, lusts, etc., into the lower scale of the personal and ignoble. All that works on man himself is Luciferic, and because man was once caught in his earthly life by this Luciferic principle, he was delivered up to another principle. If man had never been seized by this Luciferic principle, the outer world would never have appeared to him in its merely material outward form, but would have presented itself in such a way that man could have said from the beginning that all outward things were physiognomic expression of the Spirit. Man would have seen the Spirit behind all physical material things. But because matter became condensed through the influence of the Luciferic power that which was false became mingled with (lie outer appearance, so that its outward form seemed Maya or illusion, as if it were not the outer physiognomic expression of the spirit. This power presenting the outer world to the view of a man in an untrue form was first recognized in its complete depth by Zarathustra. Under the name of Ahriman, Zarathustra first presented this being as the opponent of the God of Light. In everything connected with the teaching of Zarathustra, Ahriman was the deceitful being, who hid everything in mist and smoke which otherwise would have been visible to man as a transparent, spiritual splendour. To express it plainly, this being who caused the ruin of man, because he forced him into the fetters of matter, and also deceived him about its true form, was called Mephistopheles. This figure was called in Hebrew, Mephiz, the spoiler, and Topel, the liar. This being passed over into the West in the Middle Ages in the form of Mephistopheles. In the books on Faust, we see as opposed to Faust this Power, also called the ‘old serpent.’\nGoethe learnt to know this Mephistopheles. The later traditions of Faust no longer distinguished properly between the forms of Lucifer and of Mephistopheles. In the age following the sixteenth century there was no longer a clear idea of these forms. Men no longer knew how to distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman, and they united them in the form of the Devil or Satan; and because nothing was known of the spiritual world, no particular difference was made. But to Goethe, all that he received through the outer senses, and through the human understanding, with its physical instrument the brain, by which he gained perception of the outer world, appeared to him as Mephistopheles. The man appealing to these qualities of the ordinary understanding, was the same to him as one who through the ego strove to enter the spiritual world. So that for Goethe — as also for Merck or Herder — all that appealed merely to the understanding is represented in a wonderful way in the figure of Mephistopheles, who does not believe in a world of the good, or consider it significant or important. In Goethe himself was this second ego, which could be brought to a state of doubt concerning the spiritual world, and sometimes he felt in himself the discord caused by what we may call the Mephistophelian power. He felt himself placed in conflict between this evil power raging in his soul and the truly honourable striving of his soul for the heights. Goethe felt both these forces in his soul. But in what position to place himself with regard to the spiritual world Goethe at that time did not know. He was a long way from that experience which we find in the second part of ‘Faust’ in such a magnificent way. In the scene ‘The way to the Mothers’ we see the man striving inwardly for the spiritual heights but detained by a deceptive picture and captivated by reason of what Mephistopheles has placed before him through trickery. Mephistopheles represents all that can be found in outer physical science which is bound up with the understanding. He stands there with the keys — this knowledge is certainly good, for it leads to the door of the spiritual world. — But within Mephistopheles cannot go. Therefore he describes that into which Faust must go as a ‘nothing,’ And we hear from the words of Mephistopheles, spoken in a classic, grandiose manner, what is thrown by the materialistic minds of men in the face of those who are striving to discover the foundations of life out of spiritual science. He says: ‘Thou art a dreamer and a fantastic. We are not going to be taken in by what such dreamers tell us about the spiritual foundations of things. We care nothing for that!’ And the spiritual enquirer can reply as did Faust to Mephistopheles, ‘In thy nothing I hope to find the all!’\nBut Goethe was experiencing that boisterous youth out of which he had just brought Faust and was far from possessing at that time such clarity of soul. He did not know then how to bring Mephistopheles into touch with Faust, for Mephistopheles is there in the original Faust as Goethe had experienced him as the power that drags man down, and represented him as a mocker in the ‘student scene.’ Only later did Goethe find the means for Mephistopheles by degrees to approach Faust though his changing forms.\nWe find next that Faust is drawn by Mephistopheles and falls into the abyss of sensuality in the scene in ‘Auerbach's wine cellar’ and the road begins down which Faust is led to evil. The end of the ‘prison scene’ is not given in the fragment which appeared in 1790; Goethe kept it back, but this terribly affecting scene was in the first fragment. It was in what we may call the tragedy of Gretchen that Goethe placed that side of his life which can be expressed by the words ‘I am guilty.’ What Goethe expresses in the first part of ‘Faust’ is the word ‘Personality.’\nIt was in that Goethe, who travelled to Italy, that a part of the seed sown in his soul first began to develop. He found a wonderful road during his Italian journey; it can be followed step by step. He said when he wrote at last to his friends at Weimar, ‘So much is certain, the old artists had quite as great a knowledge of nature and just as good an idea of that which we see and the manner in which it should be seen, as Homer had. Unfortunately the number of works of art of the first order is much too small. But anyone able to see them, need wish for nothing further than the right to recognize them and then go in peace. These great works of art were produced according to true and natural laws; the arbitrary, the fanciful collapses; here is necessity; here is God!’ — ‘I have an idea that the creators of these works of art acted according to those laws which guide nature, and on whose tracks I am.’ He is no longer the same Goethe who was full of an abstract longing, but is filled with self-denial and resignation, ready to investigate existence step by step along the road by which he hopes to discover the problems of life revealed.\nIt is not surprising if nothing is discovered of the great spiritual aim of mankind, if it is only sought in an abstract way, but which if sought for in the right way leads directly to the highest problems of life. Those who have no inclination to compare one plant with another, one animal with another, one bone with another, or to consider life, step by step, as they go through the world in order to find the spirit in each single being, in such people an abstract longing will lead to nothing.\nLet us consider Goethe when during his Italian journey, he gradually arrived at the discovery of the primeval plant, he collected stones, prepared himself diligently to take up the work of research, and did not seek to know immediately ‘how one thing strives to enter another’ but said to himself: ‘If you would gain a premonition’ of ‘how one thing works and lives in another’ as heavenly powers rise and fall, offering each the ‘golden urn,’ examine the vertebras of the spinal column and the way in which one bone is connected with the next; and how one faculty helps another. Seek in the smallest thing the picture of the greatest.\nGoethe became a very diligent student during his travels in Italy, examining everything. He formed the opinion that if an artist acted ‘according to the laws which are followed by nature herself’ and understood by the Greeks, the divine will be present in his works even as it is in the works of creation. For Goethe, art is a ‘manifestation of the secret laws of nature.’ The creations of the artists are works of nature on a higher stage of perfection. Art is man's continuation and conclusion of nature. ‘For since man is the head of nature so he regards himself as a complete nature, but also as one which can call forth a further rise. He strives for this through the acquisition of all accomplishments and virtues which call for choice, order, harmony, and meaning, and at last rises to the production of the work of art.’\nWe can say that during the Italian journey everything that came before Goethe took on definite forms and through inner soul experiences appeared clearly before him. So once again he took up ‘Faust,’ and we perceive how he endeavoured to bring the separate parts into union. But we also perceive how he interested himself in an objective manner in what Faust could become for the people of the North. In Italy he became particularly conscious of the great difference between people who had been brought up amid classical surroundings and those who had not. He found it strange that so little should be heard in Rome of ghost stories such as were common in the North. In the Villa Borghese he wrote at this time the ‘Witches Kitchen’ scene, as one who had lost touch with all such things, but also as one who recalled to memory the spirit of the earth. When he had previously written about the earth spirit, he represented it in such a way that Faust turned away from it, as from a ‘hideous worm.’ But the fact of turning away from it, even without understanding why, remains in the soul and works on further, as it did in Goethe. But those who become impatient and refuse to wait until after long years the seed grows, are unable to see the way clearly. And when in Italy Goethe knew that a turning away from the terrible countenance would have its effect upon his soul, and now these words arise:\n‘Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me all For which I begged. It was not without reason That thou didst turn thy face in fire to me And for a kingdom gavest me the glorious nature With strength to feel it and to enjoy it. Not A coldly astonished gaze didst thou grant to me But didst permit me to look into her profound bosom As into that of a friend. Past me didst thou lead the ranks of the living And didst teach me to know, in the quiet bushes, In air, and in water, my brother. And when the storm roared and rattled in the woods And there fell the neighbouring branches of the giant fir Squashing the undergrowth and in their fall Sounding like thunder in the hollow of the hills, Thou didst lead me to a safe Grotto, where Thou didst show me myself and opened my heart To deep and secret wonders.’\nBefore Goethe, there stands the possibility of the human soul, through its own development expanding to a spiritual universe. Through a patient sacrificial resigned search, the fruits stand before his soul which as germs were planted when he came into touch with the earth spirit. We can see through this monologue in ‘Wald und Höhle’ (wood and grotto) what a forward jerk this was towards the ripening of the fruits in his soul, for it shows us that the seed already sown was not sown in vain. And as a warning to have patience, to wait until such seeds had ripened in his soul, that fragment of ‘Faust’ meets us which appeared with this setting in 1790. And now we see how Goethe finds the way step by step after being led to his ‘safe grotto where the secret deep wonders of his own heart were opened to him,’ he obtains that comprehensive survey which bids him no longer abide with his own sorrow, but teaches him to rise above his sorrow, to send his foreseeing spirit out into the Macrocosmos, watch the fighting of the good and evil spirits and see men on their battle ground. And in ‘Faust’ in 1808 he sent out beforehand the ‘Prologue in Heaven:’\nRaphael: ‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation, 'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round: His path predestined through Creation He ends with step of thunder-sound.’\nWe next see how the macrocosmic Mights oppose the forces of the great world. We see too from out the experiences of Goethe's soul, what a remarkable light falls on the two dragons with which at one time in his youth he came in touch.\n‘Faust’ is such a universal poem because it contains so many warnings. It also gives us that golden saying: ‘Wait in confidence for the development of thy inner forces, even if that means waiting a very long time!’ These words also sound as a warning which stand as an attribute before Faust, when Goethe looks back to those ‘fluctuating figures which in early days had once shown a troubled countenance’ but which now are flooded with light. Now he had waited so long that the friends who had taken such a vivid interest in Faust as he had appeared to them in the first form, had died, and those who had not died were very far away. Goethe had been obliged to wait for the development of the seed already sown in him.\nNow these striking words meet us:\n‘My sorrow speaks to an unknown crowd, Their applause e'en makes my heart feel heavy, And those who once delighted in my song If they still live, in other lands are scattered.’\nNo longer did it matter to those who in youth had felt with him. He had had to wait, as the last lines of this dedication so beautifully express it — ‘What was once a reality to me, has gone into the unreal: but what has remained for me and appears to outer vision as unreal, that to me is now true, and it is only now that I can give it as truth.’ So we see how this poem, even if only looked at in such an external manner as we have to-day, leads us into the depths of the human soul.\n‘Faust’ was begun in a desultory manner, some parts being pushed in between others, and therefore Goethe was unable to show in a continuous way what he had experienced in his soul. But something else led to the fact that Goethe expressed his deepest experiences in ‘Faust.’\nThe ‘Helena scene’ also belongs to the first part of ‘Faust’ written by Goethe. But we find it was not included even in the ‘Faust’ of 1808. Why not? Because the manner in which Goethe had finished ‘Faust’ at that time would not allow it. What Goethe wished to say through the Helena scene was the expression of such a deep premonition of the deepest riddle of existence, that the first part was not sufficiently prepared to allow of this. Only when Goethe had reached an advanced age, was he able to give a true form to what really was the inner work of his life.\nWe see how his mind had expanded so that he was able to grasp the worlds of the macrocosm, as expressed in the ‘Prologue in Heaven.’ We shall also see the way in which Goethe represents the stages of the soul's experience, leading men from the first stage up to that of imaginative vision, where the soul penetrating ever deeper and deeper, bursts at last the doors of the spiritual world, which Mephistopheles would close. Goethe also represents these inner experiences. For he places in the second part of ‘Faust’ the experiences of a soul through secret scientific study, and we see here one of the deepest riddles of existence, which if recognized, would be found to be an announcement of Western spiritual science given in imposing language. One is tempted to place such a poem as the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ and the second part of ‘Faust’ side by side. For great and powerful wisdom speaks out of such Eastern writings. It seems as if the gods themselves desired in them to speak with men to express the wisdom out of which the world was formed. Indeed it is so.\nNow let us look at the second part of ‘Faust.’ Here we see a striving human soul which has raised itself to spiritual vision from outer physical perception; we see how it has worked its way up to true clairvoyance when Faust enters the spiritual world and finds the spiritual choir around him ...\n‘Hearken! Hark! — The Hours careering Sounding loud to spirit-hearing. See the new-born day appearing! Rocky portals jarring shatter, PhSbus' wheels in rolling clatter, With a crash the Light draws near! Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes — Eye is blinded, ear amazes: The Unheard can no one hear!’\nFaust II, Act I.\nto that passage where Faust is outwardly dazzled, so that the outer world is lost to his perception and he says to himself: ‘Only within shines clear light! ...’ up to that passage in which the soul works itself up to the spheres of world existence, where the spiritual worlds are to be seen in all their purity, and the riddle of the world discloses itself to the soul. This is a way which we must designate as an esoteric one.\nThe way in which we can penetrate from the outer to the inner life of Goethe's world enigma, we shall see tomorrow, and we shall also see from out of what depths Goethe spoke the word which at last gave him the certainty he needed with reference to all the longings, all the sorrows, pains and strivings for knowledge in his life.\n‘Whoever zealously strives We can redeem him; And if love from above Feels an interest in him, The blest choir will be there With a friendly greeting.’\nWe shall consider tomorrow how Goethe solved this riddle of existence, and how that which lives in the soul can rise up to its true home. It will give us the answer to what Goethe placed as the riddle of his existence and about which he gives us such a hopeful answer at the end of the second part of ‘Faust:’\n‘For the spiritual world, That noble member, Is saved from evil. Whoever strives zealously We can redeem him! ...’\nThis tells us Faust can be saved and those spirits will not conquer who by bringing men into the material bring them also to destruction."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-14",
    "title": "The Riddle in Faust: Esoteric",
    "date": "12 Mar 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/TP1980/19090312p01.html",
    "book_title": "Goethe's Secret Revelation",
    "content": "One idea Goethe had for his ‘Faust’ was that at the end of Part II, Act 3, Mephistopheles, who in this Act had worn the mask of Phorkyas, should step in front of the curtain, take off the mask, descend from the Kothurni and deliver a kind of Epilogue. The idea, as the now meaningless stage instruction tells us, was that this Epilogue was to indicate the manner in which the final figure of Faust was to be taken. The words Mephistopheles was to speak as Commentator are not in ‘Faust,’ but they have been preserved on a single sheet among Goethe's literary remains. Through the mouth of Mephistopheles Goethe seeks to tell the public in a not unhumorous way what attitude to adopt towards his Faust. These words are worthy of notice, and in a certain respect to-day's study is to be conducted in their spirit. They refer to Euphorion who was born in some spirit fashion, and jumps and hops about immediately after his birth and utters ‘a tender word.’ In this way these words refer to him:\n‘Enough, ye see him, though it is much worse Than on the British stage, where a small child Grows step by step to take heroic shape. Here it is madder still: for, scarce conceived, He's also born: He leaps and dances, speaks a tender word. If many criticize, There are who think this is not to be taken So straight and crudely, that there's more behind. One scents the Mysteries, perhaps withal Mystifications, Indian and may be Egyptian; for the man is right who knows How to squeeze all together, brew it well And twist and turn in etymology. We say it also, and the true disciple Of the newer symbolism will agree.’\nThus all such explanations as rest on a basis of old traditions are to be straightway excluded. On the contrary, an explanation is demanded drawn from the depths of spirit-life. Therefore also Mephistopheles says: ‘We say it also, and the true disciple of the newer symbolism will agree.’ If you read carefully Part II of ‘Faust,’ you will know that Goethe is rich in word-construction in this poem, and that we must not therefore cavil at what appears to be ungrammatical. Here in this sentence is clearly expressed that the man who understands Faust rightly in Goethe's sense, also sees that deeper things lie behind. But everything that rests on study or might lead to a merely symbolic explanation is discouraged. The demand is that the explanation of Faust is to depend on the faithful discipleship which is aware of the spiritual experience which we may call ‘experience in the sense of the new Spiritual Science.’ ‘The true disciple of the newer symbolism’ is the commentator of Faust in Goethe's sense. Thus it is to be done by drawing direct from spirit-life; and Goethe no doubt here betrays that he has put something into it which made it possible for him to get away from old symbols and to coin new and independent symbols out of direct spirit-life. If we want to compare the presentation of the spiritual world in the two parts of ‘Faust,’ we might say that Part I presents to a large extent the fruits of knowledge — the outer influences on one who has dim ideas of the spiritual world, and who tries to enter it through reading all kinds of things and conducting all kinds of experiments. Part I contains this studied view of the supernatural world.\nPart II contains experience, living experience, and if you understand rightly, you know that it can derive only from a personality which has learnt to know the reality of the spiritual, supernatural worlds behind the physical world. Truly, Goethe was consistent in his presentation, although some things in Part II are so dissimilar from Part I. What he had learnt in Part I, he experienced in Part II, he has seen it. He was in the spiritual, supernatural world: he indicates this, too, clearly enough, where in Part I he makes Faust say:\n‘What says the Sage, now first I recognize: “The Spirit-world no closures fasten; Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead: Disciple, up! untiring, hasten To bathe thy breast in morning-red!”‘\nScene I, p. 15.\nGoethe can point — from personal knowledge — to what he sees who ‘bathes his breast in morning-red,’ in order to await the rising of the spiritual sun. We find in the whole of Part I — no doubt you realize it from yesterday's discourse — an energetic upward-striving of Faust the student, to this dawn, but we also find clearly indicated that the path is nowhere traversed in a satisfactory way. Now how does Part II begin? Is the advice of the wise man, ‘to bathe the breast in morning-red,’ carried out in one respect?\nWe find Faust ‘bedded on flowery turf, fatigued, restless, endeavouring to sleep,’ surrounded by spiritual beings. We find him withdrawn from all physical vision, veiled in sleep. Beings from the spiritual world are busy with his spirit, which is withdrawn from the physical world. Marvellously and forcefully we are told what direction Faust's soul takes in order to grow into the spiritual world. Then we are shown how his soul really does grow into that world which is described as the spiritual world in the ‘Prologue in Heaven,’ in Part I. Goethe says from deep experience what was always told the pupil in the School of Pythagoras, that he who enters the spiritual world is met by the secret music of the universe:\n‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation, 'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round: His path predestined through Creation He ends with step of thunder-sound.’\nThis must be the music from the worlds of the spiritual life, if they are to be depicted as they are. What is said here of the ‘music of the spheres’ is not a poetic image, nor a metaphor, but a truth, and Goethe remains consistent to it, in that Faust, withdrawn from the physical world, now proceeds to grow, like an initiate, into that world from which this music comes. Therefore, in the scene where at the beginning of Part II Faust is withdrawn into the spiritual world, it is written again:\n‘Hearken! Hark! — The Hours careering Sounding loud to spirit-hearing. See the new-born day appearing! Rocky portals jarring shatter, PhSbus' wheels in rolling clatter, With a crash the Light draws near! Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes — Eye is blinded, ear amazes: The Unheard can no one hear!’\nFaust II, Act I.\nWould that those people who think that they can understand a poem only if they can say ‘Such things must be taken as the poet's images, created by right of poetic licence’ — would that they would cease to call these things realistic. The physical sun makes no sound! It is the spiritual sun behind the physical which sounds in the ears of him who is entering the spiritual life. They are spiritual, not physical sounds. In this passage, again, we hear the sounds of thousands of years harmonizing. Unconsciously he who can follow the course of the human spirit through thousands of years will be reminded in this passage of some great words spoken thousands of years ago; words spoken by one who through his initiation knew that what appears to us as the physical sun is the expression of the sun-spirit and the sun-soul, as the physical human body is the expression of the human spirit and the human soul. He looked up to the spiritual sun and called it ‘Ahura Mazdao,’ ‘The great sun-aura.’ We are reminded of Zarathustra, who, looking thus at the sun, and feeling the world full of spirit, spoke the great and powerful words:\n‘I want to speak! Listen to me, all ye who from far or near, desire to listen: Mark well, for He will be revealed. No more shall the False Teacher destroy the world — he who has professed evil faiths with his tongue. I shall speak of what is the highest in the world, what He, the Great, Ahura Mazdao, has taught me. Whosoever will not hear His Words, as I speak them, will suffer misery when the Earth-Cycle is fulfilled!’\nBefore the spiritual sun rises in the soul, the learner must bathe in the dawn which precedes it. Hence the words of the Wise Man: ‘Disciple, up! untiring hasten to bathe thy breast in morning-red!’ Does Faust, the disciple, do this?\nAfter the spiritual beings which surrounded him had been busy with him while his soul was for a time withdrawn from his body, he awakes as a changed man. The soul has entered the body, so that he has a dim idea, or he bathes in the morning-red, of the rising sun of the spirit:\n‘Life's pulses now with fresher force awaken To greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me; This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken, And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me, And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting, A vigorous resolution to restore me, To see the highest life for which I'm panting. — The world unfolded lies in twilight glimmer, A thousand voices in the grove are chanting; Vale in, vale out, the misty streaks grow dimmer; The deeps with heavenly light are penetrated; The boughs, refreshed, lift up their leafy shimmer From gulfs of air where sleepily they waited; Colour on colour from the background cleareth, Where flower and leaf with trembling pearls are freighted, And all around a Paradise appeareth.’\nFaust II, Act I.\nFaust now feels also that he has awakened in that world, into which he has been translated during his unconsciousness, and he bathes his earthly breast in the morning-red. But it is only the beginning of the journey. He feels that he is at the gate of initiation, and thereupon he cannot yet bear the direct vision of the spiritual sun:\n‘But if there burst from those eternal spaces A flood of flame, we stand confounded ever; For Life's pure torch we sought the shining traces, And seas of fire — and what a fire! — surprise us.’\nWherefore he sees at first the world of the spiritual — but still, as we shall see in a moment, as a symbol.\n‘Behind me, therefore, let the sun be glowing! The cataract, between the crags deep-riven, I thus behold with rapture ever-growing. From plunge to plunge in thousand streams't is given, And yet a thousand, to the valleys shaded While foam and spray in air are whirled and driven. Yet how superb, across the tumult braided, The painted rainbow's changeful life is bending, Now clearly drawn, dissolving now and faded, And evermore the showers of dew descending! Of human striving there's no symbol fuller: Consider, and 't is easy comprehending — Life is not light, but the refracted colour.’\nFaust II, Act I.\nThis is Faust bathing his earthly breast in the morning-red, in order to prepare himself to look straight at the spiritual sun, which rises at initiation.\nNow Faust is to go into the great world with the gifts he has received as one approaching illumination. It might be thought remarkable that Faust is now transplanted to the Imperial Court, when he is in the midst of all kinds of masques and revels. All the same, these masques and pranks contain deep truths and are everywhere significant. It is not possible to enter upon this significance to-day. It will be in any case the task of this study to bring out only a few moments from the whole content of Part II of ‘Faust’ Many lectures would have to be given, if we wanted to throw light on everything. We shall say only this about the general idea of these Masque scenes: For a man who surveys human life with an enlightened eye, certain words will have a different meaning from what they have in ordinary external life. Such a man, steeping himself in the whole great course of human evolution, knows that such words as ‘Folk spirit’ ( Volksgeist ), ‘Time-spirit’ ( Zeitgeist ), are not mere abstractions. He sees in the spiritual world the true and real beings corresponding to what one ordinarily calls abstractly ‘Folk spirit and Time-spirit.’ 1 See Cycle XIII, Mission of the Folk-Souls , by R. Steiner. Thus, since he has the vision, it is made clear to Faust as he enters the great world where decisions affecting the world are made from a Court, that in all these happenings there are supernatural powers at work. Outside in the physical world one can observe only individual people and the laws they have. In the spiritual world there are beings behind all that. Whereas people are under the impression that what they do is prompted by their own souls, and that they make their own resolutions, human acts and human thoughts are really pervaded and permeated by beings from the supernatural world — national spirits, time-spirits, and so on. People think they are free to make resolves, to think and to form ideas, but they are guided by spiritual beings behind the physical world. What men call their understanding, by which they believe they can control the course of time, is the expression of spiritual beings behind. Thus, the whole Masque, which is to have some meaning, becomes for Faust the expression of the fact that one can realize how in the course of world-events a part is played by powers originating in those beings which Faust met already in Part I, originating, in short, in Mephistopheles. Man is surrounded by such spiritual beings, towering above him. Thus Mephistopheles appears at the turn of the modern age as that being which prompts the human intellect to the discovery of paper money. And Goethe presents the whole affair with a certain humour: how the same spirit, the same intellect which in man is bound to the physical instrument of the brain, when inspired by the related spirit which lets nothing count but the physical, gives rise to such phenomena as can control the world — phenomena however which have an importance only for the physical world. In this way the deeper sense of development is indicated precisely in this Masque and mummery. But we are soon led out of the world which lies before us, where we are shown the part played by supernatural powers, and into the really spiritual world.\nAfter it has been made rich, the Court wishes to be amused by the presentation of figures from ancient history. Paris and Helena are to be conjured up from the past. Mephistopheles, who belongs to those powers of the spiritual world which inspired the discovery of paper money, cannot penetrate to the worlds which give rise to the whole deeper development of men. Faust carries in him the soul and spirit which can penetrate these spiritual worlds. For he is the disciple who has bathed the earthly breast in the morning-red, and we are shown how Faust has already experienced something which can be looked upon as the first stage of clairvoyance — the stage completed by the clairvoyant when he has put his soul through the appropriate exercises. There are certain exercises which the student has to perform, in meditation, concentration, and so on, which are set him in occult-scientific symbols, in which he steeps himself, whereby the soul, withdrawing from the physical and etheric body, is transfigured in the night, as it at first becomes clairvoyant in the spiritual world. What is it that the student experiences here, when he has received the effect of those exercises?\nThe first stage of clairvoyance is something which can bring people to a condition of great confusion. We shall see best why this is if we look at what are sometimes called the ‘dangers of initiation.’\nLiving in the physical world of the senses, one sees the objects round one in sharp contours, outlined in space, and the human soul makes halt at or attaches itself to these firm outlines, which one finds everywhere, filling the soul when it gives itself to sense-phenomena. Now just imagine for a moment all these objects round you becoming misty, losing their contours, merging into each other, becoming like cloud-pictures. It is something like this in the world into which the clairvoyant enters after the first exercises have taken effect. For he arrives at what is behind the whole sense-world, what lies behind all matter, what gives rise to the sense-world. He arrives at the stage where the spiritual world first approaches him. If you think how, in the mountains, crystals form themselves out of their mother-substances into their shapes and lines, so is it, roughly, when the clairvoyant human being comes into the spiritual world. At first it all appears confusing if the student is not sufficiently prepared. But the figures of the physical world grow out of this chaotic world, like the crystal shapes out of their mother-substance. At first the spiritual world is experienced like the mother-substances of the physical world. Into this realm man enters by the gates of death. The images, indeed, will take on other, fixed shapes, when the clairvoyant is further developed, shapes which are interwoven with those outlines which exist in the spiritual world, and which resound with what we have called in the spiritual sense, the music of the spheres. The clairvoyant experiences this after a time, but at first it is all confusing. Still, into this realm enters man.\nNow if the images of Helena and Paris are to be brought up, it must be from this world. Faust alone, who has bathed the earthly breast in the morning-red, and found the entrance to the spiritual world, can step into this world, Mephistopheles cannot. He can achieve only what the world of reason can achieve. He can go as far as the key that opens the spiritual realm. But Faust has the confidence and certainty that he will find there what he seeks: the everlasting, the permanent residue when the physical form of man is dissolved at death into its elements.\nNow it is wonderful how we are told the way in which Faust is to descend into the spiritual realm. The introduction already shows us that the man who depicts it is well acquainted with the facts — as well as with the perceptions and feeling which come over anyone who really knows these things and does not merely play at them. It all stood in grand manner before Goethe's soul — all that exists of this world of feeling when the seed for initiation, described yesterday, was opened by a particular event.\nHe read a passage in Plutarch, where is described how the city of Engyium seeks an alliance with Carthage. Nicias, the friend of the Romans, is to be arrested. But he poses as a man possessed. The pro-Carthaginians want to seize him, but they hear these words from his mouth: ‘The Mothers, the Mothers press hard on me!’ That was a cry which in old times one heard only from a man who was in a condition of clairvoyance and withdrawn from the physical world. Nicias could be regarded either as a fool, as one possessed, or as a clairvoyant. But how could this be known? Because he said what those who had some knowledge of the spiritual world recognized. At the utterance of: ‘It is the Mothers who press hard on me!’ the citizens realize that he is not possessed, but inspired; that he can say something as a real witness which can be learnt in the spiritual world — and so he remains unmolested.\nOn reading this scene, there is released in Goethe's soul something which had been sown as the kernel of initiation already during his Frankfort period. He knew what it meant to penetrate into the spiritual world. Hence also the words put into the mouth of Faust, when Mephistopheles speaks of the ‘Mothers,’ Faust shudders. He knows what it means — that lie touches on a holy but forbidden kingdom, forbidden, that is, for him who is not sufficiently prepared. Mephistopheles, indeed knows also of this realm, that he may not enter it unprepared. Hence the words: ‘Unwilling I reveal a loftier mystery.’ Still, Faust must descend into this kingdom in order to bring to pass what has to be brought to pass — into this kingdom where one sees what is otherwise firm and solid in transfigurations of eternal being. Here the spiritual sense catches sight behind the physical forms of the sense-world of what penetrates into this sense-world to maintain in it its sharp outlines. And then Mephistopheles says, describing this realm as it appears to all who step into it:\n‘Escape from the Created To shapeless forms in liberated spaces! Enjoy what long ere this was dissipated! There whirls the press like clouds on clouds unfolding.’\nOne cannot depict more vividly a real experience of a man truly initiated. The things ‘long ere this dissipated’ will be found in this world, when it is presented thus. ‘To shapeless forms of liberated spheres,’ i.e., into that realm where the forms of the sense-world are no more, where they do not exist, which is ‘liberated’ from them — there where ‘what long ere this was dissipated’ does exist — into this realm Faust is to betake himself. And when one reads ‘There whirls the press, like clouds on clouds unfolding,’ one recognizes again something which is characteristic in the highest degree. Let us think of the entry into the supernatural world as a gate. Before one enters, the soul has to be prepared by means of worthy symbols. One of these is taken from the appearance of the rising sun, and completes the image of bathing the earthly breast in the morning-red: the sun making a particular triangle round itself. The soul goes through this symbol and experiences its after-effects when it has passed through the gate, when it is within, in the spiritual world. Hence these effects: ‘There whirls the press, like clouds on clouds unfolding.’ Every word would be a living proof of what this scene is meant to be: Faust's penetration to the first stages of the supernatural world, which you find called the ‘imaginative world.’ When Goethe presented this, he was not obliged to compound a picture of the spiritual world from old Indian or Egyptian descriptions; he was able to put down quite realistically what he himself had experienced; and this he did.\nNow Faust brings up the ‘glowing tripod,’ round which the Mothers sit, the sources of existence in the spiritual world. With its help Faust is able to conjure up Paris and Helena before men, and to present pictures from the spiritual world. It would lead too far to explain in detail the important symbol of the glowing tripod. We are concerned to show how a kind of initiation is really depicted in Part II of ‘Faust.’ But we see how carefully and correctly Goethe proceeds by the fact that he shows us the way into the spiritual world which he only who is worthy can tread slowly and with resignation. He shows us that Faust is not even yet worthy enough. Only he is worthy to enter the spiritual world who has put off everything that is connected with narrow personality so that no wishes or desires, arising from it, any longer exist. This is apparently to say little, but in truth it is saying a great deal. For usually between what is sought and what is to be achieved by the cancellation of all personal wishes and desires, there lies not only one human life, but many. Goethe shows with the certainty of knowledge that Faust is not yet worthy. Desire awakes in him; he wants to embrace Helena from a personal desire. Whereupon the whole thing collapses — it vanishes. He has committed a sin against the spiritual world. He cannot hold her. He must penetrate further into the spiritual world. And so we see him in the course of Part II going further on his way. We see him after being ‘paralysed by Helena’ again in another state of consciousness, withdrawn from the physical body and fallen into sleep; and how something happens around him which as it were clambers from the sense-world into the supersense-world. What this is shows us nothing other than that Faust, once again withdrawn from the physical world, experiences something which can only with full consciousness be experienced in the supersense-world. What he has now to go through is the complete growth of man. He must go through those mighty events which take place behind the scenes of the stage of the physical world, so that he really can behold what he wants to behold. Helena must be brought back again into the physical world, she must be reincarnated into a new body. When he brings back the merely imaginative image from the spiritual world the whole thing breaks down. He must go deeper. We see him now overcoming a second stage. In this state in which he is put we now see how the consciousness gradually lives upward from the sense-world into the supersense-world. This is done in a poetically masterly way. It is not a case of marvelling at the reality of it, for that is explained simply by the fact that Goethe depicts Part II of ‘Faust’ from his own experience. But the way is masterly in which Goethe represents the secret of Helena's becoming mortal, it is also poetic.\nWhoever is acquainted with the elementary truths of Spiritual Science, knows that man, in assuming life on our earth, brings with him an eternal, spiritual part from quite other realms, that this spiritual part is combined below with the physical hereditary line, taken from the physical-sense-world and bequeathed finally by father and mother. On the whole — taking the various parts of man altogether without entering more precisely upon human nature — we may say that in man are combined something eternal and something earthly. The eternal part, going on from life to life, which descends from the spiritual world to be embodied in a physical form — this we call ‘spirit.’ And in order that this spirit can combine with physical matter, there must be an intermediate part, and this in terms of Spiritual Science is the soul. Thus spirit, soul and body are combined in the formation of a human being.\nNow Faust with his increased consciousness is to experience how these parts of human nature combine. The spirit descends from spiritual spheres, gradually surrounds itself with the soul which is derived from the psychic world, and then draws the physical covering round itself in accordance with the laws of the physical world. If one knows the principle which attaches itself as ‘soul’ around the spirit, and often called by us the ‘astral body,’ if one knows what is between spirit and body, one has that intermediate member, which as it were binds together spirit and body.\nThe spirit Faust finds in the realm of the Mothers. He knows already where to look for it, whence it comes, when it betakes itself into a new embodiment. But he has yet to learn how the tie is formed, when the spirit comes into the physical world. And now we are shown in that remarkable scene, how, starting from the sense-world and touching the boundary of the supersense-world, the ‘Homunculus’ is produced in Wagner's laboratory. Mephistopheles himself has a hand in it, and we are told in spirited words that only the conditions of his creation are provided by Wagner. Thus this remarkable figure, the Homunculus comes into being, assisted as it were by the spiritual world. Much thought has been spent on this Homunculus. But thinking and speculating on such things lead nowhere. The problem who he is can be solved only by real creation out of Spiritual Science. To those who spoke of him in the Middle Ages he was no other than a definite form of the astral body.\nThis scene is not to be pictured in the sphere of sense — but in such a way that it must be thought of as quite removed into the spiritual world. You must follow all the events in Faust's condition of consciousness. The way in which the Homunculus is described in the subsequent scenes shows him to be really the representative of the astral body.\n‘He has no lack of qualities ideal But far too much of palpable and real.’\nThat is the characteristic of the astral body, and he says of himself:\n‘Since I exist, then I must active be.’\nan astral figure, which cannot stay still, compelled to live in continuous activity. He must be taken away to those spheres, where he can actually combine spirit and body.\nAnd now we see the creation of man, which Faust experiences, represented to us in the ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night.’ There we are shown the sum of all the powers and beings which are active behind the physical-sense-world, and spirits from the physical world are continually being interspersed, which have trained their souls so far that they have grown together with the spiritual world, and that they are at the same time conscious in the spiritual world. The two great philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales are figures of this kind. The Homunculus wishes to find out from them how one can come to be, how one can proceed to a physical form, when one is spiritual. All the figures which we see in this ‘Classical Walpurgis-Night’ are there to assist — figures of the realization of the astral body which is ready to enter the material, physical world. If one could follow it all exactly, every detail would be a proof of its meaning. The Homunculus seeks information from Proteus and Nereus as to how he can enter the physical world. He is shown how he can wrap himself in the elements of matter, and how the spiritual qualities are in him — viz., how the soul gradually betakes itself into the physical-sense elements — through that which has played its part in the realms of nature kingdoms. We are shown how the soul has to traverse again the states of the mineral, the plant and the animal realms, in order to rise to human shape:\n‘On the broad ocean's breast must thou begin!’\nthat is, in the mineral realm; then you must go through the plant realm. Goethe, indeed, invents an expression for it, which does not otherwise exist. He makes the Homunculus say: ‘Es grunelt so:’ 2 Dictionary : grows green . – Ed.\n‘Here breathes and blows a tender air; And I delight me in the fragrance rare.’\nIt is pointed out to him what road he has to take till a physical body is formed by degrees round him. Finally comes the moment of love. Eros will complete the whole. Thales gives the advice:\n‘Yield to the wish so wisely stated, And at the source be thou created! Be ready for the rapid plan! There, by eternal canons wending, Through thousand, myriad forms ascending, Thou shalt attain, in time, to Man.’\nThen, when the Homunculus has entered upon the physical world, he loses his qualities, the ego becomes his master!\n‘But struggle not to higher orders: Once Man, within the human borders, Then all is at an end with thee.’\nSo says Proteus — i.e., at an end with the astral body which has not yet penetrated into the human realm.\nGoethe's whole theory of nature, with its relationship between all life, and its metamorphosic development from the incomplete to the complete appears here in the picture. The spirit can at first be only like a seed in the world. It must pour itself into matter, into the elements, and dive below in them, in order to assume from them a higher form. The Homunculus is shattered on Galatea's shell-chariot. He dissolves into the elements. It is a marvellous presentation of the moment when the astral body has enwrapped itself in a body of physical matter — and can now live as man.\nThese are experiences Faust goes through while he is in another state of consciousness, a condition outside the body. He is becoming gradually ready to behold the secrets lying behind physical-material existence. And now he is able to behold the spirit of Helena, from the realm of things ‘long ere this dissipated’ appearing in bodily shape before him. We have in Act 3 of Part II the re-embodiment of Helena. Goethe represents the idea of re-incarnation cryptically — as he had to in his day; how spirit, soul and body unite from the three realms, to form a human being — and before us stands the re-incarnated Helena.\nWe must of course remember that, since he is a poet, Goethe presents in pictorial form the experience of the clairvoyant consciousness. Wherefore we must not rush in with heavy-fisted criticism and ask: ‘Is Helena now really re-incarnated?’ We must keep in mind that a poet is speaking of what he has himself experienced in spiritual worlds.\nIn this way Faust, after having conquered a new stage of life, is able to experience harmony with what is ‘long ere this dissipated,’ the union with Helena. We see now how a being springs from the union of the human soul with the spiritual when the soul has raised itself up into higher worlds; a child of the spirit, subject not to the laws of the sense-world, but to the laws of the spiritual world: Euphorion. We shall understand what springs from the union of the raised spirit with the sense-world if we remember the previously-quoted passage from the proposed Epilogue of Mephistopheles-Phorkyas at the end of Act III, and if we realize that Goethe has in ‘Euphorion’ put in traits which belong to Byron, whom he much honoured. In doing so he may, after all, apply the laws of the spiritual world to it, since he is concerned with events in the spiritual world. And so Euphorion, though scarce conceived, may be already born and at once jump about and stir himself and say spirited things. Once more we see how strictly and conscientiously Goethe takes the entry into the spiritual world. In his aspiration for supernatural worlds, Faust is far beyond his present experiences. But even so he is not free from those powers from which he must liberate himself, if his soul is to unite completely with the spiritual world. He is not free from what Mephistopheles mixes into these spiritual experiences. Faust is what one calls a mystic, who — in the Helena-Euphorion scene — lives and moves completely in the spiritual world. But because he has not yet scaled the necessary step which makes him capable of being absorbed entirely by the spiritual world, so, once more, what he can experience in it escapes him: viz., Helena and Euphorion. What he had brought by his experience from the spiritual world eludes him yet again. He has become capable of living in the spiritual world, of experiencing Euphorion, the child of the spirit, who springs from the marriage between the human soul and the world-spirit — but it escapes him again and vanishes. Now there sounds from the depths a remarkable call. He is now like a mystic, stumbling for a time, one who has had a glimpse into the spiritual world and knows what it is like, but could not remain, and sees himself suddenly cast out again into the material world: he feels his soul to be the mother of what was born from the spiritual world, but what he has born sinks again into the spiritual world, and it is as if it were to call out to the soul itself:\n‘Leave me here, in the gloomy Void, Mother, not thus alone!’\nas if the human soul had to follow into the realm which has once more disappeared. Faust retains nothing more than Helena's robe and veil. The man who goes deeper into the meaning of such things, knows what Goethe meant with the ‘robe and veil;’ it is so exactly what remains when one has once peeped into the spiritual world and has then had to withdraw. There remains with one what is nothing else but the abstraction, the ideas, which stretch from epoch to epoch — nothing else but robe and veil of spiritual powers which endure from age to age.\nSo the mystic is again thrust out for a time and confined to his thoughts, like the intelligent historian, with everywhere robe and veil which carry him from age to age. These ideas are not unfruitful; for him who is limited to the sense-world, they are very much of a necessity. For him, who has already a feeling and an experience of the spiritual world, they contain another importance. They stand out dry and abstract for the man who in any case is an abstractionist, but the man who has once been touched by the spiritual world — even if he grasps only these abstract ideas — is carried by them through the world into quite another age, in which he can again experience something of the effect of the powers throughout the great world.\nFaust is transplanted again into the world he once before experienced at the Court. He sees again how the beings, in whose deeds man is only embedded, play the chief part. He sees again how supernatural threads are spun, and how the same power which he knows as Mephistopheles helps to spin them. So his life passes once more from the sense-world into the super-sense — he learns how powers worm themselves into our sense-world which we see out there in the world of nature, how Mephistopheles leads, as it were, the spirits behind the forces of nature on to the battlefield: ‘Hill-folk,’ he calls them. The powers behind the material world are represented as if the hills themselves bring their people into the war. But here is a life that stands on a subordinate plane. This participation of a world that lies below the realm of man, though directed by spiritual forces, is here plainly depicted. There follows, grandly shown, the description of the part played by the historical forces, which are real forces for the spiritual spectator. Out of the old armouries and storerooms where lie the old helmets, come those beings of whom the abstractionist would say they are ‘historical ideas’ — of whom, however, he who can look into it knows that they live in the spiritual world. And we see how Faust in his higher state of consciousness is led to the great powers in history, we see these powers of history arise and being led into the field. Faust's consciousness is to be raised still higher. The whole world must appear to him spiritualized — all the events we see around us, which the ordinary abstractionist describes only with his understanding, for being limited to a physical brain, he imagines he has done everything when he describes the externals. But all this is connected, and is guided and directed by supernatural beings and forces.\nWhen man's life is carried in this way to spiritual heights, he discovers the whole might of that which is to drag him down again into the material world. He gets to know in a remarkable manner him whom he has not quite got to know before. So it is now with Faust. He stands now at an important point in his inner development: he has to complete the journey: Mephistopheles is involved in everything he has seen up to now. He can be free from Mephistopheles — from those spiritual forces which bind man to the sense-world, and try to prevent his liberation — only when he accosts Mephistopheles as the Tempter. There where the world with its realms, nature and history with its spirituality confront Faust, he experiences something in which the man who understands these things can without difficulty recognize from what depths Goethe spoke. The ‘Tempter,’ who would drag man down when he has risen a certain way into the spiritual world, comes to man and tries to give him false feelings and sensations concerning what he sees in the supernatural world. The approach of the Tempter to man is presented in the grand manner. He is the same who came to the Christ and promised him all the kingdoms of the world and their glories.\nSomething like this happens to the man who has entered into the spiritual world. He is promised by the Tempter the world with all its glories.\nWhat does this mean? Nothing else than that he may not believe that anything of this world could still belong to his narrow egoism. That all personality with its egoistic wishes and desires must be thrust away, that the ‘Tempter’ must be overcome, Goethe points out through Mephistopheles in such a way that it may be a touchstone for us of what his meaning is:\n‘Yet now, with sober season to address thee, Did nothing on our outside shell impress thee? From this exceeding height thou saw'st unfurled The glory of the Kingdoms of the World.’\n(Matt. 4.)\nOne might say that Goethe points out with these words, more than clearly enough for those who refuse to understand, what he really intends, in order to represent also this important stage in the spiritual growth of man. Then Faust succeeds in so far overcoming the egoism of persona! wish and desire, that he dedicates all his activity to that piece of land with which he has been enfeoffed. He does not desire possession of this land — he does not desire fame — nothing of all that — he wants only to devote himself to work for other people:\n‘Stand on free soil among a people free!’\nWe must take these words to mean that personal egoism gradually departs from the human soul. For no one who has not overcome this personal egoism, can really reach the last stage, which Goethe still wants to depict. So he shows Faust at the point where the garments of human personal egoism fall away like scales, where Faust gives himself absolutely to the spiritual, where in fact all the frippery of fame and external honours in the world are nothing more to him. But one thing Faust has not even yet overcome. And again we see from a spiritual point of view deep, deep into Goethe's heart, as he now describes what happens next.\nFaust has become a selfless man up to a point. He has learnt what it means to say: ‘The act is all, the glory is nothing.’ He has learnt to say: ‘I desire to be active. My activity must flow out into the world — I will have nothing as reward for this activity!’ But in one small incident it is revealed that his egoism has not completely disappeared. On his wide territories there stands an old cottage on rising ground, in which lives an old couple, Philemon and Baucis. In all things Faust's egoism has disappeared, except with regard to this cottage. Here there is a last remnant of egoism which speaks in his soul. What he could do with this rising ground! He could stand up there and survey at a glance the fruits of his labour — and rejoice at what he had accomplished! That is a last bit of egoism, the enjoyment in a physical survey. Gratification in a commanding material view, that remains to him still. He must get beyond. Nothing of desire and comfort, i.e., of direct surrender to the outer world, with which egoism is connected, may remain in his soul. And once more we see Faust in touch with spiritual forces. In the ‘Midnight’ scene, enter four Grey Women. They come up near to him. Three of them, Want, Guilt and Necessity cannot do anything to him, but now something emerges which belongs to the experiences of the Way of Initiation. Along the Way of Initiation there is a secret connection between all that a man's egoism can make him do and that attitude of soul which is expressed by the word ‘Care.’ In that man who is far enough to look selflessly into the spiritual world, there is no care. Care is the companion of egoisms. And as little as some can perhaps believe that when Care is present, egoism has not disappeared, so true is it that on the long, self-denying path into the spiritual world, egoism must completely vanish. If man steps into the spiritual world and brings with him into it any trace of egoism, Care comes and reveals itself as a disturbing power. Here we have something of the dangers of initiation. In the material world, the kindly powers of the spiritual world take care to see that the power of Care cannot thus come near human beings. But the moment they grow together with the spiritual world, and learn to know powers which are at play there, such things as Care become disturbing forces. Some things may have been overcome by means of the keys which lead into the spiritual world, but Care slips through all key-holes. To be sure, if man is far enough, and faces Care bravely, Care becomes a power that can remove from him this last remnant of egoism. Faust goes blind. Why? He goes blind because the power of the last bit of egoism remaining in him is cancelled by the power of Care. The last possibility of personal enjoyment is removed. It gets darker and darker all round. Now his soul feels the last remnant of egoism when he has ordered the cottage to be pulled down, from whose site the selfish pleasure of satisfaction in his work could have been derived.\n‘But in my inmost spirit all is light!’\nNow Faust's soul belongs to that world over which Care and all the disturbing elements which vex the body have no power, and he experiences what those about to be initiated into the spiritual world experience. He takes part as an outside observer, in events which he does not experience in the physical world, his own death and burial. He looks down from the spiritual world upon the physical world and upon all that happens to him as if it were another. The events concern now only those powers which are in the physical world.\nIt would take us far to explain how Goethe now makes the ‘Lemures’ appear, which consist only of sinews and bones, so that they have no soul; they represent man at the stage before he has received a soul. But Faust himself is carried into the spiritual world. We see Mephistopheles fighting a last battle for Faust's soul — a significant and remarkable battle. If one were to divide this battle up into its details one would see what a deep knowledge of the spiritual world Goethe had.\nThere lies the dying Faust. Mephistopheles fights for the soul. He knows that this soul can leave the body at several places. Here there is much to be learnt by those who read in one or other handbook how the soul leaves the body. Goethe is further. He knows that it is not always the same place, but that the soul's departure from the body in death depends entirely on the state of development of the person. He knows that the soul, while in the body, receives a shape corresponding to the body only because of the elastic power of love. Mephistopheles believes Faust's soul to be ready for the Kingdom of darkness. In that case it could have only the shape he describes as a ‘hideous worm.’ When a soul has given itself to its own powers, it can have only a shape expressing its virtues or vices. If Faust's soul were ripe for the Kingdom of darkness, its shape would have been as Mephistopheles thought. But now it is developed and is carried away, because its virtues are such as correspond to the spiritual world and spiritual worlds take possession of it.\nNext we meet those people who are, so to speak, the connecting units between the physical and the spiritual world, who stand as initiates in the physical world and range with their spirit into the spiritual world: supernatural men of experience and observers — so they are introduced to us. Goethe tells in his poem that he has inscribed as ‘Symbolum’ how two voices resound out of the spiritual world:\n‘Still call from beyond The voices of spirits, The voices of masters: To exercise fail not The powers of goodness.’\nHere also Goethe is consistent with his knowledge. He represents the spirits which are not incarnate in the material world. But first he represents those to whom the name ‘Masters’ is often applied, who are incarnate in the material world. He represents them in the garb which was the handiest in his day, as ‘Pater Ecstaticus,’ ‘Pater Seraphicus,’ and ‘Pater Profundus.’ Concerning this he said to Eckermann: ‘In any case you will allow that the ending, where the rescued soul rises to heaven, was very difficult to do, and that I might have easily lost myself in vagueness with such supernatural, scarcely guessable things, unless I gave my poetic intentions a delimiting form and firmness by means of the sharply-outlined, ecclesiastical figures and ideas.’\nWhoever heard here the lectures on ‘Christian Initiation’ will recognize again to what extent Goethe was initiated into those things.\nThus Faust's soul rises through the regions, through which those souls have passed which have grown accustomed to the spiritual world and are active in it, and assist in bringing other souls into it. And then we see how Goethe lays down, so to speak, his ‘credo’ — that ‘credo’ which marks him as a member of that spiritual-scientific stream, which has also so often been spoken of here, especially in the lecture ‘Where and how does one find the Spirit’ 3 15th October, 1908, Berlin. in which an example was given of how man ‘lives’ himself into the spiritual world. There was mentioned the ‘black Cross with the red roses.’ Powers are awakened in the soul when man yields himself to this ‘Cross of roses,’ which represents in the black cross the sinking down of the sense world and in the red roses the blossoming up of the spiritual world. It represents what the abstract words say:\n‘And until thou this thing hast, This death and birth, Thou art but a sorry guest On the dark earth.’\nWhat man attains through spiritual understanding, through the power of the red roses, Goethe was well aware, and he confesses it: the red roses fall down from the spiritual world, as the immortal part of Faust is taken up. And so we see how Goethe really shows us the path of the human soul into the spiritual world.\nSome things could be presented only sketchily. For there is something peculiar about this ‘Faust’ of Goethe: it becomes deeper and even deeper, the more one grows into it, and only then one learns what Goethe can become for humanity. One learns to recognize what he will one day become, if Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy will illuminate Goethe's esoteric poetry, where he speaks of the spiritual world from his own experiences. Goethe depicts realistically what he knows to be facts of the spiritual world. This second Part of Faust is a realistic Poem — closed of course to those who do not know that the spiritual worlds are realities. 4 See Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Scientific Elucidation of Goethe's Faust , Vols. I and II, in course of translation (1933). What we have are not ‘symbols,’ but only a poetic clothing up of quite realistic, albeit supernatural events, such as the soul experiences when it becomes one with the world that is its original home; when it feels itself possessed, not of knowledge which is only an abstraction, a growing together with sense observation or abstract understanding, but of knowledge which is a real fact of the spiritual world. Certainly one will for a long time yet be far from an understanding of Goethe's ‘Faust;’ for one will first have to learn the language of ‘Faust’ if one wants to get inside it. One can take up commentary after commentary: not only once are the words explained by otherwise quite clever people. As Wagner sees the ‘Homunculus’ sprouting in the retort, he says — (you can read in commentaries what his words are supposed to mean):\n‘'Twill be! the mass is working clearer! Conviction 5 Uberzeugung. gathers, truer, nearer!’\nI say it as wrongly as all those since Goethe have said, who make it mean that Wagner has the conviction that the Homunculus will come into being: ‘The conviction in Wagner is working clearer!’ And the explainers of ‘Faust’ imagine they can ladle out the whole of its depth with such trivialities! Certainly our age, which has also another word coined by Goethe in its mouth, viz. ‘superman,’ without grasping its deeper meaning, could not explain these words otherwise. Their true meaning, however, is this: that which is conceived in the physical world is a ‘conception’ (‘ Zeugung ‘); that which is conceived here in the astral world is a ‘super-conception,’ ( Uberzeugung — conviction). One has first to learn how to read Goethe, when like all great minds, he makes his own words. Then one will be able to measure the whole earnestness, out of which the Faust arose. Then one will, above all, not commit the triviality of understanding the final words of Faust to mean by ‘eternal-feminine,’ something which has to do with the feminine in the sense-world.\nThe ‘eternal-feminine’ is that power in the soul which lets itself be fertilized by the spiritual world, and thereby grows together in its clairvoyant and magical deeds with the spiritual world. What can be fertilized there is this ‘eternal-feminine’ in every human being, which draws him up to the spheres of the eternal; and Goethe has depicted in Faust this course of growth of the eternal feminine into spiritual worlds.\nLook round in the physical world: we really see everything properly for the first time, when we see in it, not the true reality, but a symbol of eternity. This eternity is experienced by the soul when it passes the gates into the spiritual world. There it experiences what can be explained in matter-of-fact sense terms, if they are used in a quite special way. On this point Goethe has also expressed himself — and as a great warning for all who of set opinion insist in abstractions concerning something or other. In two successive poems Goethe has expressed, like a great exhortation to mankind, that when someone speaks of a thing in the spiritual world, he can express it in diametrically opposite views. In the first poem he says:\n‘The eternal must persist through all: For into nothing all must fall If it insists in being.’\nWhile he here gives utterance to the thought of his ‘eternal flux’ philosophy, he says immediately afterwards in the next poem:\n‘No being can to nothing fall, Eternity persists in all, Rejoice in that thou art.’\nWhile the opposite thoughts of the sense-world are used as the contrasted reflexions of the super-sense world, the latter cannot be described in terms of the former. Material words are always insufficient when used in a special sense.\nSo we see how Goethe, while representing the ‘indescribable’ from the most diverse sides, causes it to be done before the eyes of the spirit. What is ‘unattainable’ for the material world is within the reach of spiritual vision, if the soul schools itself in that part which can be developed by means of the powers which Spiritual Science can give it. It is not for nothing that Goethe makes that work in which he has exposed the most exquisite and richest of his experiences, ring forth in a ‘Chorus Mysticus,’ which of course must contain nothing trivial. For in this Chorus Mysticus he points out to us how that which is indescribable in material words is done, when the language of imagery is used: how the soul, by means of the eternal womanhood in it is drawn into the spiritual world.\n‘All things transitory But as symbols are sent: Earth's insufficiency There grows to Event: The Indescribable, Here it is done: The Woman-Soul 6 Ewig-Weibliche ; the Eternal Feminine. leadeth us Upward and on!’\nIn such words could Goethe speak of the way to the spiritual world. In such words could he speak of the powers of the soul, which when developed, lead mankind step by step into the spiritual world."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-15",
    "title": "Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science",
    "date": "20 Mar 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/eLib2014/19090320p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "The only meeting with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900, German philosopher) belongs to the experiences I do not forget again. At that time, he was quite mad. The sight was very important. Imagine a human being, a man who has dealt with the question the whole morning which immediately suggests itself, and who has the wish to rest some time after dinner and to let go on the thoughts sounding in himself: he lay there this way. I had the impression of a healthy man, and, besides, he was already completely mad; he recognised nobody. His forehead was moulded like that of an artist and a thinker, and, nevertheless, it was the forehead of a maniac. A riddle faced me. Human beings of his kind of insanity would have had to look completely different. Only by means of spiritual science, one can explain this unusual.\nThe etheric body, the carrier of memory, is connected with the physical body during the whole life, but it is connected different with the different human beings. With some, the relation is not very solid, with others very close. Now Nietzsche's etheric body was very movable from the start. Such human beings can have two qualities: the one is an ingenious, easily movable mental force and imagination, the ability to connect widely separated concepts and to get a synopsis of widely divergent perspectives. Such persons are not as easily restrained as others are by the gravity of the physical body in the conditions given by life.\nBefore Friedrich Nietzsche had done his doctorate, he was appointed professor of Classics in Basel. From his teacher, Professor Ritschl (Friedrich Wilhelm R., 1806–1876), information was gathered. This answered: Nietzsche is able to do everything he wants. Thus, it happened that he did his doctorate when he already held a chair. Nietzsche had an agile mind. Such a human being does not live in ideas, which are palpable. He lives, so to speak, separated like by a wall from the everyday life.\nHowever, something else is connected with such a mental disposition: he is condemned to a certain life tragedy. He hard finds the way to the immediate things of existence, he easily lives in that which cannot be seen by the eyes, be seized by the hands what can be observed in the everyday life but in that which humanity has acquired as spiritual goods. He lives in certain ways like separated by walls from the sufferings and joys of life. His look wanders into the vast, more in that which humanity has gained and created for itself, than in the everyday. Hence, it could occur that Nietzsche was in a special situation towards the civilisation of the nineteenth century.\nSomeone who surveys the civilisation of the second half of the nineteenth century sees that an immense jerk forward is done in the conquest of the physical world. We take the year 1858/59. It was the year, which brought the work of Darwin (Charles D., 1809–1882, English naturalist) of the origin of species by which the look of the human beings was banished completely in the physical concerning the evolution idea. This year also brought the work by which the matters of our fixed stars and the most distant sky space were conquered: the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, German chemist). Only since that time, it was possible to say, the substances, which are found on earth, are also found on the other planets. Then appeared the book about aesthetics by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887, 1846–1857: Aesthetics or the Science of Beauty ) which wanted to found the science of beauty bottom up, while one had once explained beauty top down, from the idea. To complete the picture: that work appeared which wanted to force the social life into the only sensuous world, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818–1883). Briefly, the time in which Nietzsche grew up was the time in which the human beings directed their look completely to the physical world.\nNow imagine which forms all that has accepted in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century: think of Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist) and other researchers who only targeted what presented itself to their sensuous eyes; think of everything that natural sciences and technology have performed in the nineteenth century. It appears to us compared with these currents like an escape of humanity to spirituality if at that time wide circles are seized by the philosophy of Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860). At that time, the mere interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy shows that the human souls escaped to something that should grant spiritual satisfaction. We see one of the great spirits of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813–1883, composer), attempting to let spirituality flow again into civilisation.\nIn this cultural trend, Nietzsche positioned himself. How did he do this? The just mentioned persons positioned themselves creatively in it, and creating is something blissful. Working makes the human being young and fresh. This becomes apparent with Haeckel. Somebody who works on the microscope and other instruments and does research can make himself happy and rejuvenate in this work, he is able to do all that also light-heartedly, and he forgets the need for a spiritual world; in him something lives that can animate the human being, creative enthusiasm, which has something divine-spiritual. Nietzsche's destiny was this cultural trend. He was destined to take joy and sorrow from this cultural trend because he was not directly connected with the everyday life. He had the nagging feeling, how can one live with that which the modern civilisation offers? Nietzsche's heart was involved in everything with joy or sorrow. He lived through everything with his soul that happened in the nineteenth century.\nWe see two spirits intervening early in Nietzsche's life: Schopenhauer whom he got to know not personally who had a deep effect on him by his writings, and Richard Wagner with whom he was tied together by the most tender bond of friendship. Both spirits induced Nietzsche to become engrossed in the riddle of ancient Greece in the beginning of our culture. He had done deep looks in the Greek world, from the oldest time up to those periods which history illumines brighter. The Greek of the oldest time seems to be much closer to divinity than later, when he tries to show pictures of the gods in his pieces of art: he makes them human-like, raises the form of the human being to the ideal image. The Greek was not that way in primeval times. He felt everything vividly flowing into himself what was outdoors what blows in the storm and grumbles with the thunder, what streaks in the flash what as harmonising wisdom has set up the world outdoors. At that time, in his original music the Greek expressed this harmony and created it in his temple dances.\nNietzsche called the ancient Greek the Dionysian human being. The later Greek, the Apollonian human being, reproduced what the original Greek was. He stood there considering and expressed it in his pieces of art. At this development Nietzsche looked like at a riddle, because he had no knowledge of that primeval culture which was the basis of the Greek and even earlier cultures from which it had taken its force. An expression of that primeval culture was also, what was expressed as wisdom in the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries as myth creation and art. Nietzsche did not know this. He thought that everything was instinct, basic instinct with the ancient Greek. He knew nothing about that wisdom which was fostered by initiates originally in the mysteries, which then flowed into the world, illustrated in pieces of art and mystery plays. Nietzsche was not able to look into these mysteries, but he had a premonition of them. Hence, he felt worried, because he could not find the correct answer to his questions. In that primeval wisdom of the human being to which spiritual science goes back, he would have had to search the answer to his Dionysian human being and his Apollonian human being. He would have to get the solution of the riddle from the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries. Then he could have seen how art fosters the beholding, and how science and religion look for that which can penetrate the human heart with devoutness.\nReligion, art, and science were not yet separated in the old mysteries from each other. They originated from one root. The ancient mysteries are this root. With the leading peoples of antiquity, they were fostered in secret sites efficiently and were developed to ritual acts. The descent of the primeval wisdom was represented to the neophyte in pictures. This remained concealed to Nietzsche; therefore, he could not find the coherence, which he searched. Only tragically, the development of the Greek spiritual life could present itself to him. He stills sees Aeschylus (525–456 BC ), who was close to the mysteries, creating his drama penetrated with inner wisdom. However, he also sees Sophocles (497–406 BC ) and in particular Euripides (480–406 BC ) already creating their dramas which only show the exterior. He recognises that the Socratics find concepts that are far from the world sources and that they place themselves like considering beyond the world content in the universe. It seemed to him in such a way that in Socrates the world itself does no longer pulsate, but only the concepts of it, that he leads the Greek pulsating life to dry, sober abstraction. Nietzsche was painfully affected by the fact that Socrates put up the sentence that virtue is teachable. He understood it in such a way that the old Greek felt what he should do; he did not ask whether it is right or wrong. Only a time estranged to divinity could ask, can one learn what is good? Hence, Nietzsche considered Socrates as the person of the decline of Greek culture.\nSchopenhauer appeared to Nietzsche as a human being who had an idea of that what led to the sources of existence. He built the bridge from the abstract world of human mental pictures to the deeper sources of existence pulsating in the will. This satisfied Nietzsche's pursuit of truth. Richard Wagner appeared to him as a person risen from the old Hellenism. It was blissful for Nietzsche to develop according to such an exceptional person who walked along beside him in flesh and blood. A substitute of that which the external world is to the other human beings was this friendship with Richard Wagner.\nAs a deposit of his world of thought in this time we have the writing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music , appeared in 1872, in which already the whole Nietzsche is included. There is already found the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Further Schopenhauer as Educator . Nietzsche writes empathically about Schopenhauer like someone who writes about his father. Then Richard Wagner in Bayreuth , it is regarded by everybody as the best writing about Richard Wagner.\nNo time is so closely related to philistines as the time of materialism. In no book, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, German theologian) expresses this connection so strongly as in the book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835/36). Nietzsche named and shamed this philistine attitude in his writing about David Friedrich Strauss. Nietzsche who longed for the re-erection of the Dionysian human being could be outraged against the philistine attitude of David Friedrich Strauss. David Friedrich Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer is a redeeming essay.\nThen he did something as an academician. He had experienced the time without fire and enthusiasm of the academics. If anybody said, there can be new ideas, one can do this or that, then the others came who said: however, history shows us that nothing can develop by leaps and bounds, everything goes on quietly. One was afraid of what one called a leap in history. Nietzsche wrote a book in which he said, pluck up courage, be a human being, do not only look for history, have the courage to be independent and to act independently! Again a releasing book, of a comprising radicalism in its demand for emancipation from history. He expressed that historical mood is an obstacle of everything original in the impulses of the human beings.\nNietzsche lived up to 1876 in such a way. His development was in such a way that he stood far from the events in the world. The easy mobility of his etheric body caused this. In 1876, when Wagner was at the peak of his creating and had realised in the outside world what lived in his soul, Nietzsche discovered, what faces you does not correspond to the picture, which has lived in you. — This was the case simply because he had built something like a wall against the demands of the external realities.\nHe could not recognise in the outside what he had formed inside as mental pictures. There Nietzsche became confused. What made him confused? Wagner? Not really. Richard Wagner never made him confused, because he did not know the objective Richard Wagner at all. He was confused by his idea, which he had got of Wagner. Now Nietzsche became confused by the whole perspective, which had led him to Wagner. He was confused by any idealism. With the idealistic Wagner, he lost all ideals which humanity can generally spin out. Thus, the feeling originated in him: idealism and all contemplation about the spiritual is a lie, is untruthfulness, illusion. The human beings have deluded themselves about that what is real, while they have made pictures of the real to themselves. Nietzsche began to suffer from himself.\nNow he is engrossed in opposite currents of the spiritual life, in the positive natural sciences and the branches, which are built up on these. He becomes acquainted with an interesting spirit, with Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher) who had written a book about moral sensations and the origin of conscience. This work The Origin of the Moral Sensations , 1877) is typical for the last third of the nineteenth century in which is searched and worked according to the methods of natural sciences. It completely gets the origin of moral sensations and conscience out of the impulses and instincts of the human being. Paul Rée makes this wittily. Nietzsche is delighted by this worldview about which he says to himself, there any illusion is overcome, and one can understand human life only from that which is palpable. Now I feel all ideals like masks of desires and instincts. In Human, All Too Human , a book which appears in aphoristic form, he tries to show how basically all ideals do not lead beyond the human being, but are something that is rooted in the all too human, in the feeling and in the everyday. Nietzsche could never find the way to the everyday immediately. He did not know the general-human from practice. He wanted to experience it now from theory with all joys and sufferings. In addition, life praxis became theory to him. This was wonderfully expressed in Daybreak (1881). Everything appears to him not only disproved, but got cold, as put on ice.\nWith particular satisfaction, Nietzsche now studies Eugen Dühring's (1833–1921) Philosophy of Reality (1878). In it, he delights himself; however, he is not a parroter of it. He writes many, partly extremely disparaging remarks in his personal copy. However, he tries to experience emotionally what is brought forward there as positive science. The French morality authors who aim at assessing moral of life not by standards, but by events become a stimulating reading for him. This becomes his tragedy or also his bliss. These are the essentials that he lives through all that. It works different on him from those who had created these works. He must always ask himself, how does one live with these things?\nNow, however, we see significant ideas originating to him from such conditions, ideas from which we must say that Nietzsche knocked at the gate of spiritual science, just as he had once stood before it with his Dionysian human being, guessing the mysteries. The gates were not opened to him. With one of these ideas, one can prove almost how it has originated. In Dühring's book A Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life you find a strange passage. There Dühring tries to put the question whether it is possible that the same combination of atoms and molecules, which has been there once, returns one day in the same way.\nDuring three weeks in which I have ordered Nietzsche's library, I myself have seen that he had marked this passage in this book and had added remarks. From then on, at first in the subconsciousness, the idea of the so-called everlasting return worked in him. This idea, which he developed more and more, has imprinted itself on Nietzsche's soul in such a way that it became a creed to him; he has familiarised himself with it that it became his tragedy. It expresses that everything that was there once returns in the same combination and with all details repeatedly, even if after long intervals. As well as we are sitting here now, we would come again heaps of times. This was a feeling, which belonged to the tragedy of his soul, the feeling: with all grief which now you experience you will always return. — Thus, we realise that Nietzsche has become the materialistic thinker by Dühring's idea of return — which Dühring rejects. For him there was only this return of the same a consequence of a materialistic idea.\nWe see Nietzsche's ideas crystallising from the cultural trend of the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows how the evolution of the imperfect to the perfect takes place how evolution advances from the simple living being to the developed human being. As for Nietzsche, it is not speculation; this becomes a source of bliss for him. It is a satisfaction for him to see the world in its development. However, he cannot stop. He says to himself, the human being has become; should he not develop further? Should the development be concluded with the human being if we see that imperfect beings have developed up to the human being? There we must look at the human being as a transition to a super-human. — Thus, the human being became to him a bridge between worm and super-human.\nNietzsche stood with his idea of the everlasting return with his whole feeling and thinking before the gate of the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He stood also with the idea of the super-human before the gate of spiritual science, which shows us that in every human being something lives that we have to understand as a divine essence of the human being. This essence is a kind of super-human if we are allowed to use the expression. When the human being has gone through many incarnations and has become more and more perfect, he will ascend to even higher degrees of existence.\nNietzsche knew nothing about all these concrete secrets of spiritual science. He knew nothing about that what we know if we look behind the sensuous, palpable. He could only emotionally grasp what lived in his soul, not with his ego. Instead of the portrayals of the spiritual facts that can fulfil us with bliss, instead of the portrayal of that world of facts which shows us how within the planetary development the human being ascends from stage to stage, all that lived with Nietzsche in the feeling, and sounds lyrically from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). It is an enthusiastic portrayal of the guessed that he could not behold. Like a question appears to us his hymn on the super-human.\nHow could this thirsty soul have been satisfied? Only if it had got to know spiritual science as contents. Nietzsche had to bleed out emotionally in his longing for it. Only spiritual science could have brought him what he strove for without being able to grasp it. In the last book, which he wanted to call Will to Power , it is especially clear how he could come to no fulfilment of his soul with the desired spiritual contents. Compare everything that spiritual science says about the higher human being and his affiliation to spiritual worlds with the abstract will to power, which has, actually, no contents. Power is something quite abstract if it is not said what should have power.\nJust this posthumous work Will to Power shows Nietzsche's vain and fateful striving that is so great in its notions. Again, you can observe the tragedy, how this striving for an unknown land grows into insanity. Just at the example of Nietzsche, you can see where the civilisation of the nineteenth century had to lead the deeper feeling personalities. Therefore, many people who guessed something beyond the material, the palpable and could not find it because they stopped with this civilisation had to bleed out. That is why Nietzsche's tragedy also shows a big piece of the tragedy of the nineteenth century. This tragedy appears in particular, if we realise how Nietzsche with a boldness which only a human being can have who is not firmly connected with his etheric body, with the inhibitions of the physical body, how Nietzsche criticises Christianity in his Antichrist (1895). For Christianity is that what he says a harsh but comprehensible and extremely urgent criticism. A lot of that which this Antichrist contains is exceptionally worth reading. Nevertheless, the whole standpoint of Nietzsche shows us how a mind must behave to whom all philosophy appears as nihilism, who wants to search the spirit from reality and cannot find this spirit in the modern form of Christianity. It will turn out more and more that humanity recognises the big impulses and the whole deepness of Christianity only by spiritual science, so that one can say, Christianity has been recognised up to now only to a lesser extent. Nietzsche did not have this consciousness; he did not recognise Christianity properly. Why could he not recognise it? Because he could not anticipate the course of development — in the sense of spiritual science. I want to show it with an example.\nAbout 600 years before Christ, Buddha appeared whom one cannot admire and revere enough if one recognises him really. He grows up as a king's son, surrounded by all joys of life. Any grief is kept away from him. It is ensured that he never leaves the gardens of his palace. Nevertheless, once he comes out of the sanctified area of the palaces and temples. He meets an old man, a sick person, a dead person. He sees: age is suffering, illness is suffering, and death is suffering. He recognises that in every rebirth the sufferings must come again. The great truth of the spiritual life reveals itself to Buddha. Therefore, he teaches that one should give up his longing for re-embodiment to be merged in the peace of the spiritual world.\nWe look at Christ now. We reincarnate in the substances of the earth. Our task is to purify, to internalise and to spiritualise this substance gradually. We carry the fruits of our pilgrimage on earth up to the spirit, and connect them thereby with the spiritual existence. May the earth then be only a vale of tears, which one should leave? No, the earth was blessed, because Christ walked about it, because his body was built from the substances of the earth, and because He permeated the earth with his forces. — The first Christians spoke that way. The human being absorbs something of the Christ principle in every life, purifies himself thereby gradually. Rebirth is not suffering, because only thereby we become able to recognise illness, age, evil as tests, as a means of education of our soul to become good and strong. The soul, which soars this knowledge, is healthy and fosters its surroundings.\nToday the fear of hereditary predisposition penetrates humanity. If the human being opened himself or herself to the Christ impulse again, the illnesses would be overcome. On Golgotha, the symbol of death became the symbol of redemption. Being separated from that what one loves is suffering. However, one can be connected with those whom one loves if one is inspired by the Christ principle. One learns bit by bit to experience this union as reality. The Christ principle transforms the sufferings described by Buddha. Overcoming the sufferings one can reach not only by turning away from life, but also by the transformation of the soul. At the sight of the corpse of the crucified, we realise the riddle of the everlasting life going through death.\nNietzsche regards Christianity just as the opposite of that, what lies in its concealed deepness and what should be brought to light by spiritual science. He bleeds out because he could not recognise this. Nietzsche's grief is the deepest, most painful longing for the sources of life. Because his spirit was not firmly tied to his physical body, he does not come to the right solution of the world riddles tormenting him. Thus, it could happen that he did not find the right answer to his question to life which spiritual science could have given him, that he passed by. When the tools of the physical body could no longer serve him, he cast it off, so to speak, he divests himself of the physical body that has become useless for the thinker, and he hovers over it as it were. Thus, he appears to the viewer looking at him as healthy, as someone who only wants to rest from intensive work of thought. In such a way, he lay there like a picture of the tragedy of modern materialistic science, which cannot recognise the spiritual."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-16",
    "title": "Isis and Madonna",
    "date": "29 Apr 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/Singles/19090429p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "Goethe has repeatedly pointed out how a man who draws near the secrets of nature yearns for the worthiest exponent of her secrets, namely, for art. And all through life Goethe showed in his creations how art was to him the interpreter of truth. It may be said that in this conception Goethe lit on something that has been a basic conviction, a basic theme, throughout all ages and epochs of human evolution.\nIn the different arts more or less consciously we are presented with different languages that give expression to certain truths living in the human soul. They are often the most secret truths, the most secret knowledge, which cannot readily be reduced to rigid concepts nor clothed in abstract formula but seek artistic expression.\nToday our attention is to be drawn to a secret truth of this kind which for centuries has endeavored to find expression in art; it is true this has always found its scientific formulation in certain narrow circles, but for a wider public it will only become a matter of popular knowledge in the future through spiritual science. Goethe himself was able in his soul to approach this truth from very many angles. In one of my lectures here on Goethe I pointed to the significant moment in his life that was an instance of this kind of experience. In the second of the lectures on Faust I told you how Goethe on reading the Roman writer Plutarch came across the remarkable story of Nikias, who wanted to make subject again to the Romans a certain town in Sicily belonging to the Carthaginians, and on that account was being pursued. In his flight he feigned insanity, and by his strange cry: “The Mothers, the Mothers are pursuing me!” it was recognized that this insanity was of no ordinary kind. For in that region there existed a so-called “Temple of the Mothers,” set up in connection with ancient Mysteries; hence it was known what was signified by the expression “the Mothers.” When Goethe was able to let the full significance of the expression “the Mothers” sink into his soul, he realized that if he wanted to reach the highest point of awe-inspiring beauty in one of the scenes in the second part of his Faust , he could not express this better than by sending Faust himself to the Mothers.\nNow what does this journey to the Mothers signify for Faust? We have made brief mention of this in the lecture referred to. Mephistopheles himself cannot enter the realm where the Mothers are enthroned although he gives Faust the key. Mephistopheles is the spirit of materialism, the spirit contained in the forces and powers of man's material existence. To him the realm of the Mothers is the realm of nothingness. Faust, the spiritual human being, with his bent towards the spirit is able to answer: “In thy nothingness I hope to find the All.” Then follows the highly remarkable and significant description of the realm of the Mothers, and we are told how they weave and live in a sphere out of which the forms of the visible world are fashioned; how man, if he would penetrate to the Mothers, must rise above all that lives in space and time. Formation, transformation, this is the essence of their realm. They are mysterious Goddesses holding sway in a spiritual realm behind the reality of the senses. Faust must penetrate to them if he is to obtain knowledge of all that transcends the sensory and physical. Only by widening his soul to this realm of the Mothers can Faust worthily unite in Helen the eternal with the temporal. In that lecture on Faust it was possible to indicate that Goethe fully understood how in this realm of the Mothers one has to do with a sphere into which man is able to penetrate when he awakens slumbering spiritual forces in his soul. This is for him the great moment in which are revealed to him the spiritual beings and facts which are always around us, but which with the eyes of the senses we see as little as the blind man sees color and light. It is the moment when the spiritual eyes and ears are opened to a world lying behind the physical world. Entrance into this realm is portrayed by the journey to the Mothers.\nIn these lectures it was repeatedly indicated that when man practices certain inner exercises on his soul, certain minutely-prescribed methods for sinking deeply into the world of his conceptions, feelings and will, then his spiritual eyes and ears actually become open and new realms are unfolded around him. It was also shown that whoever enters this realm is confused by all the impressions that work upon him. Whereas in the physical world we perceive objects in sharp outline from which we take our bearings, in the spiritual world we have a confused feeling of inter-weaving, hovering form, just as Goethe describes it in the second part of Faust . But it is out of this realm of the Mothers that there is born all that is given to our senses, just as in the mountains metal is born out of the mother-ore. And because this mysterious realm, the Mother-realm of everything earthly and physical, the realm containing, so to say, the divine substance of all things — because this mysterious realm is resounding in Goethe, the expression “the Mothers” works with such fascination and awesome beauty. Thus, when he read in Plutarch that someone cried “The Mothers, the Mothers,” he recognized that this was not a mad vision into an insane and unreal world, but a vision into a world of spiritual reality. The Mother problem of the world stood before Goethe while he was reading Plutarch, and in the way he did with much else he inserted this Mother problem as a mystery into the second part of his Faust .\nNow anyone wishing to enter this realm of the Mothers, the realm of the spiritual world, has had at all times to undertake, besides other exercises that may be found in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds , what has invariably been called preparatory purification, catharsis of the soul. He must so prepare himself that his soul, out of which the higher spiritual forces are to be derived is free of all urge and passion for the ordinary world of the senses. The soul must be purified from all those things which have sensuous attraction and provide food for the senses and which hold the understanding captive in the physical body. The soul must be free, then it can awaken within itself the spiritual eye and penetrate into the spiritual realm. The so-called purified soul, the soul that has passed through catharsis and is no longer turned towards the physical world of the senses, wherever knowledge of this mystery has existed has always been called the higher being of man, that inner being of which it has been said that it does not originate in anything the outer eyes can investigate, but in sources of a higher soul and spiritual nature; it has not an earthly but a heavenly home. It was thought that the ennobled, purified soul was connected with this true origin of man, for what has been spiritual science through the ages has never been able to speak of a purely material evolution, of a perfection or imperfection in accordance with the senses. Spiritual science does not condemn as erroneous what today is called evolution, the ascent from the lowest to the most perfect physical being wandering on the face of the earth, namely, physical man. As I have often emphasized, that is fully recognized. The scientific theory of evolution and descent is fully recognized by spiritual science, but at the same time it is pointed out that the whole being we call man is not included in this evolution, which evolution only applies to the external side of man's development.\nNow when we trace man back through all the changes of time we find that the further we go back to ever more imperfect physical forms the more we meet with man's origin as a soul spiritual being. We have often gone back to an age of human evolution when the being we now call man had as yet no kind of physical existence and was securely sheltered within an existence of spirit and soul. Attention has repeatedly been drawn to how, in the sense of spiritual science we look upon the material form, man's physical body, as a densification of a being who was once only spirit and soul. This being of spirit and soul has been densified, as it were, to present-day man, as water is solidified into ice. This picture has often been made use of, when it is said: Let us imagine a quantity of water condensed to ice so that finally we are left with a certain amount of water together with the part that is changed into ice. Here we have an image of man's origin. In the man who was once just soul and spirit there existed as yet nothing of the physical, material bodily nature today perceptible to the eyes and tangible for the hands. Man becomes gradually ever more physical, until he comes to his present physical form. The age to which orthodox science can look back reveals indeed man in the physical form we see today. But spiritual science looks back into a primordial past when man was born out of the spiritual world and was still of a spirit and soul nature. When we contemplate the soul of man today we can say that the soul element in him is the last remnant, so to speak, of the spiritual and soul nature that once was his. We look at the inner nature of man, learning to know his spiritual and soul being, and come to realize that as he is in his inner being, so he was once long ago when he was born out of the womb of the spiritual world. This being of soul is sheathed from outside in the lower elements of the sense world, but he can be purified and cleansed, can raise himself to a perception free of the senses, thereby regaining the spirituality out of which he was born. This is the process of spiritual knowledge that passes through purification. Thus in spirit we gaze into man's being of soul, and speaking not merely in imagery but with reality say: Knowing this soul being in its truth, we perceive that the being is not of this world. In the background of this soul being we see a divine spiritual world out of which he was born.\nNow let us try to turn what has been said into a physical picture. Let us ask ourselves: Do we not possess a physical picture of what has been described, where the spiritual world is represented by cloud formations out of which the spiritual is born in the form of angels' heads portraying the human soul? Have we not in the Virgin's figure in Raphael's Sistine Madonna a picture born out of the divine spiritual world?\nLet us go on to ask: What becomes of a man whose soul has been cleansed and purified, who has ascended to higher knowledge and has unfolded in his soul those spiritual images that give life within him to the divine, living and weaving through the world? This human being who gives birth in man to the higher man, to a man who represents a little world in the great world, who out of his purified soul brings forth the true higher man — what is he? He cannot be otherwise described than by the word clairvoyant. If we try to make a picture of the soul that gives birth to the higher man out of himself, out of the spiritual universe, we need only call to mind the picture of the Sistine Madonna , the Madonna with the wonderful Child in her arms.\nThus in the Sistine Madonna we have a picture of the human soul born of the spiritual universe, and springing from this soul the highest that a human being can bring forth — man's own spiritual birth, what within him is a new begetting of cosmic creative activity.\nLet us try to experience in our feeling what clairvoyant consciousness does. There was once a time when the structure of the world was founded on divine spirituality; for it would be senseless to seek in the world for spirit if this spirit had not originally built the world. All that surrounds us in the world has sprung from the spirit we seek in the soul. Thus the soul has sprung from the divine Father-spirit living and weaving throughout the universe, bearing the Son of wisdom Who is like unto this Father-spirit, of Whom He is a repetition.\nWe understand now the way in which Goethe approached this problem in all its mystical significance when he tried to gather the whole content of Faust together in the “Chorus Mysticus”, where he speaks of the human soul as the “eternal feminine” that draws us onward to the universal spirit of the world. This was Goethe's attitude to his Madonna problem at the very end of Faust . From the figure which the portrayal of the Madonna has assumed, even today it is hardly possible to recognize fully what is here expressed as in a picture which is nevertheless founded on profound truth. If, however, we trace this Madonna problem back to its origin, we shall realize that in very truth the mightiest human problem, though closely veiled, confronts us in the figure of the Madonna. These Madonnas are, it is true, greatly changed from the simple figure of the catacombs in the first Christian centuries, where we find Madonnas with the Child groping for the mother's breast. From this first simple figure, having little to do with art, it is a long way to the fifteenth century, to Michaelangelo and Raphael, where after many transformations the Child and the Madonna have become in the modern sense much more in accordance with art — in accordance with the art of painting. It is, however, as if these supreme artists proceeded from no very full knowledge but a definite feeling of the deeper truth of the Madonna problem. Very beautiful experiences arise in us when we stand before the so-called Pieta of Michaelangelo in St. Peter's in Rome, where the Madonna is sitting with the corpse across her knees — thus the Madonna is at the age when Christ had already passed through death but is portrayed with all the beauty of youth. In Michaelangelo's day it was a much discussed question why at her age he had given the Madonna this youthful beauty. When asked about it he replied how it was well known that virgins long preserve the freshness of youth — and this is no mere belief but spiritually derived knowledge. Thus why should he not be right in representing the Mother of God at this age still with all the freshness of youth? It is a remarkable conception here expressed by Michaelangelo! Although it is not openly expressed by Raphael, nevertheless we feel it to be there in his pictures. We can, however, understand this conception only by going far back into the times when what meets us in the Madonnas as unconscious art was still outwardly living. We might go very far back, and actually we should find the Madonna problem all over the world. We might go to old India and there find the Goddess with the Krishna child at her breast; in a Chinese cult we might find similar pictures.\nWe will not, however, go back into these far-off regions, but keep the representations repeated so impressively in olden times and which is given us again with such beauty in the Madonna. We will turn to the representations of Isis with the child Horus. These representations which have grown entirely out of Egyptian wisdom may in a certain sense be the key for the correct understanding of the portrayal of the Madonna. Here, it is true, we must direct our attention to the nature of the wisdom that led to this remarkable figure of the Egyptian Goddess, fix our attention on what this wisdom, expressed in the Isis Osiris saga, means to us. For when we understand it aright, this saga leads us deep into the actual problem of humanity. Wherever we look in the religion of Egypt, the saga of Osiris is still what is most significant and full of content — this King who in primordial times ruled as if in a golden age among men, and married his sister, Isis, who brought happiness and blessing to mankind. He stood before the eyes of ancient Egypt as a human King of divine power and divine virtue; and he ruled until he was killed by Set, his evil brother. He was killed in a strange way. At a banquet the evil brother Set, in later times called Typhon, caused a chest to be made, and craftily induced Osiris to lie down in it, when the lid was quickly closed. The chest was then thrown into the water and swept away to the unknown. His sorrowing spouse Isis seeks everywhere for her husband, after long searching finally discovering him in Asia. She brings him back to Egypt where he is dismembered by his evil brother Set, his fragments being interred in many graves. Hence the great number of tombs of Osiris in Egypt. Osiris now becomes King of the Dead, as previously he was King of living men on earth. From that other world a ray pierces the head of Isis and she gives birth to Horus who becomes the ruler of this world.\nAccording to the Egyptian legend Horus is the posthumous son of Osiris. Horus, who has come into existence as the result of impregnation from the world beyond, is ruler of the earthly world of the senses; Osiris is ruler of the realm of the dead. Whereas the soul while enclosed in a body is subject to the rulership of Horus, when it abandons the body — so the Egyptian Book of the Dead testifies it enters the realm of Osiris, itself becomes an Osiris. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describes in what a deeply impressive way the soul is arraigned before the tribunal in these words: “And thou, O Osiris, what hast thou done?” Thus the soul by passing through the gate of death itself becomes an Osiris.\nAccording to the old Egyptians, then, we look towards two realms, the realm perceived by the senses, the realm of Horus, and the realm into which the soul enters after death where Osiris holds sway. But at the same time we know that according to the old Egyptian initiates, the initiate who had acquired the faculty of clairvoyance already in his lifetime entered the same region which otherwise can be entered only after death — that he could be united with Osiris. The initiate therefore himself became an Osiris. He tore himself from the physical, renounced all habits of the physical plane, all passions and desires, cleansed himself of the physical, became a purified soul and as such was united with Osiris.\nNow what does this legend tell us? It is a childish idea to maintain that this legend is supposed to represent the yearly course of the sun round the earth. The learned ones of the earth in council have created the legend that Osiris is the sun, whose disappearance signifies his conquest by nature's wintry powers said to be Set, the evil brother Typhon. And in Isis we have the representation of the moon who seeks the sun in order to be irradiated by his light. Only those who spin theoretical myths about nature out of their own minds can make such statements. The truth is that this is the external, pictorial expression of a most profound truth.\nWhat is this age when Osiris ruled over men? It was the time when men were still beings of soul and spirit dwelling in the world of soul and spirit among beings who also had their being in soul and spirit. When, therefore, the realm of Osiris is spoken of, it is not the physical realm that is meant, but a realm of the past in which man held sway as a being of soul and spirit. And the brother, the enemy of Osiris, is that being who enveloped man in a physical body, who densified part of this spirit and soul being into the physical body. Now we see how the once purely spiritual Osiris was laid in a chest. This chest is simply the human physical body. But because Osiris is a being who in accordance with his whole nature cannot descend so far as the physical world, who is meant to remain in the divine spiritual world, the laying in the chest, the human body, has for him the same meaning as death.\nHere, then, is represented in a wider sense the passage from the realm of soul and spirit to the physical evolutionary epochs of humanity. Osiris could not enter this physical realm; he died to the external physical world and became King in the realm the soul enters on leaving the physical world of the senses, or on developing clairvoyant powers. Hence the initiate is in his soul united with Osiris.\nWhat has remained to man from that realm of soul and spirit, to man who did not withdraw like Osiris from the physical sense world but entered into it? What has remained to him? It is his soul, his being of spirit and soul that will always draw him onwards to the original source of spirit and soul — to Osiris. This is the human soul dwelling within us, Isis, in a certain sense the eternal feminine who draws us onward to the realm out of which we are born.\nIsis, when she is purified and has laid aside all that she has received from the physical, is impregnated from the spiritual world and gives birth to Horus, the higher man, who is to be victorious over the lower human being. Thus we see Isis as the representative of the human soul, as that in us which as the divine spiritual is born of the universal Father and has remained within us, seeking Osiris and only finding him through initiation or death. By conjuring this Osiris and Isis saga in a picture before our soul we are looking into the realm that lies behind the physical world of the senses, into a time when man was still among the Mothers, the primordial grounds of existence, when Isis was not yet enclosed in the physical body but still united in the golden age with her spouse Osiris.\nThen there is revealed to us the most beautiful flower of mankind, the highest human ideal, which is born out of the human body impregnated by the eternal world-Spirit. Hence how could it be other than the most sublime ideal, the highest peak of humanity, the Christ Himself — for He is the ideal of what they represent — Who would naturally enter the realm of the Mothers. In Goethe's Faust we meet with three Mothers seated on golden tripods — three Mothers. The human soul has passed through its evolution during the ages when it was not as yet in a human body. What we today have as human conception and human birth appears to us only as final emblem and symbol of the earlier form of the same thing. In the physical Mother we see the ultimate physical form of a spiritual Mother who is behind her; and we see the impregnation of this spiritual Mother taking place not in the way happening on earth today but out of the cosmos itself, just as in higher knowledge our souls are fructified from out the cosmos. We look back to ever more spiritual forms of fructification and reproduction.\nTherefore in the true sense of spiritual science we do not speak only of one Mother but of the Mothers , realizing that what we have today as the physical Mother is the last development of the soul-spiritual figure out of the spiritual realm. There are in fact images of Isis representing not one Mother but Mothers , three Mothers. In front we have a figure, Isis with the Horus child at her breast, resembling the oldest representations of the Madonna. But behind this figure in certain Egyptian representations we have another figure, an Isis, bearing on her head the two familiar cow horns and the wings of the hawk, offering the “crux ansata” (see Figure left) to the child. We see that what is physical, human, in the foremost figure is here more spiritualized. Behind there is yet a third figure, bearing a lion's head and representing the third stage of the human soul. This is how these three Isis figures appear, one behind the other. It is an actual fact that our human soul bears in it three natures — a will nature, found in the inmost depths of the being, a feeling nature and a wisdom nature. These are the three soul Mothers; we meet them in the three figures of the Egyptian Isis.\nThat behind the physical Mother we have the superphysical Mother, the spiritual Mother, the Isis of spiritual antiquity, with the hawk's wings, the cowhorns, with the globe of the world between them on the head of Isis — this is profound symbolism. Those who understand something of the ancient so-called theory of numbers have always said — and this corresponds with a deep truth — that the sacred number three represents the divine masculine in the cosmos. This sacred number three is pictorially expressed by the globe of the world and two cowhorns which are, if you like, a kind of image of the Madonna's crescent, but actually represents the fruitful working of the forces of nature.\nThe globe represents the creative activity of the cosmos. I should have to speak for hours were I to give a picture of the masculine element in the world. Thus behind the physical Isis stands her representative the superphysical Isis, who is not impregnated by one of her own kind but by the divine masculine living and weaving throughout the world. The process of fructification is still portrayed as being akin to the process of cognition. The consciousness that the process of cognition is a kind of fructification was still living in ancient times. You may read in the Bible: “Adam knew his wife and she brought forth ...” What today we receive as spiritual gives birth to the spiritual in the soul; it is something that represents a last remnant of the ancient mode of fructification. What comes to expression here shows us how today we are fructified by the spirit of the world receiving this spirit into the human soul as spirit of the world in order to acquire human knowledge, human feeling, human will.\nThis is what is represented in Isis. She is fructified by the divine male element, so that the head is fructified; and it is not material substance that is offered the child, as in the case of the physical Isis, but the “crux ansata” which is the sign of life. Whereas here from the physical Isis physical substance of life is offered, there is offered the spirit of life in its symbol. Behind the physical Mother of life there appears the spiritual Mother of life; behind her again the primal force of all life, represented with the life force, just as the will dwells behind everything in the still spiritual, far distant past. Here we have the three Mothers, and also the way in which out of the cosmos these three Mothers impart vitalizing force to the sun. Here we have what is not an artistic expression, nevertheless a symbolic expression of a profound cosmic truth. What lasted throughout the Egyptian evolution as the Isis symbol was received in more recent times and transformed in accordance with the progress made by humanity as a result of the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth; for in Christ Jesus we have the great prototype of everything that the human soul is destined to bring forth out of itself. The human soul in its fructification out of the spirit of the world is given tangible form in the Madonna. In the Madonna we meet, as it were, with Isis reborn and in an appropriate way enhanced, transfigured.\nWhat could be portrayed in pictures at the beginning of the lecture now comes before our souls as bound up with the evolution of humanity, streaming forth from hoary antiquity, artistically transfigured and given new form in the modern pictures presented throughout the world to the human souls thirsting for art. Here we see how in very truth art, as in Goethe's words, becomes the exponent of truth. We see how in reality when our gaze falls on the Madonna, when this gaze is permeated with deep feeling, the soul partakes in certain knowledge of the mighty riddle of the world. We realize that in such surrender our soul, seeking in itself for the eternal feminine, is yearning for the divine Father-Spirit born out of the cosmos, to Whom as the Sun we give birth in our own soul. What we are as man, and how as man we are related to the universe, this is what meets us in the pictures of the Madonna. That is why the pictures of the Madonna are such holy things, apart altogether from any religious stream, from any religious dogma. Hence we can feel it as something born out of the cosmos when the hazy masses of cloud form themselves into the heads of angels, and out of the whole the representative of the human soul comes into being. The Madonna also includes what can be born out of the human soul, the true higher man slumbering in every human being, all that is best in man, what as spirit flows and weaves through the world. Goethe too felt this when he gave final form to his Faust when he had led him on through the different stages up to higher knowledge and the higher life. This is why he makes Faust go to the Mothers and why the name “Mothers” sounds to Faust so awe-inspiring and so beautiful, instilling in him a feeling for the wisdom echoing down from ancient times. Thus Goethe felt that he must send Faust to the Mothers, that only there could Faust seek and find the eternal through which Euphorion can come into being. Because the human soul appeared to him to be represented by the Madonna Goethe gave expression to the riddle of the soul in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards.”\nWhatever modern times may have to say, this is the reason why Raphael in his wonderful picture of the Madonna, succeeded so well in leading us back to the realms to which the old figures of Isis belong. From what is spiritual, from what can no longer be expressed in a human figure because it would be too material, from that Isis whose force can be represented symbolically only by the lion's head, we descend to the human Isis who transmits her force to Horus through physical substance. Raphael unconsciously expressed this in his Sistine Madonna. But spiritual science will lead man consciously back to the spiritual realm out of which he has descended. Two lectures that I shall be giving here will furnish examples of how man has descended out of spiritual heights and will ascend again to this higher existence. Both lectures (5/1/1909 not translated. 5/6/1909, see Anthroposophical Quarterly , IV, 3.), that of 1st May and that of 6th May, 1909, will show us in a strictly scientific sense how these Madonna pictures and representations of Isis are indeed dearly and definitely artistic exponents of the very deepest secrets of Nature and of the spirit, and how in reality they are just a transcription of Plato's sublime words: “Once man was a spiritual being; he descended to earth only because he was robbed of his spiritual wings, and was enveloped in a physical body. He will struggle out of this physical body again and re-ascend to the world of spirit and soul.” This was proclaimed by the philosopher Plato. Pictures of the Madonna proclaim the same, for in the most beautiful sense they are what Goethe wished to express in the words: “Art is the worthiest exponent of the recognized mysteries of the world.” Man need not fear that art will become abstract or wholly allegorical if it is once again compelled, I repeat compelled, to recognize the higher spiritual realities; nor need he fear that it will become stiff and lifeless when it finds itself unable to continue using outer, crude physical models.\nBecause man has forgotten the spiritual, art has become bound up with the outer senses. But when men find the way back to spiritual heights and spiritual knowledge, they will then realize that true reality lies in the spiritual world, and that those who perceive this reality will create livingly, without being slavishly bound to physical models. Goethe will be understood only when it is more widely recognized that art and wisdom go hand in hand, when art again becomes a representation of the spiritual. Science and art will then again be one; in their union they will become religion, for the spiritual will work in this form as divinity once again in the heart of man, and give birth to what Goethe called the true, genuine piety. “A man who has both science and art also has religion,” says Goethe. “If anyone does not possess these two then let him have religion.”\nIn truth, whoever has knowledge of the spiritual secrets of the world and knows what speaks through Isis and Madonna sees in them something of primeval life, something much more living than all it is possible to express in any slavish imitation of a physical human model. A man of this kind whose gaze penetrates as through a veil through the living quality these Madonnas portray, and beholds the spiritual behind it, can, free from all dogma and prejudice, again feel piety in complete spiritual freedom. He will unite in his soul science or wisdom with art and give new birth to genuine free religious feeling — to genuine piety."
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-17",
    "title": "Ancient European Clairvoyance",
    "date": "1 May 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/Singles/19090501p02.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "First appeared in the Golden Blade 1977. 1 This lecture is the second of three public lectures (Berlin, April-May, 1906), which in 1955 were published in book form, in German, by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, under the title of Isis und Madonna: Alteuropäisches Hellsehen, die Europäischen Mysterien und Ihre Eingeweihten . A typescript translation of the first lecture is in the Library at Rudolf Steiner house, London; a translation of the third appeared in the quarterly, Anthroposophy, vol. iv, no. 3, 1929.\nTranslated by Dorothy Lenn\nIn the course of these winter lectures I have repeatedly said that there is such a thing as knowledge of supersensible worlds. We have discussed bow the human being can attain to such knowledge, and we have many times spoken of its fruits. I want now to give two lectures which will serve to illustrate what we mean by knowledge of the higher worlds.\nWith the help of two examples, out of many that might have been selected, I propose to show how clairvoyant knowledge developed in a certain region — the kind of clairvoyant knowledge that has been, or ought to have been, left behind by present-day humanity. Clairvoyant knowledge given by natural forces, by natural capacities, will be my subject to-day. Next time I will discuss, again by means of examples, how clairvoyant knowledge can be acquired through strict training, by specific methods. To-day we will speak of the knowledge that led our ancestors to a form of spiritual perception which has now been superseded; next time I will deal with the kind of clairvoyance which has existed in all ages, but which has to undergo a different training from epoch to epoch.\nI have already pointed out that Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of human consciousness. What we call our consciousness to-day, the consciousness whereby we recreate the outer world within us in thoughts, in mental images, in ideas, is only one stage of evolution. Another stage preceded it, and yet another stage will follow it. When anyone speaks to-day of the theory of evolution, he usually means the evolution of outer form, of the forms of material existence. Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of the soul, of the spirit, and therefore of consciousness. We can look back to an earlier form of consciousness which has been superseded by the present form, and we can look forward to a future form of consciousness which will develop only gradually. The earlier state of consciousness we may call subconsciousness, and the consciousness to which our present consciousness can be developed, by spiritual-scientific methods, we may call superconsciousness. Thus we can differentiate three consecutive stages — subconsciousness, consciousness, superconsciousness.\nIn a certain sense all consciousness to-day is a stage of development of consciousness in general, just as the forms of the higher animals are developments of the universal animal form. Present-day consciousness has evolved from a lower stage. It is surrounded by external objects, which it perceives through the senses — hearing, sight, taste and so on. From what was first perception it makes concepts, mental images, ideas. Thus an external world of objects which work upon us is mirrored in our consciousness.\nSubconsciousness was not like that. It was of a far more direct nature. We may call it a lower clairvoyant consciousness, because whoever possessed it did not approach objects with sense-organs and straightway seek to make concepts of them, but the concepts were there directly. Pictures arose and faded away. Let us suppose that the clairvoyant consciousness encountered an external object which was dangerous to it. To-day we see the object, and the mental image called forth by the sight of it brings about the consciousness of danger. It was not like that in the earlier clairvoyant consciousness. The external object was not perceived in clear outline, especially in the earliest times. Something like a dream-picture arose and revealed whether the object was sympathetic or unsympathetic. The fluctuating pictures in dreams to-day will serve to illustrate this for us. The dreams of a normal person to-day have no real connection with any outer world. But suppose something quite definite were to correspond to every picture which arose in us like a dream-picture, one picture occurring in case of dangers another in the presence of a useful object, then we could say that it was immaterial whether we were awake or dreaming, for we could direct our lives according to these pictures!\nOur present consciousness has developed out of such a dream-life, which allowed the inner nature of things, their inner soul-quality, to rise up before us. And this dream-consciousness has passed through manifold forms before reaching its present form. If we look back in history as it is revealed to us by Spiritual Science, we reach at last, in the far-distant past, a state of soul in which the external was not perceptible, but in which the surrounding world, possessed inwardly by the soul, was perceived by an old clairvoyant consciousness. But this consciousness had in consequence one attribute which, contrasted with the fundamental attribute of the soul to-day, must be designated as imperfect. It was not self-conscious; the soul could not say “I” to itself, could not distinguish itself properly from its environment. Only because external objects with sharp contours confront the soul can it distinguish itself from them. Thus man has had to purchase his self-consciousness by the surrender of his old clairvoyance. All evolution is an advance which at the same time involves the renunciation of certain advantages of the earlier stage. Now at each stage something from the earlier stage lingers on into later times, and in certain circumstances we can, from such legacies of the past, see the earlier conditions projected into the present where they rank as abnormalities.\nWe find traces of such atavisms even in the human body, as for example in the muscles round the ear, which in an earlier stage moved the ear. In animals these muscles still have a purpose; in human beings they still exist, but few men are able to move their ears voluntarily. At one time human beings had a form of body in which such muscles were needed. To-day they are just relics of the past — vestiges of an earlier stage of evolution.\nJust as we find certain organic survivals in these outer structures, so, too, we find remains of other early evolutionary conditions. Thus we see traces of the old clairvoyance projected right into our own time, but clouded and changed by our present stage of development, and hence abnormal. This throws light upon the old European clairvoyance, which differs in a certain way from the clairvoyance of the East. To-day I want to go into these differences.\nWhat are these survivals of the old clairvoyant state of mankind? We can distinguish two kinds. One of them speaks for itself and is a true legacy of the past. I am referring to the dream and to dream experiences. The other vestiges of the past are in quite a different category. They are very much coloured and altered by present-day development, whereas the dream has not been changed by man, but by advancing evolution. The other remnants of the past are vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight.\nLet us first take the dream. It is something left behind from the old picture-consciousness But into that ancient consciousness the nature of the object really penetrated, whereas the dream to-day, although it still shows certain characteristics of the old picture-consciousness, has lost its real value, its reality. Let us take an example. Someone dreams that he sees a tree-frog, snatches at it and catches it Then he wakes up and finds a corner of the bedcover in his band. The dream symbolised the external event. Had the man met the dream with objective consciousness, he would have seen that he had the bedcover in his hand. But this is how the dream symbolises. It can become very dramatic. For example, a student dreams that on leaving the lecture-room he is jostled by another student. It comes to a duel. The seconds are chosen, they go to the agreed place, the distance is measured, the pistols are loaded, the first shot is fired. But in that moment the student wakes up, and knocks over the chair by his bedside. There we have the same thing. If the student concerned had seen the event with his objective consciousness, had he been awake, he would have seen that the chair had been knocked over, or possibly it would not have been knocked over. Now, however, the dream gives a more or less symbolic expression to what happened.\nThere are all kinds of such dreams; they may even have some element of reality. But in typical cases we have to do with an arbitrary connection between what is pictured and the outer event. The dream itself shows that one is dealing with a picture; but it does not show any direct connection between the picture and the inner qualities of the outer world. In direct consciousness a man would not have been obliged to touch salt with his tongue in order to recognise it, but a quite definite dream-picture would have arisen before him, and there would have been one for vinegar, another for sugar, and yet another for a dangerous being, and so on. With every being in nature there went a specific picture.\nSomething of this survives in dream-consciousness. But because present-day man has contracted his whole being into self-consciousness, because he has cut himself off from the outer world, differentiated himself from it, his dream-pictures no longer have any connection with it. Through having made the normal transition from dream-consciousness to self-consciousness, he has lost connection with the outer world.\nIt is different as regards the other three survivals — vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight. We have often described the course of human evolution somewhat as follows. The human being, as he is to-day, consists of four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The ego is the last member to develop, and it is through the attainment of the ego that man has become a self-conscious being; he has thereby wrested his being from the life in his lower members. When the ego was not so far developed as it is to-day, when man still lived in his astral body, when the astral body was the bearer of his consciousness, this consciousness was pre-eminently a dream-consciousness. It was the astral body which caused these pictures to come and go. Hence it is easy to understand that man was then more closely united with his lower members. Thus it is as if man had become free in his astral body, as if he had disengaged himself from it and had thereby acquired his present objective consciousness.\nAs man was once submerged in his astral body, so in still earlier times he was submerged in his etheric and physical bodies. Then he had still lower forms of consciousness. Thus we have three states of subconsciousness below the present objective consciousness.\nImagine that a man is swimming below the surface of the sea. It is then possible for him to see what is in the sea. He sees what happens at the bottom of the sea, what swims and moves there, and so on. What he encounters there is quite different from what confronts him if he rises to the surface and looks up at the star-strewn heavens. Similarly, man has been lifted out of that stage of consciousness in which he was aware of what was conveyed to him by astral, etheric and physical bodies; he has risen to self-consciousness. In certain abnormal cases, however, he can revert to the sea of subconsciousness. In dreams this happens involuntarily. What he has won by rising out of this sea he can take back again into it.\nImagine a man plunging back into this sea and able to compare all that he perceives below with what he has learnt above. That is what it is like to-day. The man takes with him what he has experienced here above. It is not as it is with a diver who takes nothing but his memory with him, who can make comparisons only with the help of his memory. Whoever plunges into the sea of subconsciousness after having become a modern man colours everything below with his experiences above. What has been experienced above is carried as a sheath into the subconscious, and man receives no clear picture of that world, but a picture clouded by the world above.\nWhen a man plunges into his astral body, he transplants himself artificially into the sphere occupied by his consciousness when he himself still lived in his astral body. This is how what to-day we call visions come about. Were man to descend into his astral body without knowing anything of the modern world, he would really experience the inwardness of objects; they would appear to him in their true guise. To-day, however, they appear to him as a distorted reflection of what can be experienced only in the upper world of consciousness. Therein lies both the truth and the deceptiveness of visions. Anyone who descends into the world of vision may always be sure that the cause of what he sees lies in the soul-environment; but it is also certain that the vision confronting him will be distorted, that it will not show him things in their true guise, but will imitate what occurs in the world above. Hence a man’s visions usually indicate what the men of his own day are experiencing. This can be checked in full detail, from decade to decade.\nLet us suppose that a man plunged into that world at a time when there were no telegrams and no telephone. Then he would have seen no telegrams and no telephone in the world below, whereas in our own day the incidence of telegrams and telephones in visions becomes more and more frequent. That, too, is why the pious Catholic, who in his objective consciousness has so often seen the figure of the Madonna, takes this figure with him, and she appears to him down there too. It is not an expression of the reality, but something which the person has taken down with him, and in which he clothes the reality. In such a case he has carried down into the world below what he has experienced in the world above. Thus when a man returns in vision into the world from which he has emerged, he gives an abnormal colouring to what he experiences.\nIf he plunges back again into the etheric body, he experiences what we may call premonition. But this is even more dangerous, because his state of consciousness has gone still further back. There man becomes involved in all the tangled threads of existence out of which he had raised himself into ego-consciousness; but in that case, too, he carries below all that he has acquired above. He is unable to see the threads in their true form.\nJust think how little of what is all around man comes within his range. The thoughts which he makes (about cause and effect for example) are limited to a small section of the world. But the whole world in its entire circumference hangs together, and there are other relationships involved. Man is, as it were, standing upon an island of existence, and the island is all he sees. But this island is related to the whole cosmos. In his etheric body man is much more closely connected with the cosmos than he is in his present consciousness. If he were able to receive in its purity what his ether body tells him, he would see future events, because down in his etheric body things converge. He would see that an event, which might not emerge into reality for perhaps ten years, was already there in germ. But man takes down with him his little intellect, his narrow little mind soul. Hence what emerges as premonition is falsified; that is why so little reliance can usually be placed upon premonitions, just as generally there is no objective truth in visions which occur by way of nature.\nWhen man plunges into his physical body, premonition can pass over into penetration of space. Whereas in premonition he sees other times, in deuteroscopy he can see what happens in the far distance, beyond the range of the physical eye. These pictures are like a Fata Morgana. Abnormal phenomena such as those reported by Swedenborg come into this category. 2 See also the following lectures by Dr. Steiner: Swedenborg's Power of Vision (Dornach, 12/9/15), printed in the Goetheanum English News-Sheet 1939; Die Geschichte des Spiritismus (Berlin. 30/5/04), published in English as the first of two lectures in the booklet, The History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism (Anthroposophic Press, 1943); and Menschlich und Menschheitliche Entwicklungwahrheiten (Cycle 46, Berlin, 1917: not translated). But here the deceptions are even greater, and nothing ought to be accepted which has not been tested by a trained, disciplined seer. Such conditions, which to-day are morbid, are survivals of an ancient clairvoyance which was once thoroughly healthy, was once something which placed the man in a relationship of complete understanding with his environment.\nIn the evolution of European peoples, in particular, we find everywhere a picture-consciousness of varying antiquity which saw the world in its inner, soul-spiritual nature. But the ego-consciousness of these peoples was still quite undeveloped. Have we anything left of what was seen and related by these people of olden times, who had not yet got the mature ego-consciousness, who had a transitional consciousness between the old picture-consciousness and the objective consciousness? We have indeed a beautiful and precious survival of it in myths and sagas, in the whole range of mythology. The content of mythology is so often described to-day as folk-poetry. Clouds will be described as flocks of sheep, and thunder and lightning as something else. There is nothing more arbitrary than such interpretations. Sagas, myths and fairy tales, too, tell us about what we experienced in the subconscious. All sagas and myths were experienced, not composed — experienced not in our present-day consciousness, but in the ancient, clairvoyant state.\nWe can penetrate deeply into this consciousness and into the origin of myths and sagas if we turn to an important passage of the Scriptures. You will remember the significant verse in the Old Testament which reads. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. II, 7). A certain formation of the breathing process is here associated with human evolution. We shall see later that this is a reference to the fact that man owes his present-day ego-consciousness, his capacity for living with and in his blood, to the peculiar structure of the breathing process which he has acquired in course of time and still has to-day. Only through having learnt to breathe as an upright being did man raise himself above the picture-consciousness. Animals still have picture-consciousness to-day, either directly or indirectly, because their lungs have not the upright position. It has quite rightly been observed that the dog is much more intelligent than the parrot, and yet it is only the parrot which has learnt to speak. Much depends on the direction in which an organ is placed. The parrot has a larynx in the vertical position, and that is why it learns to speak. It is because of the special configuration of his organs that man has been able to advance to his present objective consciousness.\nIf we have understood the words of the Bible just quoted we shall say: “Man has been so formed in conformity with the laws of the cosmos that his present breathing process has developed.” Those who understood this process from its spiritual aspect, who knew that a spiritual element lives in all things, said to themselves: “The spiritual element of the air has to penetrate us in the way that this process makes possible; then the free ego-consciousness will evolve.” When this process takes place in us in an irregular way, when the spirits of the air are unable to work into our blood in a way which corresponds to our present state of consciousness, then consciousness is forced back into an earlier stage. That is why the ancient European experienced every irregularity of the breathing process as a suppression of consciousness and an inner experience.\nThe physical expression of irregular breathing is the nightmare ( Alpdruck ). The word comes from Alb or Elf , so that it signifies the spiritual which enters into the human being even though it cannot unfold itself fully. When the breathing process becomes irregular, when the ego has to descend into a lower kingdom, the host of lower spirits, which can make an appearance in the astral realm, have access to man. And though you may say this is a kind of illness, that is not the point; the important thing is what the conditions bring about. From our higher standpoint to-day, the condition must of course be called unhealthy.\nAlthough to-day it is a reversion to an earlier condition, it was once a transitional state between the normal and the abnormal. Our present-day breathing has arisen from a breathing process which is found as a survival in the nightmare; the nightmare is the last vestige of it. At one time man needed less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. When that was the normal condition, when man was nearer the state of the plant, he had a different form of consciousness, he was plunged into the ancient clairvoyant consciousness. Then he emerged from this condition, and what was formerly healthy became unhealthy, and during the transition period, when he oscillated between the one form of consciousness and the other, the ancient European experienced all that we find in the elves and sprites, which came to his consciousness before he had acquired consciousness of the self. Thus we look back by way of nature into conditions which were once normal; the nightmare represents a survival of the picture-consciousness which created myths and sagas.\nBut the change in the breathing has involved many other changes. The seeing of external objects has come about. Picture-consciousness did not involve seeing external contours, seeing the outer surface of things. Then came the time when pictures gradually vanished and were replaced by the world of external objects. And once again there was an intermediate stage when man had already developed sight, but when his external sight might in abnormal circumstances withdraw and he might revert to a state of clairvoyance.\nThere is a popular expression in German, an expression of ancient origin, for looking at something without seeing it. It is Spannung , Staunen , Spahnen , and the last word has the same derivation as the German word Gespenst (ghost), so that here you have the ghost before you, so to say; you have before you something which is seen by means of inner, astral forces. To-day that is abnormal. In the transitional period, whenever it occurred, the man was admonished to say to himself, “But I will see, I do not wish to be stared at, I wish to see.” Thus what he saw in this way seemed to him to be something which he had to overcome. All the stories about blinding whatever stares at one, so that it can no longer stare, derive from this. In all these stories, from the story of the blinding of the giant Polyphemus right down to the wonderful story in which Dietrich of Berne overcomes the giant Grim, we have this stage of consciousness. The very strangeness of the phenomenon, however, could have an attraction for the soul. Hence there were beings, beings who belonged to the inwardness of things, who could have a seductive influence on men, who could lead them astray.\nThe key word in German for this enticement is Lur or Lore . And wherever you meet this word, you have the ghost in its “alluring” form. If men were specially liable to meet it at a special place, they said that this place was its home. The word Lei is connected with this, hence the Lorelei rocks. It is there that the alluring form is to be found which withdraws into the Lei , as into its native country. We can find this word Lei in various associations with the word Lure. Thus we have the subconscious experience of seeing, with its Lore or Lure , which emerges as the specific seeing of external objects develops. The Alpe , or elves, have to do with the fact that man retains his ego-consciousness within him.\nWe have yet another survival, still to be found in certain Slav regions. It is the saga of the Midday Woman. 3 See the fourth, lecture in the cycle, The inner Nature of Man between Death and Rebirth (Vienna, 1914), published by Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928; out of print. When men go out into the fields, and, instead of returning home at mid-day, remain there, the Midday Woman appears to them, clothed in white. She questions them until the clock strikes. If they are able to answer all the time, she says, “Good, you have redeemed me.”\nHere once again an ancient clairvoyant experience is expressed. Just as we breathe in with the air the spirit of the ego, so we have gathered together our entire being, our entire microcosm, out of the macrocosm. Everything within us has come from without. Our inner intelligence is a product of the outer intelligence. There is a transitional period between the time when men saw the spiritual beings who directed the structure of the world, the beings who directed the formation of the flowers and of the crystals, and the time when the outer intelligence was formed. This intelligence has taken possession of man; he has become conscious of it. The midday sun, the midday demon, obliterates the ego-consciousness through a partial, undeveloped sunstroke. Then what has entered into man to make him intelligent, the external cause of his intelligence, appears before the man, and in such a way that he has to exercise his intelligence. It is through his having to make a mental effort that the phenomenon occurs. The man is, so to say, confronted objectively by what the cosmos has made of him. He must overcome it. If he can exercise his intelligence so as to be able to answer the Midday Woman until the clock strikes, he can unite himself again with his ego.\nWe meet the best expression of this in ancient Greece and sculpturally in ancient Egypt, in the great questioner, the Sphinx. The Sphinx is nothing but the highest expression of the Midday Woman. It asks the ultimate question, the question to which the answer is “man.” Whoever is able to solve the riddle redeems the Sphinx. It falls into the abyss — that is, it unites with human nature.\nMan has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, which has brought with it self-consciousness, as a victory over the ancient picture-consciousness. In earlier times, although he was unable to see into himself, did not find a self within him, yet when he looked outside himself he saw spiritual beings everywhere — in the waves, in the air, in the trees — all was indwelt by spiritual beings. How could he himself not be so indwelt also? When he felt, “With the air I breathe in. I receive the actual imprint of the ego,” how could he do otherwise than see in the air the embodiment of the god to whom he owed his objective consciousness? When he breathed in the air, he knew, “The air moves my ego.” When the wind blustered without in the stormy winter nights he knew that Wotan was roaming about, the same Wotan who was breathed in by him. We could go through all the myths and sagas in this way. We should doubtless find that literary composition has brought about modifications, but they can all be traced back to the old clairvoyant consciousness.\nEuropean clairvoyance, however, differs essentially from that of the East; for every people has a special mission, a special task to fulfil in the course of evolution. Whereas in the time when the Oriental was going through the transition from the old clairvoyance to the formation of the ego, he possessed only a mere rudiment of the ego, so that it very easily surrendered itself to the higher beings, the consciousness of personality developed early in European life. It was a particular characteristic of the European peoples that during the transition period the ego made tremendous inroads. The human being was able to see into the inwardness of things, but he asserted his ego very strongly, felt himself from the outset as a strong opponent of the beings who were trying to entangle him in the threads of the spiritual world around him. Therefore the beings who are man’s helpers are those who work towards the acquisition of self-consciousness, towards the liberation of the ego.\nThe victory over the astral Spirits, which is the aim of those Spirits who bestow personal self-consciousness, plays a great part in Germanic literature, in European literature. The Alp-spirit, who ensnares man, is present everywhere for European consciousness in the Midgard Snake, or in the forms of the giants. Everywhere we see how the gods ally themselves with men in the formation of personal self-consciousness. We see how the god Wotan, who lives in the breathing, becomes man’s ally in his fight against all the lower spirits; he stands beside man in his struggle to overcome the lower consciousness. It is Donar or Thor, with his hammer, who conquers the giants and the Midgard Snake; he it is who expresses man’s emergence into reality.\nThis conquest over the astral powers, who prevent men from becoming free, played a great part in preparing the way for Christianity. There was something more impersonal in the Oriental, whereas the warm-hearted European had to experience something unknown to less advanced Eastern peoples. In Europe the urge to emerge from subconsciousness was the dominant motive. Therefore the European felt intensely: “I with my ego have emerged from the spiritual world into the physical-sensible world, in primeval times my soul was in the spiritual world, the world of light. What I have acquired here has made me blind to the old astral world.” This found its strongest expression where the victory over the astral world was most strongly felt. The ancient European consciousness felt Baldur to be the leader of souls in so far as they belong to the land of their birth, to the astral world of light. The leader of the sense-world is Hodur, who slays Baldur. 4 See the lectures, The Balder Myth and the Good Friday Mystery (Dornach, 2-3/4/15); published in Festivals and the Seasons (Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928: out of print).\nThus tragically the ancient Europeans experienced the fading out of the clairvoyant soul, the provisional death of the soul. But they experienced it as a transition; they felt that something new had to follow. Hence the “Twilight of the Gods,” the downfall of the spiritual world. And because in ancient times personal consciousness was strongly marked in the European peoples, the appearance of the personal God, Christ Jesus, could be most deeply understood by the Europeans. The germ for the reception of the personal God was laid down long beforehand.\nWe have seen how in Europe the present-day consciousness has developed out of the earlier one. It was only a small section of the spiritual world that people could see in this way. But the initiates had their consciousness in still higher worlds. We shall show how the knowledge of the initiates was raised above the clairvoyant consciousness of the masses, what impression the appearance of the Christ made on the Mysteries, and how the Mysteries have evolved right up to the present day. What men saw at lower levels in the past they will see in the future at a higher level; for they will see into the spiritual world in full consciousness.\nMan has indeed passed through this process. While still leading a subconscious form of existence, he descended in order to acquire self-consciousness. And with his self-consciousness he will rise again. His earlier clairvoyance was not his own, but a clairvoyance which other beings had instilled into him. What he will acquire for himself will be a free self-conscious possession, best described by a saying of Christ-Jesus. On the occasion (John VIII, 32) when the Christ was emphasising the relationship between truth and freedom, he spoke of the far-distant future in these terms: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”"
  },
  {
    "id": "GA057-18",
    "title": "The European Mysteries and Their Initiates",
    "date": "6 May 1909",
    "city": "Berlin",
    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA057/English/Singles/19090506p01.html",
    "book_title": "",
    "content": "From ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review — Michaelmas 1929 No 3 Vol. 4. From GA# 57.\nIn ancient times a kind of natural clairvoyance was a common heritage of the European peoples. Indeed man's consciousness as it is to-day has evolved from that earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness. With these ancient clairvoyant faculties, man was able to perceive certain connections of his life, and what he so perceived was then expressed in the legends and myths which speak of goblins, elfin-beings, dwarfs and the like. Now these legends and myths are very different in character. They were based on what man was able to see with his clairvoyant faculties, but when we study them we find on the one hand certain resemblances and on the other outstanding differences, simply because the clairvoyant powers of men were by no means the same. There is a much greater similarity in the more important mythological figures — the figures of Gods and Heroes in the sagas. These sagas, too, were the outcome of clairvoyance, but in a different sense. The great mythological figures lead us back to the experiences of those who were Initiates in the ancient Mysteries. It is not easy for our present consciousness to form a true conception of these ancient Mysteries and their Initiates, for the nature of our education and the knowledge resulting therefrom does not conduce to an understanding of the nature of Initiation — far from it! If we were to speak of the nature of the Mysteries and their Initiates in the language of current thought, we should say that the Mysteries are schools for the training of those faculties which enable the soul of man to have actual vision of the spiritual worlds. They are schools, where in a methodical and systematic way, man's soul is so guided and trained that he can finally perceive the higher worlds with spiritual eyes and ears. Although modern scholarship knows little of the Mysteries, they are nevertheless still in existence to-day and are the means whereby man can be led consciously to the spiritual worlds. — And the whole content of Spiritual Science, everything that is communicated in Spiritual Science, is, in its essence, Mystery-wisdom.\nThe man who so trains his soul that he can perceive in higher worlds, is an Initiate. Through all the ages there have been centres for developing the faculty of fully conscious clairvoyance and the aim of the present lecture is to give a cursory survey of the European Mysteries.\nFor this purpose we must go back to ancient pre-Christian times and try to visualise what went on in the occult schools of Initiation and how they influenced civilisation and culture in general. You have often heard how man to-day can be led to the Initiates, how his thinking, feeling and willing can be so trained that he can set out on the path leading to the “Mothers.” This is the path which the pupils of all the Mysteries have had to tread in quest of fully conscious clairvoyance.\nThere were Mysteries of great significance, deeply influencing ancient European civilisation, in various regions of France, Germany and Britain. In all these regions the Mysteries were of a definite and unique kind, and were instituted on the basis of knowledge such as I indicated in my lecture “Isis and Madonna,” namely, that man has a spiritual origin, that his home was once in spiritual worlds whence his spirit and soul have come forth. When a man penetrates more deeply into his soul and rises to a level higher than that of ordinary sense-perception, he still feels, even to-day, that there is within him something that is a last remnant of his being as it was in the spiritual world. To-day, this last remnant — the human soul — is enclosed within the physical body, which in its turn is a densification of the primordial spiritual being. When he has conscious realisation of the spirit and soul within him, man says: ‘Now I know what I once was in my whole being; now I know that I was born out of the womb of worlds, out of the great universe.’ To-day the universe is revealed to human intelligence in everything that is spread out before the senses. But behind all that can be perceived by the senses and grasped by the intellect there is the spiritual universe — the Primordial Father and Mother from whom the soul is born. The body too is born from them but at first in spiritual form. This true form of man is now hidden.\nIt was known in the ancient European Mysteries that the true being of man is hidden and must be sought in its concealment. The saying went: “Isis is seeking for the Being from whom she proceeded.” To be initiated was to live through all those processes which enable the soul of man once again to behold its true origin and to unfold the faculty which will unite it again with its spiritual origin. Whether in the depths of the sacred oak-groves, or in places adapted for the Mysteries, it was always the same. — The candidate was subjected to certain processes whereby he might be united with his spiritual origin.\nAll that lies hidden behind the sense-world, as the sun behind the clouds, the hidden spirit, was known in these Mysteries by the name of “Hu.” “Ceridwen” was the seeking soul. And all the rites of Initiation were a means of revealing to the pupil that death is only one of the many processes in life. Death changes nothing at all in the innermost kernel of man's being. — In the Druidic Mysteries ( Druid denotes an Initiate of the third degree), the neophyte was put into a condition resembling death; his senses could not function as organs of perception. A man whose only instrument of perception is the physical body or the physical brain has no consciousness in a condition where his senses cease to function. But in Initiation, the senses — feeling, hearing and so on — cease to function, and yet the neophyte is able to experience and observe. The principle which observes was called “Ceridwen” — the soul. And that which comes to meet the soul, as light and sound come to our outer eyes and ears, was called “Hu” — the spiritual world. The Initiate experienced the union between Ceridwen and Hu. Such experiences are described in the myths. When we are told to-day that the ancients paid homage to a God Hu and a Goddess Ceridwen, this is simply another way of describing Initiation. The true myths are always concerned with Initiation. It is empty chatter to say that these myths have an astronomical meaning, that Ceridwen is the moon and Hu the sun, and so on. These myths originated because their creators were conscious of an inner union between the aspiring soul and the spirit of the sun, not the physical sun. The Mysteries of Hu and Ceridwen, then, were those into which men were initiated in the regions of which we are speaking.\nMore to the North, in Scandinavia and Northern Russia, we find the Trottic Mysteries, founded by the Initiate who is known as Sieg, or Siegfried: Sikke. All the Siegfried myths are to be traced back to this being. These Northern Mysteries are characterised by a principle that is really common to all the Mysteries, but which here for the first time is clearly emphasised. Let me explain this principle by means of a comparison. — Think of the human being as he stands before us in life, with his head, hands, feet and other members. And now, if we imagine him without one of these members, he is no longer a whole man. Think of the most important organs, the heart, the stomach and others. Each one of these organs contributes to human life and serves its needs. The fact that these organs work together makes it possible for a soul to live and develop in the body of man. The soul lives in a physical body which is a unit composed of many members. This suggests that wherever a dwelling place has to be found for a human soul, or for a higher being, single members must be working together, each one of them carrying out their particular functions. And so even in the ancient Northern Mysteries it was realised that something can be accomplished if a number of men are gathered together and each individual is allotted a special and definite task. One man, for instance, may resolve to develop principally the thinking faculty, another the power of feeling, a third the power of will. Sub-divisions are of course also possible.\nThe Northern Mysteries were based upon the idea that when a number of men, each of whom has his particular task, are gathered together into a whole, an invisible influence will work in them, just as the soul works in a human body. When men come together in this way, each playing his own part, they form a kind of higher organism or body, and thus make it possible for a higher spiritual being to dwell among them. Thus Sieg gathered together a circle of twelve men, each of whom set out to develop the powers of his soul in a particular direction. And then, when they gathered together in their holy sanctuaries, they knew that a higher spiritual being was living among them as the soul lives in a human body, that their souls were members of a higher body. This was the sense in which the “Thirteenth” lived and moved among the Twelve who knew: We are twelve and the Thirteenth lives among us. Or else they chose out a Thirteenth whose function was then, within the circle of the Twelve, to be the connecting link enabling the higher influence to descend. And so the Thirteenth was recognised to be the representative of the Godhead in the sanctuaries of Initiation.\nEverything was related to the sacred number three, and for this reason the one who united in himself all the knowledge was known as the representative of the ‘holy Three’ and around him were the twelve, each one with his definite functions, like members of an organism.\nAnd so it was realised that when twelve men united together to develop a power which enabled a higher being to dwell among them, they were rising out of the physical into the spiritual world, rising to their God. They regarded themselves as the twelve attributes, the twelve qualities of the God. This was all reflected in the figures of the twelve Germanic Gods in the Northern sagas. He who desired to become a member of this noble circle was told that he must seek Baldur — in other words, he must seek Initiation. And who is Baldur? Baldur is the Spiritual in man, the principle for which the soul is seeking and which is found in Initiation. Who slew Baldur? Those who killed out the clairvoyant faculties in man, who organised his physical nature, who endowed him with material sight and who could prematurely misuse the forces of physical matter — Loki, the power of Fire, and Hodur the Blind, representing the principle in man's being that is incapable of beholding the spiritual world. This is only a way of describing processes of Initiation. Material existence has made man blind; through Initiation he again finds the path leading to the higher worlds. The trained clairvoyance of the old Initiates was a higher faculty than the innate, natural clairvoyance possessed by all human beings in those days.\nThe Druidic and Trottic Mysteries were the inspiring source of European civilisation and culture in pre-Christian times. Now the essential feature of European culture, namely, the development of a consciousness of personality , is likewise a danger — a danger likely to be far greater here than in other regions of the earth. Consciousness of personality is a keynote of all European culture. It was present in all Germanic lands, in a much stronger form than in the East where men loved to surrender themselves to Brahman. But this consciousness of personality brought with it the danger that those who were initiated could readily misuse what they learnt in Initiation and turn it into caricature. Initiation gives man control of spiritual forces and those who have learnt to use them can also misuse them. So it came about that the Mysteries of ancient Europe began to degenerate, the unripeness of the Initiates began to give rise to all kinds of atrocities and in many regions they were dreaded by the people. Much that we hear of the Mysteries to-day, although not everything, refers to the period of their decline. In this age we need not, after all, be so very astonished that the Mysteries are so often misunderstood. For if Spiritual Science does not help a man to realise what went on in the Mysteries and he has to rely merely on the tittle-tattle of history written down much later on, his ideas on the subject will be utterly barren. Just think what happens when people are content to draw their information about Spiritual Science from what the outside world has to say about it. They get a fine picture! And if what is being said about Spiritual Science to-day were to live on, it would do far more harm than the fragmentary knowledge of the Mysteries has done.\nIt would be an attractive study to trace back many things in the sagas and legends of Europe to the Mysteries. We should find a great deal in the Niebelung and Siegfried legends that points back to the ancient Mysteries. But it is difficult to discriminate in such study. The only thing that can reveal whether a certain feature in the legends is simply an improvisation of fancy or leads back to the Mysteries, is actual knowledge and the capacity to trace it back to its real source.\nIn all these Mysteries, no matter where we look, we find an element of tragedy. Let me put it thus: The Initiate in the ancient Druidic or Trottic Mysteries might indeed be united with Hu or Baldur, but there was something lacking in the spiritual world into which he entered. In more popular parlance, the Initiates would have said: ‘Our Gods are mortal, are doomed to downfall.’ — Hence the myth which tells of the Twilight of the Gods. But then came the news of the great Christ Impulse which could work more strongly in Europe than anywhere else — the news that a sublime Spirit, the Christ, had lived in an earthly body among men. And the Initiates realised that all that had hitherto been experienced in the depths of the Mysteries had become historic fact in the Christ Event. In the ancient Mysteries the Initiate had not fully vanquished death. — But now he learnt of the Mystery of Golgotha. This historic Mystery was received with understanding in the European Mysteries — a much deeper understanding than elsewhere. The attitude of the Initiates may be described somewhat as follows: In our Initiation we rose to a divine-spiritual world, yet it was a world pervaded with the forces of mortality. But he who steeps himself with all that is bound up with the mighty impulse brought by the Christ-Being, he who can link himself with Christ, will realise that just as the sun irradiates and quickens the life of the plants, so the Christ Impulse can flow into the human soul and endow the soul with knowledge of eternity and immortality, with knowledge of victory over death. The soul is quickened by a true understanding of Christ. — And it was also known to the Initiates that besides such outer teaching as can be given, there is an inner knowledge, a quest of the soul (Ceridwen) not only for a Hu or a Baldur but for another ‘Baldur,’ for One Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates knew that the soul who experienced this acquired a bigger kind of clairvoyance than was attained through Initiation into the ancient Mysteries.\nHere in Europe there was a deep understanding of these things. I have often told you of the great stimulus given to the evolution of man by the Christ Impulse. To understand this, let us think once more of ancient Hebrew consciousness. The ancient Hebrew felt himself one with his “Fathers.” He said to himself: ‘My Ego is enclosed between birth and death, but my blood streams into me from my Father Abraham. The blood in my veins is the expression of my Ego, of my individuality; it is the blood-stream which flows through the generations and is the expression of my God.’ — And so the ancient Hebrew felt himself part of one great whole, secure in the blood-stream which passes down through the generations. Christ says: “Before Abraham was, I AM;” and “I and the Father are One.” The Ego of man is linked to a spiritual world by threads which everyone may discover in his own individuality. The Mystery of Golgotha brought to man a realisation of the Ego that is grounded upon itself, albeit the ties of blood are not ignored — the Ego that understands the physical world. Therefore, in the blood which flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, men saw the expression of the human Ego-principle, and the saying went: “He who quickens this blood within himself will become a true seer.” But the world was not ripe enough to understand the true essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. It was not ripe in the centuries immediately following the Coming of Christ, nor is it to-day. Paul had a vision of the Living Christ in the spiritual world, but, after all, who understands those profound Epistles of one who was an Initiate or speaks with any truth of Paul's disciple, Dionysos the Areopagite?\nIn the Mysteries of Wales and Britain the teachings of Dionysos were received and the influence of the Christ Mystery so permeated the Druidic and Trottic Mysteries that the Initiates realised in full clarity of consciousness that He whom they had sought as Hu and Baldur, had come to earth as Christ. But they said among themselves that mankind in general was not ripe to understand the mystery of the blood flowing from the Redeemer's wounds, that men were not fit to receive into themselves the blood that runs through all creation.\nIt was only in small circles of Initiates that this sacred Christ Mystery was preserved. A man who was initiated into this Mystery experienced the overcoming of the Ego that functions in the world of sense. This is how he experienced it. — He asked himself: ‘What has been the manner of my life hitherto? In my quest for truth, I have turned to the things of the outer world. The Initiates of the Christ-Mystery, however, demand that I shall not wait until outer things tell me what is true but that in my soul , without being stimulated by the outer world, I shall seek the invisible.’ — This quest of the soul for the highest was called by the outer world in later times: The secret of the Holy Grail . And the Parsifal or Grail legend is simply a form of the Christ Mystery. The Grail is the holy Cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood as it flowed on Golgotha. The Cup was then taken to a holy place and guarded. So long as a man does not ask about the invisible, his lot is that of Parsifal. Only when he asks, does he become an Initiate of the Christ Mystery.\nWolfram von Eschenbach speaks in his poem of the three stages through which the soul of man passes. The first of these is the stage of outer, material perception. The soul is caught up in matter and allows matter to say what is truth. This is the “stupor” (Dumpfheit) of the soul, as Wolfram van Eschenbach expresses it. And then the soul begins to recognise that the outer world offers only illusion. When the soul perceives that the results of science are not answers but only questions, there comes the stage of “doubt” (Zwifel), according to Wolfram von Eschenbach. But then the soul rises to “blessedness” (Saelde, Seligkeit) — to life in the spiritual worlds. — These are the three stages.\nThe Mysteries which were illuminated by the Christ Impulse have one quite definite feature in common whereby they are raised to a higher level than that of the more ancient Mysteries. Initiation always means that a man attains to a higher kind of sight and that his soul undergoes a higher development. Before he sets out on this path, three faculties live within his soul: thinking, feeling and willing. He has these three soul-powers within him. In ordinary life in the modern world, these three soul-powers are intimately bound together. The Ego of man is interwoven with thinking feeling and willing because before he attains Initiation he has not worked with the powers of the Ego at the development of his higher members. The first step is to purify the feelings, impulses and instincts in the astral body. Out of the purified astral body there rises the “Spirit-Self” or “Manas.” Then man begins to permeate every thought with a definite element of feeling so that each thought may be said to have something ‘cold’ or ‘warm’ about it. — He is transforming his “ether-body” or “life-body.” Out of the transformed ether-body (it is a transformation of feeling), arises “Budhi” or “Life-Spirit.” And finally, he transforms his willing and therewith the physical body itself, into “Atma” or “Spirit-Man.” Thus by transforming his thinking, feeling and willing, man changes his astral body into Spirit-Self or Manas, his ether-body into Life-Spirit or Budhi and finally his physical body into Spirit-Man or Atma. This transformation is the result of the Initiates systematic work upon his soul, whereby he rises to the spiritual worlds. But something very definite happens when the path to Initiation is trodden in full earnest and not light-heartedly. In true Initiation it is as if a man's organisation were divided into three parts, and the Ego reigns as king over the three. Whereas in ordinary circumstances the spheres of thinking, feeling and willing are not clearly separated, when a man sets out on the path of higher development thoughts begin to arise in him which are not immediately tinged with feeling but are permeated with the element of sympathy or antipathy according to the free choice of the Ego. Feeling does not immediately attach itself to a thought, but the man divides, as it were, into three: he is a man of feeling, a man of thinking, a man of will, and the Ego, as king, rules over the three. At a definite stage of Initiation he becomes, in this sense, three men. He feels that by way of his astral body he experiences all those thoughts which are related to the spiritual world; through his ether-body he experiences everything that pervades the spiritual world as the element of feeling; through his physical body he experiences all the will-impulses which flow through the spiritual world. And he realises himself as king within the sacred Three. A man who is not able or ripe enough to bear this separation of his being, will not attain the fruits of Initiation. The sufferings that crowd upon him in his immature state will keep him back. A man who approaches the Holy Grail but is not worthy, will suffer as Amfortas suffered. He can only be redeemed by one who brings the forces of good. — He is freed from his sufferings by Parsifal.\nAnd now let us return once more to what Initiation brings in its train. The seeking soul finds the spiritual world; the soul finds the Holy Grail which has now become the symbol of the spiritual world. Individual Initiates have experienced what is here described. They have gone the way of Parsifal, have become as kings looking down on the three bodies. The Initiate says to himself: ‘I am king over my purified astral body which can only be purified when I strive to emulate Christ .’ He must not hold to any outer link, to anything in the external world, but unite himself in the innermost depths of his soul with the Christ Principle. Everything that binds him with the world of sense must fall away in that supreme moment. Lohengrin is the representative of an Initiate. It is not permitted to ask his name or rank, in other words, what connects him with the world of sense. He who has neither name nor rank, is called a “homeless” man. Such a man is permeated through and through with the Christ Principle. He too looks down on the ether-body which has become Life-Spirit, as upon something that is now separate from the astral body. By this ether-body he is borne upwards to the higher worlds, where the laws of space and time do not hold sway. The symbol of this ether-body and its organs, is the Swan who bears Lohengrin over the sea in a boat (the physical body), over the material world. The physical body is felt to be an instrument.\nThe soul on earth who experiences a new impulse through Initiation is symbolised in the figure of Elsa von Brabant. This shows us the sense in which the Lohengrin legend — which has many other meanings as well — is a portrayal of Initiation in the Mysteries associated with the Holy Grail. Thus in the eleventh to the thirteenth century, these secrets of the Holy Grail were taught in connection with the Christ Mystery. The Knights of the Grail were the later Initiates. They were confronted in the world with an exoteric Christianity, whereas esoteric Christianity was cultivated in the Mysteries. And in the Mysteries, men sought to find that relation to Christianity whereby, through the outer Christ in the soul, the inner Christ, Who is symbolised by the Dove, was awakened to life.\nThe whole development of the European Mysteries is expressed in yet another cycle of legends and sagas, but it is difficult to speak of them now. We must wait for another occasion. To-day we will consider how this knowledge found its way into the outer world and made its appearance in a remarkable body of legends. Comparatively little notice has been taken of a legend which was given poetic form by Conrad Fleck in 1230. It is one of the legends of Provence and deals with the Initiation of the Knights of the Grail or the Templars. It speaks of an ancient pair, “Flor” and “Blancheflor.” In modern parlance: the flower with red petals (the rose) and the flower with white petals (the lily). In earlier times it was known that a great many mysteries were contained in this legend, of which it is only possible to-day to speak briefly. It was said: Flor and Blancheflor are souls incarnated in human beings who have lived on earth. According to the legend, these two were the grandparents of Charles the Great. But those who studied the legend more deeply, saw in Charles the Great the figure who, in a certain sense, united esoteric and exoteric Christianity. This is expressed in the coronation of the Emperor. But in the grandparents of Charles the Great, Flor and Blancheflor, lived the rose and the lily — typifying souls who were to preserve in its purity the esoteric Christianity which had been taught by Dionysos the Areopagite and others. The rose — Flor or Flos — symbolised the human soul who has received the impulse of the Ego, of personality, who lets the Spiritual work out of his individuality, who has brought the Ego-force down into the red blood. But the lily was the symbol of the soul who can only remain spiritual when the Ego remains outside . Thus there is a contrast between the rose and the lily. The principle of self-consciousness has entered wholly into the rose, whereas it remains outside the lily. But there was a union between the soul that is within and the soul that as the World-Spirit pervades the universe outside. Flor and Blancheflor symbolise the finding of the World-Soul, the World-Ego, by the human soul or the human Ego. The event recorded in the legend of the Holy Grail is also described in the legend of Flor and Blancheflor. Flor and Blancheflor must not be thought of as outer figures — the lily symbolises the soul which finds its higher Egohood. The union of the lily-soul with the rose-soul was taken to express that principle in man which can link him with the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore it was said: Over against the forces of European Initiation inaugurated by Charles the Great which were to fuse exoteric and esoteric Christianity, pure esoteric Christianity must be kept alive and continued. But among the Initiates it was said: The same soul who lived in Flos or Flor and of whom the legend tells, was reincarnated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the founder of Rosicrucianism, a Mystery-School having as its aim the cultivation of an understanding of the Christ Mystery in a way suited to the new era. Thus esoteric Christianity found refuge in Rosicrucianism. Since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Rosicrucian Schools have trained the Initiates who are the successors of the ancient European Mysteries and of the School of the Holy Grail. Many things have trickled through into outer life in regard to the Rosicrucian Mysteries, but much that is told is a caricature of the truth. Profound achievements of spiritual life were influenced by the mysterious threads of Rosicrucianism which found their way into civilisation. — So, for instance, there is a connection between Bacon of Verulam's New Atlantis and Rosicrucianism. This work is more than a Utopia. Bacon there tries to lead those who would revive the dim clairvoyant faculties of the old Atlanteans, to higher levels. But associated with the outer Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians is all the charlatanism, quackery and caricature that is unavoidable in our age since the discovery in the art of printing. Since printing was discovered it has been no longer possible, as it was in olden times, to let secrets remain secret. Everything comes out, caricatured and distorted! And the same terrible thing happens to the teachings given in the Anthroposophical Movement. If the Anthroposophical Movement were what it is said to be in entirely ignorant circles, it would be something to be avoided at all costs. But in reality, anthroposophical teachings are nourished to a greater extent than has yet ever been the case, from the wellsprings of the Mysteries. Goethe's greatest poetic achievements were nourished from Rosicrucian sources. It is not without significance that in his poem Die Geheimnisse he speaks of a man who was led to a house and found on its door the sign of the Rose Cross. “Who brought the roses to the Cross?” — Who were these Initiates of the European Mysteries who linked the mysteries of the rose to the mystery of the Cross? How deeply Goethe had penetrated these things is apparent, for instance when he speaks of the twelve gathered around the table — twelve as in the ancient Trottic Mysteries. Oh! Goethe knew all these things. But those who study him to-day, study only the Goethe they are capable of understanding. But although he was only able to speak a mysterious language, the time has now come to speak openly about Initiation. More and more it will become apparent that Spiritual Science does not produce dreamers who are remote from the affairs of the world, but men who are practical and active in life. It brings a new hope and confidence. To modern thinking we shall more and more be able to apply the words spoken by Faust of Wagner, the representative of materialistic thinking: “How ardently be grubs for treasures, and is happy when he finds rain-worms!” Truly, materialism is happy when it finds rain-worms and can prove that in a certain sense they are necessary to the re-organisation of everything that lives and moves upon the earth. But the spirit that flows from the Mysteries makes human thinking so supple and flexible that it can really cope with life. It could not be otherwise, for the meaning of world-evolution itself is contained in the mystery-teachings of Spiritual Science.\nThe world and “all that therein is” is born out of the spirit; man is born and called to rise to the spirit. Spiritual Science shows us more and more that the spirit lies exhausted in matter, that physical substance is the magic robe of the Spiritual. It is for man living in the material world, to charm the spirit out of this magic robe. The Spiritual finds its resurrection in man, in the human soul that rises above itself. — To enable the soul to find this path is the task of Spiritual Science. Thus does spirit find spirit. And man will realise and understand the spirit more and more as he fashions himself in its image."
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