The Karmic Relationships of the Anthroposophical Movement

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The Karmic Relationships of the 
Anthroposophical Movement. 


RUDOLF STEINER, Ph.D. 


Printed for Members of the School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, Class 1. 

No person is held qualified to form a judgment on the contents of this work, 

who has not acquired—through the School itself or in an equivalent manner 

recognised by the School—the requisite preliminary knowledge. Other 

opinions will be disregarded ; the authors decline to take them as a basis 
for discussion. 


The Karmic Relationships of the 
Anthroposophical Movement. 


Lectures by 
RUDOLF STEINER 
Dornach, July and August, 1924. 


With a Foreword by 
MARIE STEINER 


Shorthand Report unrevised by the Lecturer 
English Translation by George Adams Kaufmann 


1929. 
LONDON : 
ANTHROPOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 


NEW YORK : 
ANTHROPOSOPHIC PRESS 


Authorised Translation 
Edited by H. Collison 


All Rights Reserved 
Copyright, 1929, by 
MARIE STEINER 


Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland 


Printed in Jersey, O.I., British Isles, by J. T. Bigwood Ltd. 


WORDS OF REMEMBRANCE 


I cannot send out these lectures, through which the ebbing tide of Rudolf 
Steiner’s life is flowing, without an accompanying word in which some features 
of the giver’s portrait are recorded. He gave in these lectures something that 
had never been in the world before. We were the fields he ploughed—fields 
full of stones and sand and yet with some good soil. On us he wore his physical 
forces away ; we do well ever to acknowledge this fact instead of basking in the 
light of our own achievements, which at their best are merely the assimilation of 
his gifts. Again and again one should point out the immense distance that 
divides him from contemporary men. 

These words, written in clear perception of our inadequacy, are not aimed 
at any single persons. No, they are written in the knowledge that we—all of us, 
however many we may be in the Society—are quite unequal to the immensity 
of the task that was here achieved by a single man. There is no exception to 
the rule. No doubt there are those among us who achieve more than others, or 
whose selfless will must suffer from immature egoisms. Here we are making 
no such distinctions. We will but look at the high vantage-point where stood a 
single chosen one. From this perspective, those down below seem not so different 
after all; their contrasts fade into insignificance. 

To the Anthroposophical Society Rudolf Steiner offered up his life. When 
in the tangle and confusion of the after-war period members repeatedly asked 
him to show them the ways that might serve the urgent needs of social recon- 
struction, he did not seek to withdraw from the pressing task. In shouldering 
this burden he suffered unspeakably, for the capacity of those who wished to take 
these tasks upon them was quite unequal to their goodwill. The obstacles were 
no doubt immense. Not only did the attempts of those who were trying to 
help, for example, in industrial reconstruction, coincide with the hardest times of 
economic crisis and inflation ; the good experiment was also met with deliberate 
hostility by vested interests in business and in the press. Nevertheless, no one 
of those concerned will hesitate to confess that his faculties were unequal to the 
task. Here on the one hand were the mighty problems waiting for solution, and 


the great man of genius, creator of the future; there on the other hand were 
willing hearts, yet with a mingled life of feeling, into which beat the waves of the 
unrecognised and the unconscious, mingling with their conscious will to selfless 
action. Moreover, their gifts and talents—not inconsiderable in themselves— 
were yet unequal to the demands set by the hard times and by the builder of 
the future. To mould the future, needs Divine forces. They contain not only 
the glory of perfection but the unmeasured power of self-sacrifice, and they are 
all-embracing. In such a case, the human powers which try to help and to 
transmit their working only too often fail. But as one column falls, another 
takes its place; so by and by the work is done. In this long course of growth 
the adversary sleeps not. He has an easy prey when modesty departs from those 
whose best ability is, after all, but to assimilate and to pass on the treasures they 
receive so freely. The servant’s highest property is faithfulness; this will 
remain with him if his heart is pure. From the pure heart the demon shrinks 
away. 

Time can restore the moment’s failing. Our individual mistakes are balanced 
by the lasting force of the great aims outlined. Inadequate fulfilment is made 
good by the giver’s gift of very life. His-death, atoning for our failure, hallows 
the work and bears within it resurrection-power. Rudolf Steiner witnessed with 
pain his forces paralysed by the insufficiencies of the working members ; his 
time frittered away on their mistakes which he had to remedy. His first and 
foremost task suffered thereby, and he himself suffered unspeakably, having to 
devote himself to countless petty details—nay, willing to do so out of his feeling 
of responsibility. Boundless possibilities of creative spiritual work lay before 
him, while he thus had to give away his time for other things. 

Then happened that which Rudolf Steiner had declared must never happen. 
It proved impossible to carry out what we intended in the social and economic 
sphere. Only the seed of it has now remained. Carried through winter’s sleep, 
it will in time to come spring forth again in the souls of a later era. 

Nor did the happy attempt, initiated by university students, succeed. Efforts 
were made to permeate academic scholarship with spiritual science. The fault 
that was committed here was due to the habits of thought acquired in modern 
universities and colleges. Our young scholars did not sufficiently withstand the — 
temptation to adapt the spiritual knowledge to the official demands of academic 
respectability. Thus academic usages and habits crept into the young move- 
ment for a School of Spiritual Science. Rudolf Steiner had to express many a 
scathing criticism, and characterised the whole attempt as a failure. 

The need arose to save the Society and the whole Movement ; to give it an 
impulse that should make it capable of resistance. Often already, in the time 


after the war, in many a moment of dire failure over against the ugly weapons of 
our opponents, and our own lukewarmness as compared with their destructive 
zeal, Rudolf Steiner had spoken to this effect: ‘‘ Who knows whether it would 
not be better to carry the Movement on without a Society ? For all the failings 
of the Society, I myself am held responsible. It is the Movement that suffers.” 

Often he pondered how to give the Society the new impulse it needed. 
A firm and binding element, overcoming lukewarmness and yet consistent with 
the freedom of each one, must flow through it. 

_ That esoteric life could be carried on as in former times, in deep enclosure 
and with binding vows, was not his view. Such vows were no longer compatible 
with the individual’s feeling of freedom. The soul must stand before its own 
higher Ego, recognising the reverent silence that it owes to this Ego and to the 
Spiritual World. In union with the Divine Will the soul must find its freedom. 
This knowledge brings liberation once more from the cravings and the random 
will of the lower ego. 

For many years the awful demonic ring of the world-war had made esoteric 
work impossible. In the after-war period many requests for esoteric instruction 
were brought to Rudolf Steiner. To begin with, he declined them. Those who 
asked must first absolve their apprenticeship in the attempts they had once under- 
taken for the solution of social, industrial and academic problems. They were to 
learn to free their soul from the hidden ambushes within, from which Rudolf 
Steiner ever strove to remove the veil, so that they might be faced and recognised © 
and overcome ; so that the spirit might find a pure vessel. But the thought of 
the new way of spiritual work which was now needful, grew more and more 
into a ripening resolve. Just a short while before this resolve was turned to 
action, Rudolf Steiner acceded to the requests of smaller groups, intending to 
let their esoteric work converge into the spiritual viaticum which he was now about 
to give. 

Then came the burning of the Goetheanum—after the failing of men, the 
destruction of the outer work. It was the trial by fire of the Society. All that 
was best in it had been laid into this building—its faith, its love, its hope. Our 
feelings of thankfulness, devotion and loyalty lived in this building ; sacrifices 
had been given from all sides, our hearts were in each gift and our souls had 
grown thereby. Now the building was no more. 

But the members, mindful above all of the pain of the artist of this work, 
know only one desire: to re-erect what had been taken from them. He, on the 
other hand, was thinking of those who were now doubly hurt—by economic need 
and stress and by the elemental powers loosed against them. This baptism by 
fire hallowed and energised the resolve. ‘The whole Society should now be 


awakened to a consciousness of the spiritual life flowing and pulsating through it. 
No longer were the individual’s efforts in meditative work the most important 
thing esoterically ; no, the essential thing was that which bound and welded the 
whole Society together. That which was given to it as its goal and task for 
the sake of human progress,—this it should penetrate with clearest knowledge 
and find therein its strength and cleansing. 

Never was greater treasure given to a community of men ; never was spiritual 
gift brought down from a higher vantage-point, to give abundance to earthly 
life and raise it to the spirit. All this was given to our Society and through it 
to mankind at large; for a few weighty words alone sever the outside world 
from us, albeit, those who unknowingly lift the veil cannot read the writing. 

The Society, however, has the possibility to decipher the starry script that 
has been given to it. All has been given into its hands—all that can lift the veil 
so that the holy of holies is made visible. Through long years it had been led 
and guided and so prepared that that which went before was always there to 
sustain that which followed, and to make the new gift possible. Never did 
Rudolf Steiner deviate from this way of building stage by stage on the foundations. 
It was the law of his working. Nevertheless, his stage-by-stage progress took 
place at a speed and intensity of work not to be measured by human standards. 
For those who witnessed it, this was the gradual dawning of a miracle; while 
for those who came in newly, what had already been done was an overwhelming 
wonder. They too, if they are wise, can choose for themselves the quieter and 
more gradual way of evolution, making good use of the fulness of literature at 
our disposal. ‘They will then be preserved from excesses of fancy that might 
endanger the true earnestness of the cause. Earnestness Rudolf Steiner required ; 
time and again he asked for it, in the sternest and most penetrating way, when 
he resolved to illumine out of spiritual backgrounds the life and development of 
historic figures and the inner history of the Society, thus placing facts and their 
connections in the true spiritual horizon, as an example for future historical 
research. In the Mystery Plays he had given us a pattern for the drama of the 
future, thus teaching us to understand how the biography of individuals, reaching 
back in the spirit into former ages, might replace the modern psychological novel 
upon a higher level. One thing, however, Rudolf Steiner did not permit ; con-__ 
structions, hypotheses or exercise of the imagination to fill in the gaps of would- 
be spiritual research. These things he called lacking in earnestness, and they 
aroused his holy indignation. He earnestly begged his listeners not to approach 
the content of the Karma lectures with curiosity or hunger for sensation in their 
souls. The inner connections were the important thing; the way light fell 
upon the facts, explaining them and making clear their inner consistency and 


sequence. Above all, he said, personal interest must be silenced. When the 
study of Karmic questions is approached with personal motives or with personal 
or group-interests, only the greatest harm can result. Nay more, he did not 
hesitate to assert that the passing of such things on in a sensational way or in the 
pursuit of special aims was the plague. The esoteric teacher burdens his Karma 
with that of his pupils ; we have reason enough to ponder deeply on this state- 
ment. 

The Karma lectures Rudolf Steiner gave to the Movement as an esoteric 
content after the Christmas Foundation Meeting had been prepared by manifold 
earlier studies. As early as 1902 he spoke on “ Practical Studies in Karma ” 
and he returned again and again to this subject. He dealt with it in great detail 
in the 31 lectures given in Berlin in 1905—lectures we listened to with amaze- 
ment. From the printed material available to-day, I may mention among others ; 

Manifestations of Karma (Lecture-Cycle XII. Hamburg, 1910) 

Occult History (Lecture-Cycle XVI, Stuttgart, 1910) 

Secrets of the Threshold (Lecture-Cycle XXIX, Munich, 1913, notably the 

fifth and the sixth lectures) 

Reincarnation and Karma: their Significance for the Civilisation of To-day 

(Three Lectures, Berlin, 1912) 
The Forming of Destiny and the Life after Death (Lecture-Cycle XL, 
Berlin, 1915) 
and many other single lectures, beside what was said in more intimate meetings 
and not written down. We were wont to look on these things with holy awe. 
Offended by the absurdities that were current in the Theosophical Society, we 
had endeavoured to let no such things arise among us. After all, we had been 
excluded from the Theosophical Society, among other things, for our non- 
acceptance of the Alcyone affair, and because we had not allowed ourselves to be 
flattered by inclusion in high-sounding spiritual genealogies. One might have 
thought that the Society was steeled against such dangers, so strict and un- 
ambiguous was Rudolf Steiner’s education in this sense. 

Now, after long preparation in spiritual science and in ethical refinement, 
it became possible to give the Society still more of what humanity is needing 

for its further evolution,—what will alone bring sense, justice and logic into the 
world of facts, and spiritual substance into the striving of souls for a more healthy 
life. That a real spiritual force might be at work in it, the Society as such had 
to become esoteric. This mighty impulse was given by the Christmas Foun- 
dation Meeting, when the resolve was turned to action. Rudolf Steiner declared 
the Society identical with the Movement and himself with the Society. 

He took its Karma on himself. 


It was the last’ Christmas meeting he was able to conduct. Fifteen months 


ie 


later he had passed away from us. 

But in the intervening time he gave to us what, rightly understood and 
lived, can transform the world, quicken the souls of men and create spiritual 
life anew. If only it be truly lived—with that earnestness for which he craved, 
and with that purity of heart. He had to go from us. What will now become 
of the Society, depends upon its group-soul-knowledge. ‘The Society as a whole 
will give the decisive answer. However it emerges—upward or downward— 


/ 


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one thing it will have done. It has provided the bridge ; like the Green Serpent | 


in Goethe’s Fairy Tale, it has hurled itself over the abyss wherein mankind was 
threatening to be submerged. Over it, mankind will be able to step forward 
to the other side, there to receive the heritage which Rudolf Steiner left behind. 
The faults of the Society itself will be atoned for by his death. He was able to 
give it so much because he was willing to die for it and for mankind in order 
that he might give. 

Rudolf Steiner earnestly bade us study the Karma lectures in this way and 
in this way only :—beginning with the first, introductory lecture, to work through 
them in the proper sequence and to devote our attention above all to the inner 
connections, the reasons, the interplay of concatenations. We should avoid all 
sensation in the treatment of this material ; we should extinguish personal interest. 
It was these so-called ‘‘ Chartres Lectures,” beside the Lecture-Course on Speech 
Formation, which he had still intended to revise for the printer even on his sick- 
bed. He was no longer able to do so. I feel it a duty to make them accessible 
to the members of the Society, conscious that I am thereby giving into their 
hands the highest esoteric matters, which none of us are ripe enough fully to 
understand, nor even nearly so, but which mankind will in due time require of 
us, even if now they stone us for it. 

We shall accept the stones as gladly as we are carrying hither those other 
stones for the completion of the Building. Well may it be, many a fault will 
thereby be forgiven us. 

It would have been impossible for me to have issued these lectures without 
turning to the spirit of him who so took our faults upon him that he had to die 


for our sake. ~ 


MARIE STEINER. 
DorNacH, September, 1926. 


/ 


THE KARMIC RELATIONSHIPS 
OF THE 
ANTHROPOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT 


LECTURE 1. 
INTRODUCTION TO THESE STUDIES UPON KARMA. 


Dornach, ist July, 1924. 
My DEAR FRIENDS, 

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of 
interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall 
say today will serve to illustrate and explain many a question that may emerge 
out of the subjects we have treated hitherto. At the same time it will help to 
throw light on the mood-of-soul of the civilisation of the present time. 

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in 
that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time 
I mean lies in the fourteenth or fifteenth century or about the middle of the Middle 
Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of mankind when intellectualism begins 
—when men begin mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, 
making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them. 

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good 
idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time, to 
gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th 
century. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer 
able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally 
project what they are accustomed to see in the present time, back into the historic 
past, and they have little idea how altogether different men were in mind and 
spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for 
themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the 
present. 


To spiritual-scientific study many a thing will appear altogether differently. 
Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were in- 
fluenced on the one hand from the side of Arabism, from the civilisation of Asia 
—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mahommedan religion, 
while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider 
these personalities, who found their way in course of time through Africa to 
Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even 
beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of 
soul as though they had been like men of the present time with the only difference 
that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (For 
roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole 
way of thought and outlook, even of the men who lived in the above described 
stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different 
from that of today. 

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of 
Thoughts, Feelings, and impulses of Will which lead to action. Above all, man 
ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘ I will.’ 

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was 
by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would 
say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In 
effect, these human beings ascribed to their own person only their Feeling and 
their Willing. Out of an ancient background of culture, they rather lived in the 
sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless 
they thought ‘I feel,’ “I will,’ but they did not think “I think’ in the same 
measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now 
describe was an absolutely real conception to them :—In the Sublunary Sphere, 
there live the thoughts. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which 
is determined when we imagine the Earth at a certain point, and the Moon at 
another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth 
as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they 
conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the Moon. And as we say, ‘ In the 
air in which we breathe is Oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten 
now that it ever was so) :—‘ In the Ether which reaches up to the Moon, there 
are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘ We breathe-in the Oxygen of the air,’ so did 
these people say—not ‘ We breathe-in the thoughts ’"—but ‘ We perceive the 
thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of | the fact that 
they received the thoughts. 

Today, no doubt, a man can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a 
theoretic concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, 


but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at 
once he has this rather strange idea, that the thoughts spring forth within himself 
—which is just as though he were to think that the Oxygen he receives in breathing 
were not received by him but sprang forth from within him. 

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling 
and an immediate experience : ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own posses- 
sion. I can not really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them into 
myself.’ 

Now we know that the Oxygen of the air circulates through our organism 
in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This 
happens quickly. The men of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine 
the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. 
It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable 
of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time— 
between our in-breathing and out-breathing —so did these men conceive a certain 
fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet 
_ only in the sense in which we hold the Oxygen which belongs to the outer air. 
They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, 
and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed 
through the gate of Death. 

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life ; holding the 
breath—the duration of earthly life; out-breathing—the sending-forth of the 
thoughts into the Universe. 

Men who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common 
atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a 
common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the Earth, not only a few miles, 
but as I said, up to the orbit of the Moon. 

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was 
trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aris- 
totelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. 
Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then 
have come about ? 

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find 
expression in the course of earthly evolution, could never have come to expression 
in the fullest sense: I mean, the Spiritual Soul. The human beings of whom 
I am now speaking, stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or 
Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Spiritual Soul was to arise— 
the Spiritual Soul, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civili- 
sation into intellectualism. 


The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, 
was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception 
such as was held by the men whom I have now described. For if they had 
done so, the evolution of the Spiritual Soul would not have come about. Though 
it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Spiritual Soul should 
evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of 
European humanity even in its totality. A special impulse had to be given 
towards the development of the Spiritual Soul itself. 

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the 
rise of two spiritual streams. The one was represented by the quasi-Arabian 
philosophers who, working from the west of Europe, influenced European 
civilisation very strongly —far more so than is commonly supposed. The other 
was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity 
and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all. 

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may 
still feel this, my dear friends, if you consider the pictures in which Dominican 
Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to 
say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above 
all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that 
man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see 
the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of of Arabism under foot. 
The Arabians are there under their feet—they are are being trodden underfoot. 

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy 
of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity 
of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, 
not indeed for the things for which they battled, but for other things we need it. 

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of 
thoughts as the cosmic Ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning 
of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out- 
breathing—that is the going-forth of the thoughts once more, but With» an 
individually human colouring, into the cosmic Ether, into the impulses of the 
sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere. 

What then is this out-breathing ? It is the very same, my dear friends, of 
which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of 
man expands, Man looks back upon his etheric body, slowly increasing in 
magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the Cosmos. It is the 
very same, only it was then conceived—if J may say so—from a more subjective 
standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. 
They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today. 


4 


Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble 
feeling of the Ego would have evolved in the men of European civilisation. The 
Spiritual Soul would not have been able to emerge; the Ego would not have 
grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become 
vaguer and vaguer. Men would increasingly have fixed their attention on that 
which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant 
of the human being who has lived here on this Earth. 

They would have felt the spirituality of the Earth as its extended atmosphere. 
They would have felt themselves belonging to the Earth, but not as individual 
men distinct from the Earth. Through their feeling of ‘“ It thinks in me,” the 
men whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the 
Earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as 
the men of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however in- 
distinctly. 

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual 
stream of which I have just spoken, was aware of the fact that when man dies 
the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the 
cosmic Ether that surrounds the Earth. This idea was violently attacked by 
those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They 
on their side declared that man is an individuality, and that w we e must concentrate 
above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of Death, not on 
what is dissolved in the universal cosmic Ether. This was emphasised para- 
mountly, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by 
the Dominicans. ‘They stood up sharply and vigorously for the idea of the 
individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. 
But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now 
consider these representatives—shall we say—of individualism. 

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the 
universal Ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because 
they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,— 
were troubled and disquieted by what was really there. 

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result 
of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts 
to the cosmic Ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century. 

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul 
of these people,—those especially who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only 
then do we gain an idea, how much they were disquieted by what was really 
left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer 


could nor dared believe in. 


We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. 
No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so drily, so abstractly 
or in such cold and icy concepts as the men of today. When the men today are 
standing up for any ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised 
condition for so doing that one’s heart should first be torn out of one’s body. 
At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heartiness 
in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, 
this heartiness also involved the presence of an intense inner conflict. 

That philosophy, for instance, which proceeded from the Dominican Order 
was evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy 
which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was 
still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such 
popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people 
knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, 
these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all 
that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived 
through, were contained. 

Today one reads the works of the Schoolmen and is conscious only of the 
driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote 
these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with 
inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the 
striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts. 

When a man of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of world- 
outlook, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think 
the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity 
has already evolved for so long within the Spiritual Soul, that no such disquieting 
occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the 
thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environ- 
ment of the Earth. Today, such things as could still be experienced in the 13th 
or 14th century, are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger 
priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was 
undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise : 
“TI am pursued by the spectres of the dead.’ 

Speaking of the spectres of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just 
described. That was a time when men could still grow deeply into what they 
learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they 
learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They 
learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to Thought, 
a kind of universal soul comprising all the Earth. They learned to attack this 


6 


: 


heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep 
counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence 
of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would 
say to themselves, ‘ Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here 
is something intangible, working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am 
held fast by it.’ 

The intellects of the men of that time,—of many of them at any rate,— 
were still so constituted that they were quite generally aware of the speaking of 
the dead, at least for some days after Death. And when the one had ceased to 


speak, another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt them- 


selves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal— - / Y 


essence of the Universe. 

Coming down into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All 
has ceased. In return for it we have achieved the conscious life in the Spiritual 
Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, 
no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of 
our subconsciousness. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has 
passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge 
livingly received. 

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we 
shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind 
us. Imagine a scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down 
his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for men have grown accustomed 
to think intellectualistically. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was 
still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was 
conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial 
comparison. Today the thinking of many men has become quite automatic. 
We of today are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our 
thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a man of today letting 
one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do 
not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man 
is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. 
Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and 
expand, when he is dead. 

So could a man be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon 
of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man, so as to save the doctrine 
of individual immortality. So could he be rising in polemics against Averroes, 
or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this 
lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an 


outstanding man like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after 
his Death like a kind of spectre in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered 
up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having 
enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, and shape and form be 
given to it, till it was consolidated once again into a being built, if I may say so, 
in the Ether. That could well happen. Then would a man be sitting there, 
trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against 
Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, 
disturbing, putting off his mind. 

The most important of the scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century 
were directed against Averroes who was long dead. They made polemics 
against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then 
he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated 
once again and thus were living on. 

There were indeed these inner conflicts, before the beginning of the new 
age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more 
their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The 
men of later times can but receive what lies behind the words, with such ideas 
as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner 
life. ‘They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described. 

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, funda- 
mentally speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the 
spiritual world, yet all the stronger there-—would fain impress it upon man that 
an universal life of thoughts surrounds the Earth, and that in thoughts man 
breathes-in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that 
man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream 
is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of Earth, 
perceptible today to many men (for there are still such men) when in peculiar 
nights they lie there on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all 
manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely 
and so surely in their own individuality. 

Meanwhile in other folk, who always sleep soundly because they are so well 
satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual 
principle. 

This battle, after all, is smouldering still at the very foundations of European 
culture. It is there to this day ; and in the things that are taking place outwardly 
at the surface of our life, we have after all scarcely anything else than the beating 
of the surface-waves from that which is still present in the depths of souls,— 
a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of yonder time. 


8 


Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain 
way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface 
consciousness,—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface 
consciousness. 

But in the depths it smoulders all the more, in many minds and hearts today. 
Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts 
as these. 

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which men 

become unconscious, during earthly life, of what is there none the less, namely 
the thoughts in the Ether in the immediate environment of Earth—in the same 
measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession 
—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of Death 
with a contracted soul. 
a The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts 
into the cosmic Ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence 
there arise such social movements as we see arise today. We must understand 
these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other 
cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, 
than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being. 

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones 
taking into account the idea of reincarnation and leading to so many definite 
examples. ‘These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the 
surface of external history. You will have seen how that which lives in one 
historic age is carried over into a later one by men returning into earthly life. 
But everything spiritual plays its part, between death and a new birth, in moulding 
what is carried by man from one Earth-life into another. 

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that 
objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, 
when we describe the men who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind- 
Soul age. 

- Some of the men who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in 
their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the 
constant attacks they suffered from the spectres of which I have now spoken, 
they have, after all, absorbed deep doubts as to the unique validity of what is 
intellectualistic. 

This doubt can well be understood. For about the 13th century there were 
many men—men of knowledge, who stood in the midst of the life of learning, 
almost entirely theological as it then was—men for whom it was a deep conscience 


question : What will now become ? 


Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from 
their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectualistic colouring ; but they 
felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward 
as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length 
those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed 
all meaning. ‘To speak radically, we will say: those who stood under the 
influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place 
in the scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way 
of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things under- 
went many a change. When men begin to think along these lines the strangest 
nonsense becomes self-understood. To Descartes, as you know, is due the 
saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’ | . 

Countless clever thinkers, my dear friends, have accepted this as true: ‘I 
think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I 
think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. 
I wake up again, I think, therefore fam. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, 
Iam not. This then is the consequence: A man not only falls asleep, but ceases 
to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the 
spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely 
accepted statement in the age of evolution of Consciousness (the age of the 
Spiritual Soul). When we point to such things today, it is like a sacrilege—we 
cannot help ourselves ! 

But over against all this, I would now tell you of a kind of conversation. 
Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered 
among the real facts that happened. It was a conversation that took place between 
an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows :— 

The younger man said, ‘ Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow 
of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times, thought was always the last 
revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now, thought is the very thing 
that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. 
Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. 
The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only 
the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’ 

The older man replied, ‘In Thinking, through the very fact that man is 
turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts 
Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),— 
in Thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality 
must be found once more.’ 

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘ Will European humanity 


Io 


be strong enough to find this earthly reality of Thought, or will it only be weak 
enough to lose the heavenly reality ?’ 

This dialogue truly contains all that can still hold good with regard to 
European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of 
the living quality of thought, mankind must now attain the living thought once 
more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak, and with the reality of Thought 
will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the entry of our 
Christmas impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without 
reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about, more and 
more, that even the things we know from this source or from that—as for instance, 
that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body,—will only be 
taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking. 

These things must not be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking. 
For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself. 

So much I wanted to describe today. We must attain a living, sympathetic 
interest, a longing to go beyond the ordinary History and to attain that History 
which must and can be read in the living Spirit, which History shall more and 
more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. ‘Today, my dear friends, 
I wished to place before your souls, as it were, the concrete outline of our pro- 
gramme in this direction. 

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn 
upon you if you attempt, not so much to follow up with intellect, but to feel 
with your whole being, what was desired to be said today. You must attempt 
to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but 
what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality. 

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall 
we develop the true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling 
in you today; not so much to hold a systematic lecture, but to speak to your 
hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did so, many a concrete spiritual fact. 


iI 


LECTURE 2. 


FORCES OF KARMIC PREPARATION IN THE COSMOS. 


Dornach, 4th July, 1924. 
My DEAR FRIENDS, 

Today I shall have to say some more of how the Karmic forces of preparation 
undergo their further course of evolution when man has passed through the gate 
of death. So far as the ordinary consciousness is concerned, the forming of 
Karma, and indeed that whole intercourse with the world which we call ‘ karmic,’ 
takes place in the human being in a more instinctive way. We see the animals 
act ‘ instinctively.’ Words like ‘ instinct,’ which are used so frequently in science 
and every-day life, are generally applied in a vague and undefined way. People 
make no real effort to associate them with clear conceptions. What is it that we 
call instinct in the animals? We know that the animals have a Group-soul. 
The animal, such as it is, is not a self-contained being. The Group-soul is 
standing there behind it. Now to what world does the Group-soul belong ? 
We must first answer this question: Where do we find the Group-souls of the 
animals? They are certainly not to be found here in the physical world of 
sense. Here we have only the single individual animals. We do not find the 
Group-souls of the animals until, by initiation or in the ordinary course of human 
evolution between death and a new birth, we come into that altogether different 
world which man passes through between his successive earthly lives. There 
indeed we find, among the beings with whom we are then together, including 
above all those of whom I have been speaking to you, those with whom we 
elaborate our karma,—there we find the Group-souls of the animals. And the 
animals that are here on the Earth, when they act instinctively, they act out of 
the full consciousness of the Group-souls. 

You may conceive it thus, my dear friends. (Dr. Steiner here made a drawing 
on the blackboard). Here we have the realm in which we live between death and 
a new birth ; and out of it there work the forces which proceed from the Group- 
souls of the animals. And here upon this earth we have the single animals which 


IZ 


act and move about, guided as it were by threads which pass to the Group-souls 
—the beings whom we ourselves discover in the realm between death and a 
new birth. Such in truth is instinct. 

It is obvious that a materialistic world-conception cannot explain instinct, 
for instinct is :—to act out of that sphere of being which you will find described 
as Spirit-land in my ‘ Theosophy ’ for example, and in my ‘ Occult Science.’ 

For man however it is different. Man too has instinct, but when he acts 
through his instinct, he is not acting out of yonder Spirit-realm, but out of his 
own former lives on Earth. He is acting across time, out of his former earthly 
lives, out of a whole number of former lives on Earth. 

As the spiritual realm works upon the animals, causing them to act in-— 
stinctively, so do the former incarnations of man work on his later incarnations 
in such a way that he instinctively lives out his Karma. But this is a spiritual 
instinct—an instinct that works within the Ego. 

It is just by understanding this, that we shall come to understand the 
absolute consistency of this instinctive working with human freedom. For the 
freedom of man proceeds from the very realm out of which the animals act 
instinctively, namely the realm of the spirit. 

Today we will concern ourselves especially with the way in which this 
instinct is gradually prepared when man passes through the Gate of Death. 
Here in earthly life, as we have seen, the inner experience of Karma is instinctive. 
It takes its course beneath the surface of consciousness; but the moment we 
pass through the Gate of Death we become objectively conscious, during the 
first few days, of all the experiences which we first underwent on Earth. We 
have them before us in ever expanding pictures ; and what we thus behold as a 
great tableau of our life contains, in addition, all that took place instinctively 
in the working of our Karma. 

When man passes through the Gate of Death, and his life, expanding ever 
more and more, is unfolded before his eyes, there goes with it all that was in- 
stinctive, of which he was not conscious in his life—the web of Karma. He 
does not actually see it in the first days after death. But what he would other- 
wise perceive only in pale images of memory, this he now beholds vividly as a 
living configuration, nor does he fail to perceive that something more is contained 
in it than ordinary memory. And if we look with the vision of Initiation on 
all that the human being has before him at this stage, we can describe it as follows : 

The man himself, who has passed through the Gate of Death having possessed 
the ordinary consciousness during his earthly life, sees his life spread out before 
him as a mighty panorama. But he sees it only ‘from in front.’ The vision 
of Initiation sees it also from the other side—‘ from behind,’ as it were. The 


a3 


human being himself sees it only from the one side. With the vision of the 
initiate we can see it ‘ from behind,’ and then the whole web of karmic relation- 
ships springs forth from it. We behold this web of karmic relationships arising 
to begin with from the Thoughts, that lived within the Will during the man’s 
earthly life. But immediately something else enters into it, my dear friends. 

I have often emphasised the fact :—The thoughts we experience consciously 
during our earthly life are dead thoughts. But the thoughts that are woven into 
our Karma, the thoughts that now emerge, are ving. 'Thus—on the ‘ other 
side,’ as it were, of the panorama of our life—the living thoughts spring forth. 
And now, (this is a fact of untold significance)—now the beings of the Third 
Hierarchy draw near, and receive what is springing forth from the ‘ other side ’ 
of the panorama. Angels, Archangels and Archai draw it into themselves, they 
breathe it in ! 

This takes place during the time when man ascends on his way upward, 
after death, to the end of the Moon Sphere. Thereafter he enters the Moon 
Sphere, and his backward journey through his life begins, lasting—as we know 
—a third of the time he spent on earth, or—to speak more accurately—lasting 
for the same length of time as the periods of sleep which he spent while he was 
on the Earth. 

I have often described, my dear friends, how this backward journey through 
life takes place. We may now ask ourselves : What is man’s condition in ordinary 
sleep, in relation to the condition in which he finds himself directly after death ? 
Normally when he goes to sleep, man as a being of soul and spirit is only in his 
astral body and his Ego. He has not his etheric body with him, for this has 
remained behind in the bed. Hence his thoughts remain unliving; they have 
no active power, they are mere pictures. But when he passes through the Gate 
of Death, to begin with he takes his etheric body with him, and the etheric body 
begins to expand. Now the etheric body has a life-giving quality, not only for 
the physical existence, but for the thoughts themselves. By this means the 
thoughts can become alive, inasmuch as man has taken his etheric body with him. 
The etheric body, as it frees itself, carries forth the living Thoughts from man 
to the Angels, Archangels and Archai, who in their Divine Grace receive the 
_ Thoughts. 

This, if I may so describe it, is the first Act that is unfolded in the life 
between death and a new birth. Beyond the Threshold of Death, the Beings 
of the Third Hierarchy approach that which loosens itself from the human being 
—which is entrusted to his etheric body as it dissolves away. The Beings of the 
Third Hierarchy receive it into Their care. And we as human beings on the 
Earth utter a simple and good, a wonderful and beautiful Prayer, when we think 


4 


of the connection of Life and Death, or of one who has passed through the Gate 
of Death, in this way, saying :— 


Angels, Archangels and Archai in the Ether-weaving receive 
the human being’s Web of Destiny. 


For as we say these words we turn our eyes to a real spiritual fact. Much depends 
upon it, whether human beings on the Earth think the spiritual facts or not : 
whether they merely accompany the Dead with thoughts that remain behind on 
the Earth, or accompany them on their further path with thoughts which are 
a true image of what takes place in yonder realm which they have entered. 

This, my dear friends, appears so infinitely desirable to Initiate Science :— 
That thoughts shall be within the earthly life, which are a true image of real 
spiritual happenings. By merely thinking in theories—enumerating so many 
higher members of the human being, and the like,—we achieve no union with 
the Spiritual World. We can only do so by thinking the realities that are enacted 
there. 

Therefore, human hearts should be ready to hear once more, what human 
hearts did hear in the old ages of Initiation, in the ancient Mysteries, when they 
called out impressively, again and again, to those who were about to be initiated :-— 
‘ Accompany the Dead in their further Destinies !’ ‘ Memento mori’ is all that 
is left of it now, a more or less abstract exhortation which no longer affects the 
human being deeply. For it no longer expands his consciousness into a life 
more living than this life in the world of the senses. 

Now the Reception of the human Web of Destiny by Angels, Archangels 
and Archai, unfolds before us in this wise :—we have the impression : it lives 
and moves and has its being in the bluish violet ethereal atmosphere. It is a 
living and weaving in the bluish-violet atmosphere of the ether. 

When the etheric body is dissolved, that is, when the thoughts have been 
breathed-in by the Angels, Archangels and Archai, then, after a few days, man 
enters into that backward course of life which I have described to you. There 
he experiences his deeds, his impulses of will, his tendencies of thought, in the 
way in which they worked on other men, to whom he did either good or evil. 
He enters right into the minds and feelings of other men. He does not live 
in his own mind. With the clear consciousness that it is his concern, he under- 
goes all that took place in the depths of other human beings’ souls, with whom 
he entered into any kind of Karmic relationship,—to whom he did anything 
whatever good or ill. And once again it shows itself, how that which the human 
being thus experiences is received. He experiences it in fullness of reality— 
a reality, which I had to describe not long ago as a reality more real than that 


15 


of the senses between birth and death. He experiences a reality in the midst 
of which he stands more fully, more glowingly than in any reality of this earthly 
life down here. 

But if we look at it once more with the vision and insight of Initiation from 
the ‘ other side,’ we see all this, which the human being experiences, received 
into the essence, into the reality and being of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai. 
They draw into Themselves, as it were, the ‘ Negative’ of the human deeds. 
This wondrous process unfolds before the vision of the Initiate. The conse- 
quences of man’s actions, transformed in righteousness and justice, are taken up 
into the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. 

Now the vision of all this transplants him who has it into such a conscious- 
ness that he knows himself to be in the centre of the Sun and with it of the whole 
Planetary system. From the aspect of the Sun he beholds what is now taking 
place. He sees a lilac-coloured living and weaving; he sees the Exusiai, Dynamis 
and Kyriotetes absorbing the human deeds, transformed into righteousness, in 
the living and weaving of a pale violet, lilac-coloured astral atmosphere. 

Here, you see, we have the truth :—the aspect of the Sun as it appears to 
earthly man is only the one side, it is seen here from the periphery. From the 
centre the Sun is seen as the field of action for the living spiritual deeds of 
Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. There it is all spiritual action, spiritual 
happening. There we find as it were the ‘ other side’ of the pictures of that 
earthly life which we experienced consciously here between birth and death. 

Once again we can think truly of what is happening there. We must think 
of the word ‘ verwesen’ which is ordinarily used for the fading, dying, destroying 
process, the passing out of existence,—in its true and original meaning, which is : 
“to carry the real Being away.’ (As when we say ‘to forgive’ or ‘ to forego,’ 
which means in reality a ‘ giving away ’ in devotion). 

Thinking thus we may say :— 


In Exusiat, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, in the astral feeling of 
the Cosmos the righteous consequences of the earthly life of man 
die into the realm of Being. 


At length, this too has been accomplished. Man after death has lived through 
a third of the time of his earthly life. Journeying backward, he feels himself 
once more at the starting point of his earthly life—in the spaces of the Spirit— 
at the moment before his entry into his past earthly life. And now, we may 
say, he enters through the centre of the Sun into the essential Spirit-land, and 
in the Spirit-land his earthly deeds—transformed into the Divine Righteousness 
—are received into the activity of the first Hierarchy. They come into the domain 


16 


of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Man feels, as he steps out into this new 
kingdom :—‘ All that took place through me on earth is now being received by 
Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, into their own active Being.’ 

Consider well what this means, my dear friends. We are thinking truly of 
what happens to the Dead in his further life after death, if we cherish the thought : 
The Web of Destiny which he wove here on earth, is caught up, to begin with, 
by the Angels, Archangels and Archai. In the next part of the life between 
death and new birth, They bear it into the kingdom of Exusiai, Dynamis and 
Kyriotetes. These in turn are gathered in and woven around by the Beings of 
the first Hierarchy. And in the process, ever and again, man’s action upon 
earth is received into the Being—into the Deeds of Being, into the living Action 
—of Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim. 

Once again we are thinking rightly if to the first and the second saying we 
now add the third, which is as follows :— 


In Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim, as Their Deeds of Being, the 
justly transmuted ‘ fruits of the earthly life’ of Man are resurrected. 


Thus we can turn the gaze of Initiation upon what is going on perpetually in the 
spiritual world. Here on earth we have the unfolding life and action of men 
with their instinct of Karma, their ceaseless weaving of Destiny—a weaving more 
or less similar to the weaving of thought. Looking up into the spiritual worlds, 
we see there what were once the earthly Deeds of man—having passed through 
Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes—received by the 
Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim, expanding as Their Heavenly Deeds 
above. 
1. Es empfangen Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai im Aetherweben 
das Schicksalsnetz des betreffenden Menschen. 
Angels, Archangels and Archai in the Ether-weaving receive his web 
of Destiny. 
2. Es verwesen in Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—im Astralempfinden des 
; Kosmos—die gerechten Folgen des Erdenlebens des Menschen. 
In Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, in the Astral feeling of the Cosmos, 
the righteous consequences of his earthly life die into the realm of Being. 
3. Es auferstehen in Thronen, Cherubim, Seraphim—als deren Tatenwesen 
—die gerechten Ausgestaltungen des Erdenlebens des Menschen. 
In Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim, as Their Deeds of Being, the 
justly transmuted fruits of his earthly life are resurrected. 
This, my dear friends, is a succession of spiritual facts infinitely sublime and 
significant especially for our present age. For the dominion of Michael has 


17 


now begun, and in this world-historic moment it is as though we could behold 
the deeds of those who lived upon Earth before the end of Kali-Yuga, in the 
1880’s and go’s. ‘That which was then enacted among men on Earth, has now 
been received by Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. Yet never was the spiritual 
contrast-of-light so great as it is today, in the realm of these spiritual facts. 

In the 1880’s one could look upward and see how the people of the Re- 
volution period of the middle of the 19th century, were received as to their deeds 
by Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim. But as one looked, a kind of darkling 
cloud settled over the middle of the 19th century. What one then saw passing 
into the realm of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, lighted up only a very 
little. 

But today, when we look back to all that took place at the end of the roth 
century—the deeds of men, their relations to one another,—having seen it clearly 
still, only a short time ago, it vanishes away...... We saw it clearly still, a 
moment since,—all that took place in that declining age of Kali-Yuga,—like 
Thought-masses wafted away before our eyes...... We saw what was worked 
out in destiny among the human beings of the end of Kali-Yuga. And then it 
vanishes, and we behold in clear, radiant light what became of it as it passed 
Heavenward. 

This fact bears witness to the immense importance of what is taking place 
at the present time in the transmutation of the earthly deeds of men into the 
heavenly deeds of souls. 

What man experiences as his destiny or Karma takes place for him, within 
him and about him, from earthly life to earthly life. But in the heavenly worlds 
the consequences of what he did and experienced on Earth go working on— 
and they work on even into the historic shaping of this earthly life. For there 
are many things which are not grasped or controlled by the individual human 
being here upon Earth. 

My dear friends, you must take this statement in its full weight and im- 
portance. The individual man experiences his destiny. But as soon as two 
human beings are working together, something more arises,—more than the 
working out of the individual destinies of the one and of the other. Something 
takes place as between the two, transcending the individual experiences of either. 
Ordinary consciousness perceives no connection of what happens between man 
and man, with what goes on in the spiritual worlds above. For ordinary con- 
sciousness the connection is at most established when sacred spiritual actions are 
brought into this physical world of sense,—as when in sacred cult or ritual men 
consciously transform their physical actions so as to make them actions of the 
spiritual world at the same time. 


18 


But in a far wider sphere, all that happens between man and man is more 
than what the individual man experiences as his Destiny. All that is not merely 
the destiny of individual men, but that is brought about by the feeling-together 
and working-together of men on Earth, is for ever in connection with the Deeds 
of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones above. Into the latter there flow the 
deeds of men in their mutual connection with one another, as well as the individual 
earthly lives of men. 

Most important at this point is the wider range of vision that opens out for 
the Initiate. For today as we look upward we behold the heavenly deeds and 
consequences of what took place on Earth in the late 70’s, the 80’s and go’s of 
last century. And it is as though a fine spiritual rain were falling, falling to the 
Earth, moistening the souls of men, impelling them to many things that arise 
historically in our time, in the relations between man and man. 

Once more we can see, how there lives again today in living mirror-images 
of thought—through Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones,—what was enacted here 
on Earth by men of the 1870’s, 80’s and go’s. 

When one sees through these things, again and again one must say to oneself : 
—Here you are speaking to a human being of today. What he says to you out 
of the commonly accepted opinion—not from his own emotions or inner impulses 
but simply as a person of this age—seems often as though it stood in connection 
with human beings who lived in the 70’s, 80’s and go’s of last century. It is so 
really. We see many a human being of today as though he were in a meeting 
of departed spirits, surrounded by human beings who are busily at work upon 
him. But in reality they are only the after-images, rained down from Heaven, 
of what lived through human beings upon Earth in the last third of the 19th 
century. 

Thus in a spiritual sense the shades—the real ghosts, I would say,—of a 
former age are- roaming about in a later age. This is one of the more intimate 
workings of Karma which are indeed widely present in the world, though they 
frequently remain unnoticed even by the most occult of occultists. ‘To many a 
man of today, when he utters some opinion not individual but stereotyped, one 
would fain whisper in his ear: ‘ That was said to you by this man or that, of the 
last third of the 19th century.’ 

Only so does life become a real totality. And in this respect once more we 
must say of the present age—the age that began with the end of the Kali-Yuga 
—that it is different from all historic ages preceding it. It is different in this 
sense, that in very truth the human deeds on Earth in the last third of the 19th 
century have the greatest imaginable influence on the first third of the 2oth. 

My dear friends, I am saying something far removed from any superstitious 


19 


use of words. I say it with the full consciousness of voicing an exact and scientific 
fact :—Never before did the ghosts of the preceding age move about among 
men so palpably as they do in this present time. And if men fail to perceive 
them, it is not because we are living in an age of darkness. Rather is it that they 
are still dazzled by the light of the new Age of Light. But as a consequence, 
what is done among us by the shades of the past century is an all the more fruitful 
field for the people of Ahriman. Though man is unaware of it, the people of 
Ahriman are working today in a more than usually evil way. They are at pains 
—if I may so describe it—to galvanize into Ahrimanic life as many as possible 
of these ghosts of the past century and bring them to bear upon the human beings 
of today. This Ahrimanic quality of our age is fostered most of all when societies 
are formed to popularise erroneous ideas of the 19th century—ideas which, for 
all men of insight, are out of date and discarded. There never was a time when 
amateurish persons popularised the outlived errors of the past to the extent they 
do today. Indeed we have opportunities on all hands today, to acquaint our- 
selves with the essential nature of the deeds of Ahriman. We need only visit 
many a meeting where people are working out of the ordinary consciousness. 
We have many an opportunity to learn to know the Ahrimanism in the world 
today, for it is at work most strongly. By the very path which I have now 
described, it hinders people from receiving into their hearts and souls what must 
come forth anew, what was not there before,—what is coming to the light of 
day in Anthroposophy. 

How happy men are when they can somehow contrive to cover up the New, 
that is coming forth in Anthroposophy today, with some old saying. How con- 
tented they are, if in some lecture that I give something occurs of which they 
can subsequently prove: ‘ Look, here it is in an old book!’ In reality, of 
course, it is there in quite a different form, coming out of altogether different 
foundations of consciousness. The people of today have so little courage to 
receive what grows on the soil of the living present. Their minds are set at 
rest as soon as they can bring something forward out of the past. 

It shows, my dear friends, how powerfully the impulses of the past work 
upon the men of the present time,—how contented they feel under these in- 
fluences. It is due to the fact that the 19th century is working still so strongly 
into the 2oth. Future historians—who will write their descriptions spiritually, 
as we write ours today by reference to outer documents,—future historians will 
have to describe this feature above all, and they may well express it in some 
such words as these :—‘ Look at the first three decades of the 2oth century. 
Nearly everything appears as though it were being done by the shades, the images 
of deeds of men of the end of the 19th century.’ 


20 


At this point I may perhaps say a word that is truly not intended in any 
political sense. Politics must be eliminated altogether from our Society. May 
I say this word, my dear friends, simply as a characterisation of the facts :— 
We can look back on the stupendous, revolutionising actions—or rather, happen- 
ings, I should have said, for they were no really active deeds,—which took place 
notably in the second decade of the 2oth century. It has been said so often 
that it has become a truism. Since time has been, since men have written 
history, such world-shaking events have not happened. But are not men standing 
in the midst of them, my dear friends, as though they were not there at all ? 
We see it everywhere,—it is as though the revolutionising events were taking 
place outside the human beings, and the latter had no part in them at all. Almost 
every man we meet today, we would fain ask of him: ‘ Did you really Ave through 
the second decade of this century ?? And how much more do we feel it when 
we look at it from a somewhat different point of view! How helpless, how 
infinitely helpless do the human beings seem today—helpless in judgment, 
helpless in action. Never were there such difficulties as there are today in 
filling the ministerial benches—the Cabinets! Consider only how curious this 
is,—how helpless men are in the midst of the events. At long last we are im- 
pelled to raise the question, who then zs doing anything? Who is playing an 
active part? My dear friends, more than any of the men of the present time, 
it is the men of the last third of the 19th century! Their shadow-forces are to 
be seen at work in everything. . 

This is the very secret of our time. Never were the Dead so powerful as 
are the Dead of the last third of the 19th century. This too is a world-aspect 
of realities. 

When we enter into the spiritual content of these things in a single instance, 
we often come to strange conclusions. I recently had to consider, my dear 
friends, whether I would alter this or that in the new edition of my books, written 
in the 70’s, 80’s and go’s of last century. The pedants of today declare: Every- 
thing has altered, the scientific theories and hypotheses of that time are out-of- 
date and long ago discarded. But when we look at it from a standpoint of reality, 
we can alter nothing at all! For in reality, behind everyone who writes a book 
today, or lectures from a professorial chair, there stands the shade, the shadow- 
picture of another. There they still are,—the Du Bois Reymonds, the Helm- 
holtzes, the Haeckels,—all those who were the spokesmen of that time, (in 
Medicine the Obholzers, the Billroths and the rest)—they are still speaking. 

Here we are lifting a corner of the veil, a secret of the present time. Initiate 
Science says in all truth: ‘ Never were the Dead so mighty as in our age !’ 

This is what I wish to insert today in the course of our studies on Karma. 


21 


LECTURE 3. 


THE SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF ANTHROPOSOPHICAL 
ENDEAVOUR. 


Dornach, 6th July, 1924. 
My DEAR FRIENDs, 


We have seen how the study of Karma, wherein the destiny of man is con- 
tained, leads us from the affairs of the farthest Universe—from the worlds of 
the stars—down to the tenderest experiences of the human heart, inasmuch as 
the heart is an expression of all that man feels working upon him during life, 
—of all that happens to him in the whole nexus of Earth-existence. When we 
try to arrive at our judgments through a deeper understanding of the karmic 
connections, we are driven again and again to look into these two domains of 
world-existence which lie so far removed from one another. Indeed we must 
say: Whatever else we may be studying,—be it Nature, or the more natural 
configuration of human evolution in History or in the life of Nations—none 
of these leads us so high up into cosmic realms as the study of Karma. 
The study of Karma makes us altogether aware of the connections between human 
life here upon Earth and that which goes on in the wide Universe. We see this 
human life taking its course on Earth, unfolding till about the 7oth year of life, 
when in a certain connection it attains its limit. Whatever lies beyond this is 
in reality a life given by grace. What lies below this limit stands under karmic 
influences, and these we shall now have to study. 

It is possible, as I have often mentioned from varied points of view, to put 
the length of human life on Earth at about 72 years. Now 72 years, seen in 
relation to the secrets of the cosmos, is a remarkable number, the true significance 
of which only begins to dawn upon us when we consider what I may call the 
cosmic secret of human earthly life. We have already described what the world 


of the stars is from a spiritual point of view. When we enter on a new earthly © 


life, we return, so to speak, from the world of stars to this life on Earth. 

At this point once more it is astonishing how the ancient ideas—even if we 
do not take our start from tradition—simply emerge again of their own accord 
when we approach these domains of life with the help of modern spiritual science 


22 


We have seen how the various planetary stars and fixed stars take part in human 
life and in all that permeates this human life on Earth. If we have before us an 
earthly life that has taken its full course,—one that does not come to an end all 
too soon, but that has passed through half at least of the allotted earthly time,— 
then in the last resort we find this truth once more : The human being, inasmuch 
as he comes down from cosmic spiritual spaces into an earthly life, comes always 
from a certain star. We can trace the very direction of it, and it is not unreal— 
on the contrary, it is most exact, to say :—‘ The human being has his star.’ If 
we take what is experienced beyond all space and time between death and a 
new birth, and translate this into its spatial image, we can say: Every man has 
his star, which determines what he has attained between death and a new birth. 
He comes from the direction of a certain star. We may indeed receive into 
our minds this conception. The whole human race inhabiting the Earth is to be 
found on the one hand by looking round about us upon Earth, passing through 
these many continents, finding them peopled by the human beings who are now 
incarnated. And the others who are not on the Earth, where in the Universe 
shall we find them ? Whither must we look in the great Universe if we would 
turn our soul’s gaze to them,—assuming that a certain time has elapsed since 
they went through the gate of death? ‘The answer is: We look in the true 
direction when we look out upon the starry heavens. There are the souls— 
or at least the directions which will enable us to find the souls—who are spending 
their life between death and a new birth. We see and comprehend the entire 
human race that inhabits the Earth, when we look upward and downward. 

Those alone who are now on the way thither or returning thence, we find 
in the planetary region. But we can certainly not speak of the midnight hour 
of existence between death and a new birth, without thinking of some star which 
the human being as it were indwells between death and. a new birth (albeit we 
must always bear in mind what I have said about the beings of the stars). 

Then, my dear friends, we shall approach the cosmos with this knowledge. 
Away there are the stars, the cosmic signs from which there shines and lightens 
down upon us the soul-life of those who are between death and a new birth. 
And then we become aware that we can look also at the constellations of stars, 
saying to ourselves : ‘ How is all this, that we behold in cosmic spaces, connected 
with the life of man?’ We look up with a new fulness of heart and mind to the 
silvery Moon, the dazzling blaze of the Sun, the twinkling stars at night-time, 
and we feel ourselves united even humanly with all of these. This is what 
Anthroposophy is to attain at last for the souls of men ; they shall feel themselves 
united even in a human way with the whole cosmos. It is at this point that 
certain secrets of cosmic existence first begin to dawn upon us. 


23 


My dear friends, the Sun rises and sets; the stars rise and set. We can 
trace how the Sun sets, for example in the region where there are certain groups 
of stars. We can trace what is now called the apparent course of the stars, 
circling round the earth. We can trace the course of the Sun. In 24 hours, 
the Sun circles around the Earth—‘ apparently ’ as we say nowadays,—and the 
stars too circle around the Earth. So we say: but it is not quite correct. For 
if again and again we attentively observe the course of stars and Sun, we perceive 
at length that the Sun does not always rise at the same time in relation to the 
stars. It grows ever a little later. Day after day it arrives a little later at the 
place where it was on the previous day in relation to the stars. ‘These spaces of 
time, by which the Sun remains behind the stars in their course, add up till they 
become an hour, two hours, three hours, and at length a day. Thus at length 
the time approaches when we can say: The Sun has remained behind the star 
by a whole day. 

Now let us assume: Someone was born on the 1st of March in a particular 
year. And, let us say, he lived till the end of his 72nd year. He always celebrates 
his birthday on the 1st of March, for the Sun says: His birthday is on the 1st 
of March. And he can celebrate it so, for throughout the 72 years of his life 
(though it progresses in relation to the stars) the Sun shines forth ever and again 
in the neighbourhood of the star that shone when he came down to Earth. But 
when he has lived for 72 years, a full day has elapsed. He has arrived at an age 
in life when the Sun leaves the star into which it entered when he began his life. 
At his birthday now he is beyond the rst of March. The star no longer says 
the same as the Sun ; the stars say it is the 2nd of March; the Sun says it is the 
1st. ‘The human being has lost a cosmic day, for it takes just 72 years for the 
Sun to remain behind a star. 

During this time which the Sun can spend in the region of his star, a man 
can live on Earth. Then (under normal conditions) when the Sun is no longer 
there to comfort his star for his life on Earth, when the Sun no longer says to his 
star: ‘ He is down there, and I from myself am giving thee what he—this human 
being—has to give to thee ; and for the time being, as I cover thee, I am doing 
for him what thou dost for him between death and a new birth,’ when the Sun 
can no longer speak thus to the star, the star summons the man back again. 

Thus you perceive the processes in the heavens immediately connected with 
human existence upon Earth. In the mysteries of the heavens we see the age 
of man’s life expressed. Man can live 72 years, because in this time the Sun 
remains a day behind. After that time the Sun can no longer comfort the star 
which it could comfort while it stood before and covered it. The star has become 
free again for the soul-spiritual work of man within the cosmos. 


24 


These things cannot be understood in any other way than with reverence,— 
with that deep reverence which was called in the ancient Mysteries ‘ the 
reverence for that which is above.’ For this reverence leads us ever and again 
to see what happens here on Earth in connection with what is unfolded in the 
sublime, majestic writing of the stars. It is indeed a limited life men lead to- 
day, compared to what was still existing at the beginning of the 3rd Post-Atlantean 
epoch. ‘They did not merely base their reckoning, their understanding of man, 
on that which describes his steps upon the Earth ; they reckoned with what the 
stars of the great Universe are saying about the life of man. 

Once we are attentive to such connections and able to receive them 
with reverence into our souls, then too we know: ‘ Whatever happens 
here on Earth has its corresponding counterpart in the spiritual worlds.’ In 
the writing of the stars is expressed the kind of connection that exists between 
what happens here, and what happened (to speak from the earthly point of 
view) ‘some time ago’ in the spiritual world. In truth our every reflection 
upon Karma should be accompanied by holy reverence and awe before the 
secrets of the Universe. 

In such a mood of reverence, let us approach the studies of Karma which 
we are to make here during the near future. To begin with, my dear friends, 
let us take this fact: Here are sitting a number of human beings, a section of 
what we call the Anthroposophical Society ; and though one of us may be united 
with this Anthroposophical Society by stronger links, and another by less strong, 
it is in all cases part of a man’s destiny—and the destiny that underlies these 
things is powerful—it is a part of his destiny that he has found his way into 
the Anthroposophical Society. Moreover, it lies inherent in the spiritualisation 
which must come over the Anthroposophical Society since the Christmas Foun- 
dation Meeting :—We must become ever more conscious of the spiritual, cosmic 
realities that underlie such a community as this Society. For out of such a 
consciousness the individual will then be able to take his true stand in the Society. 
Hence you will understand—along with all the other responsibilities resulting 
from the Christmas Foundation Meeting—that we must now begin to say some- 
thing too about the Karma of the Anthroposophical Society. It is very com- 
plicated, for it is a Karma of community,—a Karma that arises from the karmic 
coming-together of many single human beings. Take in its true and deep 
meaning all that has been said in these Karma lectures and all that results from 
the many relationships that have been unfolded here; then, my dear friends, 
you will yourselves perceive that what is taking place here in our midst—where 
a number of human beings are led by their Karma into the Anthroposophical 
Society—has been preceded by many and important events which happened to 


of) 


these very human beings before they came down into this present earthly life— 
events moreover which were themselves the after-effects of what had taken place 
in former lives on Earth. 

Let your thought dwell for a moment on the great vistas that are opened up 
by such an idea as this. Then you will realise how this thought may by and 
by be deepened till there emerges the spiritual history that stands behind the 
Anthroposophical Society. But this cannot be accomplished all at once. It can 
only enter our consciousness slowly and gradually ; then only will it be possible 
to build even the conduct and action of the Anthroposophical Society on the 
foundations which are actually there for anthroposophists. 

It is of course Anthroposophy as such which holds the Society together. 
In one way or another, every one who finds his way into the Society must be 
seeking for Anthroposophy. And the preceding causes are to be sought for in 
the experiences which were undergone, by the souls who now become anthro- 
posophists, before they came down into this earthly life. 

At the same time, if we look out into the world with a clear perception of — 
what has happened hitherto, we are also bound to admit : There are many human 
beings whom we find here or there in the world to-day, and of whom—looking 
at their connection with their pre-earthly life—we must say that they were truly 
pre-destined by their pre-natal life for the Anthroposophical Society ; and yet, 
owing to certain other things, they are unable to find their way into it. There 
are far more of them than we generally think. 

This must bring still nearer to our hearts the question: What is the pre- 
destination that leads a soul to Anthroposophy ? 

I will take my start from extreme examples, which are all the more instructive 
in shewing how the karmic forces work. In the Anthroposophical Society the 
question of Karma does indeed arise before the individual in a more intensive 
way than in other realms of life. I need only say the following : The souls who 
are incarnated in a human body now,—to begin with we cannot possibly follow 
them back far enough to assume that they experienced directly in their past 
earthly lives anything that could lead them, for example, to Eurhythmy (to take 
this radical instance from within the Anthroposophical Movement). For Eurhy- 
thmy did not exist in the times when the souls who now seek for it were incarnated. 
Thus the burning question arises: How comes it that a soul finds its way into 
Eurhythmy out of the working of the karmic forces ? 

But so it is in all the domains of life. Souls are there today, seeking the 
way to that which Anthroposophy can give them. How do they come to unfold 
all the pre-dispositions of their Karma from past earthly lives, precisely in this 
direction which leads them to Arthroposophy ? 


26 


In the first place there are some souls who are driven to Anthroposophy 
with strong inner intensity. The intensity of these forces is not the same in all. 
Some souls are driven to Anthroposophy with such inward intensity that it seems 
as though they were steering straight towards it without any by-ways at all, 
finding their way directly into one domain or another of the anthroposophical 
life. 

There are a number of souls who steer their cosmic way in this sense for 
the following reason: In past centuries, when they had their former life on 
Earth, they felt with peculiar intensity that Christianity had reached a definite 
turning-point. They lived in an age when the main effect of Christianity was 
to pass over into a more or less instinctive human feeling. It was an age when 
Christianity was practised in a perfectly natural and simple way but quite in- 
stinctively ; so that the question did not really occur to the souls of men: Why 
am I a Christian ? Such souls we find especially if we turn our gaze to the 13th, 
12th, 11th, roth, gth, and 8th centuries after Christ. There we find Christ- 
permeated souls, who were growing and evolving towards the age of Conscious- 
ness (the age of the Spiritual Soul), but who, since this age had not yet begun, 
were still receiving Christianity into the pure Mind-Soul. On the other hand, 
with respect to the worldly affairs of life, they already experienced the dawn of 
what the Spiritual Soul is destined to bring. 

Thus their Christianity lived in a way unconsciously. It was in many 
respects a deeply pious Christianity, but it lived, if I may say so, leaving the head 
on one side and entering straight into the functions of the organism. Now that 
which is unconscious in one life becomes a degree more conscious in the next 
life on Earth : and so this Christianity which had not become fully clear or self- 
conscious, became at length a challenge and a question for these human souls : 
“ Why are we Christians ?’ 

The outcome was (I am speaking in an introductory way to-day, hinting 
at matters which will be spoken of more fully afterwards) the outcome was that 
in the life between death and a new birth these souls had a certain connection 
once more in the spiritual world, especially in the first half of the 19th century. 
In the first half of the 19th century there were gatherings of souls in the spiritual 
world,—souls who took the consequences of the Christianity they had experienced 
on Earth, finding it again in the radiance, in the all embracing glory of the spiritual 
world. Above all in the first half of the 19th century, there were souls in the 
life between death and a new birth who strove to translate into cosmic Imagina- 
tions what they had felt in a preceding Christian life on earth. The very thing 
that I once described here as a great cult or act of ritual was there enacted in the 
Supersensible. A large number of souls were gathered in these mutually-woven 


27 


cosmic Imaginations, in these mighty pictures of a future existence, which they 
were to seek again in an altered form during their next life on Earth. 

But in all this was also interwoven all that had taken place between the 7th 
and 13th or 14th centuries A.D. by way of dire and painful inner conflicts, which 
were indeed more painful than is generally thought. For the souls to whom I 
now refer had undergone very much during that time; and all that they had 
thus undergone, they wove it into the mighty cosmic Imaginations which were _ 
woven together by a large number of souls in common, during the first half of 
the 19th century. 

The great cosmic Imaginations that were thus woven were shot through 
on the one hand by something that I cannot otherwise describe than as a kind 
of longing and expectant feeling. Working out these mighty Imaginations, the 
souls experienced within them a concentrated feeling, gathered from manifold 
experiences, a concentrated feeling within their disembodied souls. It was a 
feeling which I can describe somewhat as follows : ‘ In our last life on Earth we 
inclined towards the living experience of Christianity. Deeply we felt the 
Mysteries which tradition had preserved for all Christians, telling of the sacred 
and solemn happenings in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian Era. But 
did He really stand before us in all His glory, in His full radiance ?? The question 
arose out of their hearts. ‘Was it not only after our death that we learned how 
Christ had descended from cosmic heights, as a Being of the Sun, to Earth? 
Did we really experience Him as the Being of the Sun? He is here no longer, 
He is united with the Earth. Here we can only find what is like a great cosmic 
memory of Him. We must find our way back again to Earth, in order to have 
the Christ before our souls.’ 

A longing for Christ accompanied these souls from that time forth, when 
with the Spirit-Beings of the Hierarchies they wove the mighty and sublime 
cosmic Imaginations. This longing went with them from their pre-earthly life 
into the present life on Earth. 

This can be experienced with overwhelming intensity by spiritual vision 
when it observes what was taking place in mankind, incarnate and discarnate, 
in the course of the 19th and 2oth centuries. And as I said, all manner of things 
were mingled into these impressions. For we must remember that in their 
Christian experience the souls who are now returning had shared in all that was 
taking place as between those who were striving for Christianity and those who 
still stood within the old Pagan consciousness,—which was frequently the case 
during the centuries to which I just now referred. In these souls therefore, 
many of those influences are present which make it possible for man to fall a 
victim to the temptations of Lucifer on the one hand and Ahriman on the other. 


28 


For in Karma, Lucifer and Ahriman are weaving, no less than the good Gods : 
this we have already seen. 

_ All that was thus interwoven, and that works itself out karmically to-day, 
must be followed out in detail, if we would really penetrate the spiritual foun- 
dations of anthroposophical striving. If the Christmas Foundation Meeting is 
to be taken in real earnest, the time has now come when we must draw aside the 
veil from certain things. Only they must be taken with the necessary earnestness. 

Let us begin, as I said, with a radical instance ; and while we discuss the 
following, let there hold sway in the background, for the rest of this hour, all 
that has now been said. 

From the pre-earthly into this earthly existence, through their education, 
through all that they experience on earth, human souls find their way. They 
seek and find their way into the Anthroposophical Society, and remain in it for 
a time. But there are isolated cases among them, where, having shewn them- 
selves zealous, nay over-zealous members of the Anthroposophical Society for a 
while, they become the most violent opponents. Let us observe the working of 
Karma in an extreme case of this kind. 

A person comes into the Anthroposophical Society. He proves a very 
zealous member, yet after a time he somehow manages to become not only an 
opponent but a maligner among opponents. We must admit, it is a very strange 
Karma. 

We will consider a single case. There is a soul. We look back into a past 
life on earth, into a time when old memories from the ages of Paganism still 
lingered on, enticingly for many people. It was a time when men were finding 
their way on the one hand into a Christianity that spread out with a certain 
warmth and fire, and yet, for many of them, with a certain superficiality. 

When such things are spoken of, we must always remember that we have 
to begin somewhere or other, at some particular earthly life. Every such earthly 
life leads back to earlier ones in turn ; therefore there will always be some things 
that remain unexplained—things to which we simply refer as matters of fact. 
They are of course the karmic consequences of still earlier events, but we have 
to begin somewhere. 

In the period to which I have just referred we find a certain soul. We 
find him, indeed, in a way that very nearly concerned myself and other present 
members of this Society. We find him as a would-be maker of gold, in possession 
of writings, manuscripts which he is hardly able to understand but interprets 
in his own way and then makes experiments in accordance with the instructions, 
though he has no real notion what he is doing. For it is by no means a simple 
matter to look into the spiritually chemical relationships, if we may call them so. 


29 


Thus we see him as an experimenter, with a little library containing the most 
varied instructions and recipes going far back into Moorish and Arabian sources. 
We see him unfolding this activity in an almost out-of-the-way place, though 
visited by many inquisitive persons. At length, under the influence of the 
practices in which he engages without understanding, he gets a strange physical 
debility,—a disease attacking especially the larynx,—and (this being a masculine 
incarnation) his voice becomes hoarser and hoarser till it has almost vanished. 

Meanwhile the Christian teachings are spread abroad ; they are taking hold 
of men on all hands. This man is filled on the one hand with the greedy longing 
to make gold, and, with the making of gold, to attain many other things attainable 
at that time if one had been successful in making gold. On the other hand 
Christianity comes near to him, in a way that is full of reproaches. There arises 
in him what I may perhaps describe as a kind of Faustian feeling, though not 
altogether pure. Strong becomes the feeling in him: ‘ Have I not really done 
an awful wrong?’ By-and-by under the influence of such reflections the con- 
clusion grows upon him, living with scepticism in his soul: ‘ Your having lost 
your voice is the divine punishment, the just punishment, for meddling with 
unrighteous things.’ 

In this situation of his inner life, he sought out the advice of human beings 
who have also become united at this present time with the Anthroposophical 
Society, and who were able at that time really to play a helpful part in his destiny. 
For they were able to save his soul from deep and anxious doubt. We can really 
speak of a certain ‘ salvation of the soul’ in this case. But all this took place 
under such conditions that he experienced it with feelings which remained to 
some extent external, no matter how intense they were. He was overwhelmed 
on the one hand with a sense of gratitude toward those who had saved his inner 
life. But on the other hand—unclear as it all was—an appalling Ahrimanic 
impulse became mingled with it. After the strong inclination towards un- 
righteous magic practices, and with his present feeling—which was not quite 
genuine—of having entered into Christian righteousness, an Ahrimanic trait 
became mixed up in all these things. For in effect the soul was brought into 
confusion ; things were not really clear, and the result was that he brought an 
Ahrimanic trait into his gratitude. His thankfulness was transformed into some- 
thing that found an unworthy expression in his soul, and that appeared to him 
in this light, during his life between death and new birth. It came before him 
especially when he had reached that point which I described, in the first half 
of the 19th century. There he had to live through it again ; and he experienced 
the deep unworthiness of what his soul had evolved in that former life, by way 
of gratitude which was superficial, external, nay even cringing. 


30 


We see this picture of Ahrimanised gratitude mixed up in the cosmic Imagi- 
nations of which I spoke. And we see the soul descend from that pre-earthly 
existence into a new earthly life. We see him descend on the one hand with all 
those impulses that entered into him from the time when he was seeking to make 
gold,—the materialistic corruption of a spiritual striving. On the other hand we 
see evolving in him under the Ahrimanic influence something which is distinctly 
to be perceived as a sense of shame,—shame at his gratitude improperly expressed 
and superficial. 

These two currents live in his soul as he descends to earth. And they express 
themselves in this way: ‘The soul of whom I am speaking, having become a 
person again in earthly life, finds his way to those others who were also with 
him in the first half of the 1gth century. 

To begin with, a kind of memory arises in him of what he lived through 
in the Imaginative picture of the unworthy external gratitude. All these things 
become unfolded now, almost automatically. Then there awakens what is living 
there within him,—what I described as a sense of shame at his own attitude 
which had been unworthy of aman. This takes hold of his soul, but, influenced 
as it is by Ahriman (through the Karma of former epochs too, of course), it finds 
vent as an appalling hatred against all that he had at first espoused. The sense 
of shame against himself becomes transformed into a wild and angry opposition. 
And this again is united with dreadful disappointment that all his old sub- 
conscious cravings have been so little satisfied. For they would have been 
satisfied if anything had arisen now, similar to what was contained in the old, 
improper art of making gold. 

You see, my dear friends, here we have a radical example shewing how such 
things turn inward. We have traced the strange mysterious by-ways of such a 
thing as this: the connection of a sense of shame with hatred. Such things 
must also be discovered in the connections of human life if we would understand 
a present life from its preceding conditions. 

When we consider such things as these, a certain measure of understanding 
is indeed poured out over all that takes place through human beings in the world. 
Then indeed great difficulties of life begin, when we take the thought of Karma 
in real earnest. But these difficulties are meant to come, for they are founded 
in the real essence of human life. Such a Movement as the Anthroposophical 
must indeed be exposed to many things, for only so can it evolve the strong forces 
which it needs. 

I gave you this example first, so that you might see how we must 
seek—even for negative things—the Karmic relationships with the whole 
stream of destiny which is causing the Anthroposophical Movement to arise 


31 


out of the preceding incarnations of those who are joined together in this 
Society. 

So, my dear friends, we may hope that there will awaken in us by-and-by 
an entirely new understanding of the essence of this Anthroposophical Society. 
We may hope to discover, as it were, the very soul of the Anthroposophical 
Society with all its many difficulties. For in this case too, we must not remain 
within the limits of the single human life, but trace it back to what is now being 
—I cannot say re-incarnated—but re-experienced in life. In this direction I 
wanted to begin to-day. 


32 


LECTURE 4. 


THE SOUL’S CONDITION OF THOSE WHO SEEK 
FOR ANTHROPOSOPHY. 


Dornach, 8th July, 1924. 
My DEAR FRIENDS, 

To-day I would like to insert certain things which will afterwards make it 
possible for us to understand more closely the karmic connections of the anthropo- 
sophical movement itself. What I wish to say to-day will take its start from the 
fact that there are two groups of human beings in the anthroposophical move- 
ment. In general terms I have already described how the anthroposophical 
movement is composed of the individuals within it. What I shall say to-day 
must of course be taken in broad outline and as a whole; but there ave the two 
groups of human beings in the anthroposophical movement. The things which 
I shall characterise do not lie so obviously spread out ‘ on the palm of the hand,’ 
as we say. ‘They are by no means such that crude and simple observation would 
enable us to say: in the case of this or that member, it is so or so. Much of 
what I shall characterise to-day lies not in the full everyday consciousness of the 
personality, but, like most karmic things, in the instincts—in the sub-conscious- 
ness. Nevertheless, it does thoroughly impress itself on the character and 
temperament, the mode of action and indeed the real action of the human being. 

We have to distinguish the one group, who are related to Christianity in 
such a way that those who belong to it feel their attachment to Christianity 
nearest and dearest to their hearts. There lives in these souls the longing, as 
anthroposophists, to be able to call themselves Christians in the true sense of 
the word, as they conceive it. 

This group derives great comfort from the fact that it can be said in the 
widest and fullest sense : The anthroposophical movement is one that recognises 
and bears the Christ Impulse within it. Indeed, for this group, pangs of con- 
science would arise if it were not so. 

Now as to the other group :—In the manifestations of their life, those who 


33 


belong to it are indeed no less sincerely Christian. And yet, they come to 
Christianity from rather a different angle. ‘To begin with they find great satis- 
faction in the anthroposophical cosmology—the evolution of the Earth from the 
other planetary forms, and so forth. They find satisfaction in all that anthropo- 
sophy has to say about Man in general. From this point they are then led 
naturally to Christianity. But they do not feel in the same measure an inward 
need of the heart, to place Christ in the central point at all costs. 

As I said, these things work themselves out to a large extent in the sub- 
consciousness. But whoever is able to practise true observation of souls will be 
able to judge the different individuals in the right way in every single case. 

Now the origins of this grouping go back into very ancient times. You 
know, my dear friends, from my ‘ Occult Science’ that at a certain period of 
earthly evolution the souls took their departure as it were from the continued 
evolution of the Earth and came to dwell on other planets of our system. ‘Then, 
during a certain time—during the Lemurian and Atlantean times—they came 
down again to Earth. Thus the souls came down again from the various planets 
—not only from Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc., but also from the Sun—to take on 
an earthly form. And we know how there arose, under the influence of these 
facts, what I described in ‘ Occult Science ’ as the Oracles. 

Now there were many among these souls who tended through a very ancient 
karma to come into that stream which afterwards became the Christian stream. 
We must remember, after all, that less than a third of the population of the Earth 
are professing Christians to this day. ‘Thus only a certain number of the individual 
souls who came down to Earth unfolded the tendency, the impulse, to evolve 
towards the Christian stream. 

The human souls came down at different times. There were those who 
came down comparatively soon, in the first periods of Atlantean civilisation, 
But there were also those who came down relatively late—whose sojourn, so to 
speak, in the pre-earthly, planetary life was long. When we look back into the 
life of such a soul—beginning with the present incarnation—we come perhaps 
to a former Christian incarnation and maybe to yet another Christian incarnation. 
Then we come to the pre-Christian incarnations. But we reach comparatively 
soon the earliest incarnation of such a soul, whereat we must say: Tracing the 
life still farther back from this point, it goes up into the planetary realms. Before 
this point, these souls were not yet present in earthly incarnations. 

In the case of other souls, who have also found their way into Christianity, 
it is different. We can go very far back; we find many incarnations. It was 
after many incarnations, pre-Christian and Atlantean too, that these other souls 
dived down at length into the Christian stream. 


34 


For intellectualistic thought, such a thing as I have just mentioned is 
exceedingly misleading. For one might easily be led to suppose that those who 
by the judgment of present-day civilisation would be considered as particularly 
able minds, are the very ones who have had many incarnations. But this need 
not by any means be the case. On the contrary, people who have excellent 
faculties in the present-day sense of the word—people who are well able to enter 
into modern life, may often be the very ones for whom we find comparatively 
few past incarnations on the Earth. 

Perhaps I may here remind you of what I said at the time when the anthropo- 
sophical stream which we now have in the anthroposophical movement was 
inaugurated. I may remind you of what I said at the Christmas Foundation 
Meeting, when I spoke of those individualities with whom the Epic of Gilgamesh 
is connected. I explained certain things about such individualities. We find, as 
we look backward, that they had had comparatively few incarnations. But there 
were other individualities again who had had many incarnations. 

Now, my dear friends, for those human souls who come to Anthroposophy 
to-day—no matter whether there are still other, intermediate incarnations or not 
—that incarnation is important, which falls roughly into the 3rd or 4th or 5th 
century after Christ. (We find it nearly always, spread out over a fairly long 
period,—two to three centuries. Sometimes it is later—even as late as the 7th or 
8th century). Above all things, we must look into the experiences of these souls 
in that early Christian time. We then find a subsequent incarnation when all 
these experiences were fastened or confirmed. But I will connect what now I 
have to say to-day most definitely with what we may describe as the first Christian 
incarnation. | 

Now in the case of all these souls, the important thing is: According to all 
their past conditions, their former lives on Earth, how were they to relate them- 
selves to Christianity ? You see, my dear friends, this is a very important karmic 
question. Later on we shall have to consider other, more subsidiary karmic 
questions ; but this question is so to speak a cardinal question of Karma, because, 
passing over many other subsidiary things, it is through their deepest, innermost 
experiences in former incarnations—through what they underwent with respect 
to world-conceptions, religious beliefs and the like—that human beings come 
into the Anthroposophical Society. With respect to the Karma of the Anthro- 
posophical Society, this must therefore be placed into the foreground. What 
have the souls in this Society experienced, in matters of Knowledge, World- 
conception and Religion ? 

Now in those early centuries of Christian evolution, one could still take 
one’s start from traditions of knowledge—which had existed ever since the 


35. 


founding of Christianity—about the Being of Christ Himself. In these traditions, 
He who lived as Christ in the personality of Jesus was regarded as a Dweller on 
the Sun, a Being of the Sun, before He entered into this earthly life. We must 
not imagine that the attitude of the Christian world to these truths was always as 
negative as it is to-day. In the first centuries of Christianity they still understood 
the Gospels, certain passages of which speak so distinctly of this Mystery. They 
understood that the Being who is called Christ had come down into a human 
body from the Sun. How they conceived it in detail is less important for the 
moment; the point is that this conception was still theirs. It certainly went 
as far as I have just described. 

At the same time, in the epoch of which I am now speaking, the possibility 
of really understanding such a conception had dwindled very much. It was 
hard to understand that a Being coming from the Sun descends on to the Earth. 
Above all, many of the souls who had come into Christianity having a large 
number of earthly incarnations behind them—far back into Atlantean times— 
could no longer fully understand how Christ can be called a Being of the 
Sun. The very souls who in their old beliefs had felt themselves attached to 
the Sun-Oracles, and who thus revered the Christ even in Atlantean times inas- 
much as they looked upward to the Sun—the souls therefore who according to 
the saying of St. Augustine were ‘ Christians before Christianity was founded 
upon Earth,’ Christians as it were of the Sun—these very souls, by the whole 
character of their spiritual life, could find no real understanding of the saying 
that Christ was a Sun-Hero. Therefore they preferred to hold fast to that belief 
which—without such interpretation, without this cosmic Christology—simply 
regarded Christ as a God, a God from unknown realms, who had united Himself 
with the body of Jesus. Under these conditions, they accepted what is related 
in the Gospels. They could no longer turn their gaze upward to the cosmic 
worlds in order to understand the Being of the Christ. They had learned to 
know Him only in the worlds beyond the Earth. For even the Mysteries on 
Earth—the Sun-Oracles—had always spoken to them of Christ as a Sun-Being. 
Thus they could not find their way into the idea that Christ—this Christ beyond 
the Earth—had really become an earthly Being. 

These Christian souls, when they afterwards passed through the gate of 
death, came into a strange position, which I may describe—somewhat tritely 
perhaps—as follows. These Christians, in their life after death, came into the 
position of a man who knows the name of another man and has heard many 
things about him ; but he has never made his acquaintance in person. To such 
a man it may happen, at a moment when all the support which served him as 
long as he merely knew of the name are taken away, that he is suddenly expected 


36 


to know the real person, and his inner life completely fails him in face of this 
new situation. So it was with the souls of whom I have now spoken: those 
who in ancient times had felt themselves belonging especially to the Sun-Oracles. 
In their life after death, they came into a situation in which they had to say, ‘ Where, 
then, zs the Christ ? We are now among the Beings of the Sun, where we had 
always found Him, but now we find Him not.’ That He was on Earth, this 
they had not really received into the thoughts and feelings which remained to 
them when they passed through the gate of death. So after death they found 
themselves in a state of great uncertainty about the Christ, and they lived on in 
this uncertainty about Him. They remained in many respects in this uncertainty. 
Thus, if in the intervening time another incarnation followed, they tended easily 
to join those groups of men who are described to us in the religious history of 
Europe as the various heretical societies. 

Then, no matter whether they had passed through such another incarnation 
or not, they found themselves together again in that great gathering above the 
Earth, which I described here the other morning, placing it at the time of the 
first half of the 19th century. Then it was that these souls among others found 
themselves face to face with a great supersensible cult or ritual, consisting in 
mighty Imgainations. And in the sublime Imaginations of that supersensible 
ritual there was enacted before their spiritual vision, above all other things, the 
great Sun-Mystery of Christ. These souls, as I explained, had as it were 
come to a blind alley with their Christianity. And the object was, before 
they should descend to earthly life again, to bring them, in picture-form at 
least, face to face with Christ, whom they had lost—though not entirely—yet to 
such extent that in their souls He had become involved in currents of uncertainty 
and doubt. 

Now these souls responded in a peculiar way. Not that they found them- 
selves in a still greater uncertainty through the fact that all this was enacted before 
them. On the contrary it gave them a certain satisfaction in their life between 
death and a new birth—a feeling of salvation from many doubts. But it also 
gave them a kind of memory of what they had received about the Christ—albeit 
in a form that had not yet been permeated in the true cosmic sense by the Mystery 
of Golgotha. Thus there remained in their inmost being an immense warmth 
and devotion of feeling towards Christianity, and at the same time a subconscious 
dawning of those sublime Imaginations. 

All this was concentrated into a great longing, that they might now at last 
be able to be Christians in the true way. Then when they descended—when 
they became young again, returning to Earth at the end of the 19th or at the 
turn of the 1gth and 2oth centuries—having received the Christ by way of inner 


37 


feeling though without cosmic understanding in their early Christian incarnation, 
they could do no other than feel themselves impelled towards Him. But the 
impressions they had received in the Imaginations to which they had been drawn 
in their pre-earthly life, remained in them only as an undefined longing. ‘Thus 
it was difficult for them to find their way into the anthroposophical world-con- 
ception, inasmuch as the latter studies the Cosmos to begin with and leaves the 
consideration of Christ until a later point. 

Why did they have such difficulty? For the simple reason, my dear friends, 
that they had their own peculiar relationship to the question ‘ What is Anthro- 
posophy ?’ Let us ask: What is Anthroposophy in its reality ? My dear friends, 
if you gaze into all those wonderful, majestic Imaginations that stood there as a 
supersensible spiritual action in the first half of the 19th century, and if you 
translate all these into human concepts, then you have Anthroposophy. For the 
next higher level of experience—for the adjoining spiritual world whence man 
descends into this earthly life—Anthroposophy was already there in the first half 
of the 19th century. It was not on the Earth, but it was there. And if Anthro- 
posophy is seen to-day it is seen indeed in that direction : towards the first half 
of the 19th century. Quite as a matter of course one sees it there. Nay, even 
at the end of the 18th century one sees it. 

For example, one may have the following experience. There was a certain 
man who was once in a peculiar position. Through a friend, the great riddle of 
human earthly life was raised before him. But this his friend was not altogether 
free of the angular thinking of Kant (“‘ das kantige Kant’sche Denken ’’), and 
thus it came to expression in a rather abstract philosophic way. He himself— 
the one of whom I am now speaking—could not find his way into the ‘ angular 
thinking of Kant.’ Yet everything in his soul stirred up the same great riddle, 
the great question of life. How are the reason and the sensuous nature of man 
connected with one another? And lo, there were opened to him—not merely 
the doors but the very flood-gates, which for a moment let radiate into his soul 
those regions of the World in which the mighty Imaginations were being enacted. 
And all this—entering not through windows or doors but through wide-open 
flood-gates into his soul—translated as it were into little miniatures, came forth 
as the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. For the man of 
whom I speak was Goethe. 

Miniatures—tiny reflected images, translated even into a fairy-like prettiness 
—descended thus in Goethe’s Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. 
We need not therefore wonder that when it became necessary to give Anthro- 
posophy in artistic scenes or pictures, (where we too must naturally have recourse 
to the great Imaginations), my first Mystery Play, ‘ The Portal of Initiation ’ 


38 


became alike in structure—albeit different in content—alike in structure to the 
Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. 

You see it is possible to look into the deeper connection even through the 
actual things that have taken place among us. Everyone who has had anything 
to do with occult matters, knows that that which happens on Earth is the down- 
ward reflection of something that has taken place long, long before in the spiritual 
world, though in a somewhat different way, inasmuch as certain spirits of hind- 
rance are not mingled in it there. 

These souls now, who were preparing to descend into earthly existence at 
the end of the rgth or at the beginning of the 20th century, brought with them— 
albeit in their subconsciousness—a longing also to know something of cosmology, 
etc., z.e. to look out upon the world in the anthroposophical way. But above all 
things, their heart and mind were strongly inflamed for Christ. They would 
have felt pangs of conscience if this whole conception of Anthroposophy—to which 
they found themselves attracted as an outcome of their pre-earthly life—had 
not been permeated by the Christ Impulse. Such was the one group, taken of 
course ‘ as a whole.’ 

The other group lived differently. If I may put it so, the other group, 
when they emerged in their present incarnation, had not yet reached that weariness 
in Paganism which the souls whom I described just now had reached. Compared 
to those others, they had indeed spent a relatively short time on Earth—they had 
had fewer incarnations; and in these incarnations they had filled themselves 
with the mighty impulses which a man may have, if through his lives on Earth 
he has stood in a living connection with the many Pagan Gods, and if this con- 
nection echoes strongly in his later incarnations. Thus they were not yet weary 
of the old Paganism. Even in the first centuries of Christianity the old Pagan 
impulses had still been working in them strongly, although they did incline more 
or less to Christianity, which, as we know, only gradually worked its way forth 
from Paganism. 

At that time they received Christianity chiefly through their intellect. Though 
indeed it was intellect permeated with inner feeling, still they received it with their 
intellect. They thought a great deal about Christianity. Nor must you imagine 
this a very learned kind of thinking. They may indeed have been relatively 
simple men and women, in simple circumstances ; but they thought much. 

Once again it matters not whether there was a subsequent incarnation in the 
meantime. Such an incarnation will of course have wrought some changes ; 
but the essential thing is this : When they had passed through the gate of death, 
these souls looked back upon the Earth in such a way that Christianity appeared 
to them as something into which they had not yet really grown. They were less 


39 


weary of the old Paganism ; they still bore within their souls strong impulses 
from the old Pagan life. Thus they were still waiting, as it were, for the time 
when they should become true Christians. 

The very people of whom I spoke to you a week ago, describing how they 
battled against Paganism on the side of Christianity—they themselves were 
among the souls who in reality still bore much Paganism, many Pagan impulses 
within them. They were still waiting to become real Christians. These souls, 
then, passed through the gate of death. They arrived in the spiritual world. 
They passed through the life between death and a new birth, and in the time 
which I have indicated—in the first half of the 19th century or a little earlier— 
they came before that sublime and glorious Imagination ; and in these Imagi- 
nations they beheld so many impulses to fire their work and their activity. They 
received these impulses paramountly into their will. 

And, if I may say so, when we now look with occult vision at all that these 
souls are carrying to-day, especially within their will, we find—above all in their 
life of will—the frequent impress of those mighty spiritual Imaginations. 

Now the souls who enter their earthly life in such condition feel the need, 
to begin with, to experience again here upon Earth—in the way that is possible 
on Earth—what they experienced in their pre-earthly life as a determining factor 
for their karmic work. For the former kind, for the former group of souls, the 
life in the first half of the 19th century took its course in such a way that they felt 
themselves impelled by a deep longing to partake in that supersensible cult or 
ritual. Yet they came to it—if I may so describe it—in a vague and mystic mood, 
so that when they afterwards descended to the Earth, only dim recollections 
remained to them ; albeit Anthroposophy, transformed into its earthly shape, 
could make itself intelligible to them through these recollections. But with the 
second group it was different. It was as though they found themselves together 
again in the living after-effect of the resolve that they had made. For they, even 
then, had not been quite weary of Paganism. They still stood in expectation of 
being able to become Christians in a true way of evolution. And now it was as 
though they remembered a resolve that they had made during that first half of 
the 19th century: a resolve to carry down on to the Earth all that had stood 
before them in such mighty pictures, and to translate it into an earthly form. 

When we look at many an anthroposophist who bears within him the impulse 
above all to work and co-operate with Anthroposophy most actively, we find 
among such anthroposophists souls of the kind that I have now described. The 
two types can be distinguished very clearly. 

Now, my dear friends, perhaps you will say: All that you have here told 
us may explain many things in the Karma of the Anthroposophical Society ; 


40 


but one may well grow anxious : ‘ What is coming next ?’—seeing that so many 
things are being explained about which one might well prefer not to be torn 
away from blissful ignorance. Are we now to set to work and think, whether 
we belong to the one type or the other? My dear friends, to this I must give 
a very definite answer. If the Anthroposophical Society were merely to contain 
a theoretic teaching or a confession of belief in such and such ideas of 
cosmology, Christology, etc_—if such were the character of this Society—it would 
certainly not be what it is intended to be by those who stand at its Fountain-head. 
Anthroposophy shall be something which for a true anthroposophist has power 
to change and transform his life, to carry into the Spiritual what is experienced 
nowadays only in unspiritual forms of expression. 

I will ask you this: Has it a very bad effect upon a child when at a certain 
age certain things are explained to him or her? Until a certain age is reached, 
the children do not know whether they are French or Germans, Norwegians, 
~- Belgians or Italians. At any rate this whole way of thinking has little meaning 
for them until a certain age. One may say, they know nothing of it in reality. 
We need only put it radically :—You will surely not have met many Chauvinist 
babies, or even three-year-old Chauvinists!...... It is only at a certain age 
that we become aware: I am German, I am a Frenchman, I am an Englishman, 
I am a Dutchman and so on. Yet in accepting these things, do we not grow into 
them quite naturally ? Do we say it is a thing unbearable, to discover at a certain 
age of childhood that we are a Pole or a Frenchman, or a German or a Russian 
or a Dutchman ?...... We are used to these things, we take them as a matter 
of course. But this, my dear friends, is in the external realm of the senses. 
Anthroposophy is to raise the whole life of man to a higher level. We must learn 
to bear different things, things which will only shock us in the life of the senses 
if we misunderstand them. And among the things we are to learn to recognise 
there is this too :—We must grow just as naturally and simply into the self- 
knowledge which is, to realise that we belong to the one type or the other. 

By this means too, the foundation will be created for a right estimation of 
the other karmic impulses in our lives. Hence it was necessary, as a kind of 
first direction, to show how the individual—according to the special manner of 
his pre-destination—stands in relation tothis Anthroposophy, to this Christology, 
and in relation to the greater degree of activity or passivity within the Anthro- 
posophical Movement. 

Of course there are transitions too, between the one type and the other. 
These however are due to the fact that that which comes over from the previous 
incarnation into the present is still irradiated by a yet earlier incarnation. Especially 
with the souls of the second group, this is often the case. Many things still 


41 


shine over from their genuinely Heathen incarnations. For this reason they have 
a very definite pre-disposition to take the Christ in the sense in which He must 
truly be taken, namely as a Cosmic Being. But what I am now saying shows 
itself not so very much in the ideal considerations ; it shows itself far more in the 
practical things of life. The two types can be recognised far better by the way 
in which they tackle the detailed situations of life than by their thoughts. Thoughts 
indeed have no great significance—I mean, the abstract thoughts have no such 
great significance for man. So, for instance (needless to say, the personal element 
is always to be excluded here) we shall frequently find the transition types from 
the one to the other among those who somehow cannot help carrying over the 
habits of non-anthroposophical life into the Anthroposophical Movement. I 
mean, those who are not even inclined to take the Anthroposophical Movement 
so very seriously, and those above all who are always grumbling in the Anthro- 
posophical Movement, finding fault with the anthroposophists. Precisely among. 
those who are always finding fault with the conditions in the Anthroposophical 
Movement, especially with the personalities and all the little petty things, we 
find the transition types, flickering from the one into the other. For in such 
cases the intensity of neither of the two impulses is very strong. 

Therefore, my dear friends, at all costs—even though it may sometimes 
mean a searching of conscience and character—we must somehow find it possible, 
each one of us, to deepen the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction, 
approaching such realities as these and thinking a little earnestly on this: How 
do we, according to our own supersensible nature, belong to the Anthroposophical 
Movement? If we do this, there will arise a purer conception of the Anthro- 
posophical Movement ; it will become in course of time an ever more spiritual 
conception. What we have hitherto maintained in theory—and it need not go 
so very deep, when we merely stand for it as a theory—this we shall now apply 
to real life. It is indeed an intense application to life, when we learn to place 
ourselves, our own life, into connection with these things. To talk alot of Karma, 
saying that such and such things are punished or rewarded thus and thus from 
_one life to the next, need not strike so very deep ; it need not hurt us. But when 
it reaches so to speak into our own flesh and blood—when it is a question of 
placing our own present incarnation, with the perfectly definite supersensible 
quality that underlies it—then indeed it goes far nearer to our being. And it is 
this deepening of the human being which we must bring into all earthly life, 
into all earthly civilisation through Anthroposophy. 

This, my dear friends, was a kind of Intermezzo in our studies, and we will 
continue from this point next Friday. 


42 


LECTURE s. 


SPIRITUAL CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION 
LEADING UP TO THE ANTHROPOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT. 


Dornach, 11th July, 1924. 
My Dear FRIENDS, 


The members of the Anthroposophical Society come into the Society, as 
indeed is obvious, for reasons that lie in their inner life, in the inner condition of 
their souls. And as we are now speaking of the Karma of the Anthroposophical 
Society, nay of the Anthroposophical Movement altogether, showing how it 
arises out of the karmic evolution of members and groups of members, we shall 
need to perceive the foundations of this Karma above all in the state of soul 
of those human beings who seek for Anthroposophy. This we have already 
begun to do, and we will now acquaint ourselves with certain other facts in this 
direction, so that we may enter still further into the Karma of the Anthroposo- 
phical Movement. 

Most important in the soul condition of anthroposophists, as I have already 
said, are the experiences which they underwent in their incarnations during the 
first centuries of the founding of Christianity. As I said, there may have been 
other intervening incarnations; but that incarnation is above all important, 
which we find, approximately, in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth 
century A.D. In considering this incarnation we found that we must distinguish 
two groups among the human beings who come to the Anthroposophical Move- 
ment. ‘These two groups we have already characterised. We are now going to 
consider something which they have in common. We shall consider a significant 
common element, lying at the foundation of the souls who have undergone such 
lines of evolution as I described in the last lecture. 

Looking at the first Christian centuries, we find ourselves in an age when 
men were very different from what they are today. When the man of today 
awakens from sleep, he slips down into his physical body with great rapidity, 
though with the reservation which I mentioned here not long ago, when I said 
that this entry and expansion into the physical body really lasts the whole day 
long. Be that as it may, the perception that the Ego and the astral body are 


43 


approaching takes place very quickly. For the awakening human being in the 
present age, there is, so to speak, no intervening time between the becoming- — 
aware of the etheric body and the becoming-aware of the physical. Man passes 
rapidly through the perception of the etheric body—simply does not notice the 
etheric body,—and dives down at once into the physical. This is a peculiarity 
of the man of the present time. 

The nature of the human beings who lived in those early Christian centuries 
was different. When they awoke from sleep they had a distinct perception : 
‘“‘T am entering a two-fold entity: the etheric body and the physical.” ‘They 
knew that man first passes through the perception of the etheric body, and then 
only enters into the physical. ‘Thus indeed, in their moment of awakening they 
had before them—though not a complete tableau of life—still very many pictures 
of their past earthly life. And they had before them another thing, which I 
shall describe directly. For if man enters thus, stage by stage, into that which 
remains lying on the couch, into the etheric and physical bodies,—the result is 
that the whole period of waking life becomes very different from the experiences 
which we have in our waking life today. 

Again, when we consider the moment of falling asleep nowadays, the peculiar 
thing is this :—when the Ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric, the 
Ego very quickly absorbs the astral body. And as the Ego confronts the Cosmos 
without any kind of support, being unable at its present stage to perceive anything 
at all, man as he falls asleep ceases to have perceptions. For the little that emerges 
in his dreams is quite sporadic. 

This again was not so in the times of which I am now speaking. The Ego 
did not at once absorb the astral body; the astral body continued to exist, 
independently in its own substance, even after the human being had fallen asleep. 
And to a certain extent, it remained so through the whole night. Thus in the 
morning the human being awakened not from utter darkness of unconsciousness, 
but with the feeling :—‘‘ I have been living in a world filled with light, in which 
all manner of things were happening.” Albeit they were only pictures, some- 
thing was taking place there. It was so indeed: the man of that time had an 
intermediate feeling, an intermediate sensation between sleeping and waking. 
It was delicate, it was light and intimate, but it was there. It was only with 
the beginning of the 14th century that this condition ceased completely in 
civilised mankind. 

Now this means that all the souls, of whose life I was speaking the other day, 
experienced the world differently from the man of the present time. Let us try 
to understand, my dear friends, how those human beings—that is to say you 
yourselves, all of you, during that time—experienced the world. 


44 


The diving down into the etheric and physical body took place in distinct 
stages. And the effect of this was that throughout his waking life man looked 
out upon Nature differently. He saw not the bare, prosaic, matter-of-fact world 
of the senses, seen by the man of modern times, who—if he would make any 
more of it—can only do so by his fancy or imagination. No, when the man 
of that time looked out, upon the world of plants, for instance, he saw the flowering 
meadow land as though there were spread over it a slight and gentle bluish-red 
cloud-halo. Especially at the time of day when the sun was shining less brightly 
(not at the height of noontide), it was as though a bluish-red light, like a luminous 
mist with manifold and moving waves and colours, were spread over the flowering 
meadow. What we see today, when a slight mist hangs over the meadow (which 
comes of course from evaporated water),—such a thing was seen at that time 
in the spiritual, in the astral. Indeed every tree-top was seen enveloped in a 
cloud, and when man saw the fields of corn, it was as though bluey-red rays were 
descending from the Cosmos, springing forth in clouds of mist, descending into 
the soil of the earth. 

And when man looked at the animals, he had not merely an impression of 
the physical shape, but the physical was enveloped in an astral aura. Slightly, 
delicately, and only intimately, this aura was seen. Nay, it was only seen when 
the sunshine light was working in a rather gentle way ;—but seen it was. Thus 
everywhere in outer Nature man still perceived the spiritual, working and weaving. 

Then, when he died, the experience he had in the first days after passing 
through the gate of death——gazing back upon the whole of his past earthly life— 
was in reality not unfamiliar to him. As he looked back upon his earthly life 
directly after death, he had a distinct feeling. He said to himself: Now I am 
letting go that quality, that aura from my own organism, which goes out into all 
that I have seen of the aura in external nature. My etheric body goes to its own 
home. Such was man’s feeling. 

Naturally all these feelings had been much stronger in more ancient times. 
But they still existed—though in a slight and delicate form—in the time of which 
I am now speaking. And when man beheld these things directly after passing 
through the gate of death, he had the feeling : “In all the spiritual life and move- 
ment which I have seen hovering over the things and processes of Nature, the 
Word of the Father-God is speaking. My etheric body is going to the Father.” 

And if man thus saw the outer world of Nature differently owing to the 
different mode of his awakening, so too he saw his own outer form differently 
than in subsequent ages. When he fell asleep the astral body was not immediately 
absorbed by the Ego. Now under such conditions the astral body itself is filled 
with sound. Thus from spiritual worlds there sounded into the sleeping human 


45 


Ego,—though no longer so distinctly as in ancient times, still in a gentle and 
intimate way,—all manner of things which cannot be heard in the waking state. 
And on awakening man had the very real feeling: It was a language of spiritual 
Beings in the light-filled spaces of the Cosmos in which I partook between my 
falling asleep and my awakening. 

And when man had laid aside the etheric body a few days after passing 
through the gate of death, to live henceforth in his astral body, he had once more 
this feeling : ‘‘ In my astral body I now experience in a returning course all that I 
thought and did on earth. In this astral body in which I lived every night 
during my sleep,—herein I am experiencing all that I thought and did on earth.” 
Moreover, while he had carried into his awakening moments only a vague and 
undetermined feeling, he now had a far clearer feeling. Now in the time between 
death and a new birth, as in his astral body he returned through his past earthly 
life, he had the feeling: ‘‘ Behold in this my astral body lives the Christ. I 
only did not notice it, but in reality every night my astral body dwelt in the 
essence and being of the Christ.” Now man knew, that for as long as he 
would have to go thus backward through his earthly life Christ would not desert 
him, for Christ was with his astral body. 

My dear friends, it is so indeed, whatever may have been one’s attitude 
to Christianity in those first Christian centuries, whether it was like the first 
group of whom I spoke or like the second, whether one had still lived as it were 
with the more Pagan strength, or with the weariness of Christianity, one was 
sure to experience—if not on earth, then after death—the great fact of the Mystery 
of Golgotha ; Christ who had been the ruling Being of the Sun, had united him- 
self with what lives as humanity on earth. Such was the experience of all who 
had come in any way near to Christianity in the first centuries of Christian 
evolution. For the others, these experiences after their death remained more 
or less unintelligible. 

Such were the fundamental differences in the experience of souls in the 
first Christian centuries, and afterwards. Now all this had another effect as 
well. For when man looked out upon the world of Nature in his waking life, 
he felt this world of Nature as the essential domain of the Father God. All 
the spiritual that he beheld living and moving there, was for him the expression, 
the manifestation and the glory of the Father God. And he felt : This world, 
in the time when Christ appeared on earth, stood verily in need of something. 
It was the need that Christ should be received into the substance of the Earth 
for Mankind. In relation to all the processes of Nature and the whole realm of 
Nature, man still had the feeling of a living principle of Christ. For indeed, 
his perception of Nature, inasmuch as he beheld a spiritual living and moving 


46 


and holding sway there, involved something else as well. All this which he felt 
as a spiritual living and moving and holding sway,—hovering in ever-changing 
spirit-shapes over all plant and animal existence,—all this he felt so that with 
simple and unbiassed human feeling he would describe it in the words: It is 
the innocence of Nature’s being. Yes, my dear friends, what he could thus 
spiritually see was called in truth: the innocence in the kingdom of Nature. 
He spoke of the pure and innocent spirituality in all the working of Nature. 

But the other thing, which he felt inwardly—feeling when he awakened 
that in his sleep he had been in a world of light and sounding spiritual being—of 
this he felt that good, and evil too, might there prevail. In this he felt, as it sounded 
forth from the depths of spiritual being, good spirits and evil spirits too were 
speaking. Of the good spirits he felt that they only wanted to raise to a higher 
level the innocence of Nature and to preserve it ; but the evil spirits wanted to 
adulterate with guilt this guiltlessness of Nature. Wherever such Christians 
lived as I am now describing, the powers of good and evil were felt through 
the very fact that as man slept the Ego was not drawn in and absorbed into the 
astral body. 

Not all who called themselves Christians in that time, or who were in any 
way near to Christianity, were in this state of soul. Nevertheless there were 
many people living in the southern and middle regions of Europe, who said : 
“ Verily, my inner being that lives its independent life from the time I fall asleep 
till I awaken, belongs to the region of a good and to the region of an evil world.” 
Again and again men thought and pondered about the depth of the forces that 
bring forth the good and the evil in the human soul. Heavily they felt the fact 
that the human soul is placed into a world where good and evil powers battle 
with one another. In the very first centuries of Christianity, such feelings were 
not yet present in the southern and middle regions of Europe, but in the fifth 
and sixth centuries they became more and more frequent. Especially among 
those who received knowledge and teachings from the East (and as we know such 
teachings from the East came over in manifold ways), this mood of soul arose. 
It was especially widespread in those regions to which the name Bulgaria after- 
wards came to be applied. (In a strange way the name persisted even though 
quite different peoples inhabited these regions). ‘Thus in later centuries, and 
indeed for a very long time in Europe, those in whom this mood of soul was most 
strongly developed were called ‘ Bulgars.’ ‘ Bulgars "—for the people of Western 
and Middle Europe in the later Christian centuries of the first half of the Middle 
Ages—Bulgars were human beings who were most strongly touched by this 
opposition of the good and evil cosmic spiritual powers. i 

Throughout Europe we find the name ‘ Bulgar’ applied to human beings 


47 


such as I have characterised. Now the souls of whom I am here speaking, had 
been to a greater or lesser degree in this very mood of soul. I mean the souls 
who in the further course of their development beheld those mighty pictures 
in the super-sensible ceremony, in which they themselves actively took part,— 
all of which happened in the spiritual world in the first half of the 19th century. 
All that they had lived through when they had known themselves immersed in 
the battle between good and evil, was carried by them through their life between 
death anda new birth. And this gave a certain shade and colouring to these 
souls as they stood before the mighty cosmic pictures. 

To all this yet another thing was added. These souls were indeed the last 
in European civilisation to preserve a little of that distinct perception of the 
etheric and the astral body in waking and sleeping. Recognising one another 
by these common peculiarities of their inner life, they had generally lived in 
communities. And among the other Christians, who became more and more 
attached to Rome, they were regarded as heretics. Heretics were not yet con- 
demned as harshly as in later centuries. Still, they were regarded as heretics. 
Indeed the others always had a certain uncanny feeling about them. They had 
the impression that these people saw more than other folk. It was as though 
they were related to the Divine in a different way through the fact that they 
perceived the sleeping state differently than the others among whom they dwelt. 
For the others had long lost this faculty and had approached more nearly to the 
condition of soul which became general in Europe in the 14th century. 

Now when these human beings—who had the distinct perception of the 
astral and the etheric body—passed through the gate of death, then also they 
were different from the others. Nor must we imagine, my dear friends, that 
man between death and a new birth is altogether without share in what is taking 
place through human beings on the Earth. Just as we look up from here into 
the spiritual world of Heaven, so between death and a new birth man looks down 
from that world on to the Earth. Just as we here partake with interest in the 
life of spiritual beings, so from the spiritual world one partakes in the experiences 
of earthly beings upon Earth. After the age which I have hitherto been describing 
there came the time when Christendom in Europe was arranging its existence 
under the assumption that man has no longer any knowledge of his astral or 
his etheric body. Christianity was now preparing to speak about the spiritual 
worlds without being able to presume any such knowledge or consciousness 
among men. For you must think, my dear friends, when the early Christian 
teachers, in the first few centuries, spoke to their Christians—though they already 
found a large number who were only able to accept the truth of their words by 
external authority—nevertheless the simpler more child-like feeling of that time 


48 


enabled men to accept such words, when spoken from a warm and enthusiastic 
heart. And of the warmth and enthusiasm of heart with which the men of those 
first Christian centuries could preach, people to-day, where so much has gone 
into the mere preaching-of-words, have no conception. Those however who 
were still able to speak to souls such as I have described to-day,—what kind of 
words could they speak? ‘They, my dear friends, could say: ‘ Behold what 
shows itself in the rainbow-shining glory over the plants, what shows itself as the 
desire-nature about the animals,—lo, this is the reflection, this is the manifestation 
of the spiritual world from which the Christ has come.’ Speaking to such men 
about the truths of spiritual wisdom, they could speak, not as of a thing unknown, 
but in such a way as to remind their hearers of what they could still behold under 
certain conditions in the gently luminous light of the Sun: The Spirit in the 
world of Nature. Again when they spoke to them of the Gospels which tell of 
spiritual worlds and spiritual Mysteries or of the secrets of the Old Testament, 
then again they spoke to them not as of a thing unknown, but they could say : 
“Here is the Word of the Testament. It has been written down by human 
beings, who heard, more fully and clearly than you, the whispered language of 
that spiritual world in which your souls are dwelling from the time you fall 
asleep till you awaken. But you too know something of this language, for you 
remember it when you awaken in the morning.” Thus it was possible to speak 
to them of the spiritual as of something known to them. In the conversation 
of the priests or preachers of that time with these men, something was contained 
of what was already going on in their own souls. So in that time the Word 
was still alive and could be cultivated in a living way. 

Then when these souls, to whom one had still been able to speak in the 
living Word, had passed through the gate of death, they looked down again upon 
the earth, and beheld the evening twilight of the living Word below. And they 
had the feeling that it was the twilight of the Logos. ‘ ‘The Logos is darkening ” 
—such was the underlying feeling in their souls. After their life in the 7th, 
8th or gth century (or somewhat earlier) when they had passed through the gate 
of death again and looked down upon the Earth, they felt: “ Down there upon 
the Earth is the evening twilight of the living Logos.” Well may there have lived 
in these souls the Word: “ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. 
But human beings are less and less able to afford a home, a dwelling place for the 
Word that is to live within the flesh, that is to live on upon the Earth.” This, I 
say again, was an underlying mood, it was indeed the dominant feeling among 
these souls, as they lived in the spiritual world between the 7th or 8th and the 
19th or 20th Century, no matter whether their sojourn there was interrupted by 
another life on Earth. It remained their fundamental underlying feeling : “ Christ 


49 


lives indeed for the Earth, since for the Earth He died; but the Earth cannot 
receive Him. Somehow there must arise on Earth the power for souls to be 
able to receive the Christ.” 

Beside all the other things I have described, this feeling became more and 
more living in the souls who had been stigmatised during their earthly time as 
heretics. This feeling grew in them between their death and the coming of a 
renewed revelation of the Christ—a new declaration of His Being. 

In this condition of their souls, these human beings—disembodied as they 
were—witnessed what was happening on Earth. It was something hitherto 
unknown to them, nevertheless they learned to understand what was going on 
on Earth below. They saw how souls on Earth were less and less taken hold of 
by the spirit, till there were no more human beings left, to whom it was possible 
to speak such words as these: ‘ We tell you of the Spirit whom you yourselves 
can still behold hovering over the world of plants, gleaming around the animals. 
We instruct you in the Testament that was written out of the spiritual sounds 
whose whispering you still can hear when you feel the echo of your experiences 
of the night.’ This was no more. 

Looking down from above they saw how different these things were now 
becoming. For in the development of Christendom a substitute was being 
introduced for the old way of speaking. For a long time, though the vast majority 
to whom the preachers spoke had no longer any direct consciousness of the 
Spiritual in their earthly life, still the whole tradition, the whole custom of their 
speech came down to them from the older times,—I mean, from the time when 
one knew, as one spoke to men about the Spirit, that they themselves still had 
some feeling of what it was. It was only about the gth, roth or 11th century 
that these things vanished altogether. Then there arose quite a different con- 
dition even in the listener. Until that time, when a man listened to another, 
who, filled with a divine enthusiasm, spoke out of the Spirit, he had the feeling 
as he listened that he was going a little out of himself. He was going out a little, 
into his etheric body. He was leaving the physical body to a slight extent. He 
was approaching the astral body more nearly. It was literally true, men still 
had a slight feeling of being ‘ transported ’ as they listened. Nor did they care 
so very much in those times for the mere hearing of words. What they valued 
most was the inward experience, however slight, of being transported—carried 
away. Men experienced with living sympathy the words that were spoken by 
a God-inspired man. 

But from the gth, roth, or 11th, and towards to the 14th century, this vanished 
altogether. The mere listening became more and more common. Therefore 
the need arose to make one’s appeal to something different, when one spoke of 


50 


spiritual things. The need arose somehow to draw forth from the listener what 
one wanted him to have as a conception of the spiritual world. The need arose 
as it were to work upon him, until at length he should feel impelled even out 
of his hardened body to say something about the spiritual world. Thus there 
arose the need to give instruction about spiritual things in the play of question 
and answer. There is always a suggestive element in questions. And when 
one asked: What is baptism? Having prepared the human being so that he 
would give a certain answer ; or when one asked : What is Confirmation ? What 
is the Holy Spirit ? What are the seven deadly sins ?—when one trained them 
in this play of question and answer, one provided a substitute for the simple 
elemental listening. To begin with this was done with those who entered the 
Schools where this was first made possible. Through question and answer, what 
they had to say about the spiritual worlds was thoroughly brought home to 
them. In this way the Catechism arose. 

We must indeed look at such events as this. For these things were really 
witnessed by the souls who were up there in the spiritual world and who now 
looked down to Earth. They said to themselves : something must now approach 
man which it was quite impossible for us to know in our lives, for it did not lie 
near to us at all. 

It was a mighty impression when the Catechism was arising down upon the 
Earth. Very little is given when historians outwardly describe the rise of the 
Catechism, but much is given, my dear friends, when we behold it as it appeared 
from the supersensible : ‘‘ Down there upon the Earth men are having to undergo 
things altogether new in the very depths of their souls; they are having to 
learn by way of Catechism what they are to believe.” Herewith I have described 
a certain feeling, but there is another which I must describe to you as follows :— 
We must go back once more into the first centuries of Christendom. In those 
times it was not yet possible for a Christian simply to go into a church, to sit 
down or to kneel, and then to hear the mass right through from the beginning— 
from the “ Introitus ’—to the prayers which follow the Holy Communion. It 
was not possible for all Christians to attend the whole Mass through. Those 
who became Christians were divided into two groups. ‘There were the Cate- 
chumenoi who were allowed to attend the Mass till the reading of the Gospel 
was over. After the Gospel the Offertory was prepared, and then they had to 
leave. Only those who had been prepared for a considerable time for the holy 
inner feeling in which one was allowed to behold the Mystery of Transubstan- 
tiation, only these—the Transubstantii as they were called—were allowed to 
remain and hear the Mass through to the end. 

That was a very different way of partaking in the Mass. Now the human 


51 


beings of whom we have been speaking (who in their souls underwent the con- 
ditions I described, who looked down on to the Earth and perceived this strange 
Catechism-teaching, which would have been so impossible for them)—they, in 
their religious worship too, had more or less preserved the old Christian custom 
of not allowing a man to take part in the whole Mass till he had undergone a 
longer preparation. They were still conscious of an Exoteric and an Esoteric 
portion in the Mass. They regarded as esoteric all that was done from the 
Transubstantiation onward. 

Now once more they looked down and beheld what was going on in the 
outer ritual of Christendom. They saw that the whole Mass had become exoteric. 
The whole Mass was being enacted even before those who had not entered 
into any special mood of soul by special preparation. “Can a man on Earth 
really approach the Mystery of Golgotha, if in unconsecrated mood he witnesses 
the Transubstantiation ?”? Such was their feeling as they looked down from the 
life that takes its course between death and a new birth: ‘“ Christ is no longer 
being recognised in His true being; the sacred ceremony is no longer under- 
stood.” 

Such feelings poured themselves out within the souls whom I have now been 
describing. Moreover they looked down upon that which became a sacred 
symbol in the reading of the Mass, the so-called Sanctissimum wherein the Host 
is carried on a crescent cup. It is a living symbol of the fact that once upon a 
time the great Sun-Being was looked for in the Christ. For the very rays of the 
Sun are represented on every Sanctissimum, on every Monstrance. But the 
connection of the Christ with the Sun had been lost. Only in the symbol was 
it preserved ; and in the symbol it has remained until this day. Yet even in the 
symbol it was not understood, nor is it understood today. This was the second 
feeling that sprang forth in their souls, intensifying their sense of the need for 
a new Christ-experience that was to come. 

In the next lecture, the day after tomorrow, we will continue to speak of the 
Karma of the Anthroposophical Society. 


52 


LECTURE 6. 


THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES. 


Dornach, 13th July, 1924. 
My DEAR FRIENDS, 


Among the spiritual conditions of evolution that have led to the Anthroposo- 

phical Movement and that are contained within its Karma from the spiritual 
side, I have mentioned two external symptoms. The one is expressed in the 
rise of the Catechism with its questions and answers, leading towards a faith 
which is no longer i in direct touch with the spiritual world. The other is repre- 
sented by the Mass becoming exoteric. The Mass in its totality, including the 
Transubstantiation and Holy Communion, was made accessible to all, even to 
the unprepared. Tt thus lost its character of an ancient Mystery. 
These two earthly events led those who observed them from the spiritual 
world to prepare in a very definite way, within the stream of spiritual evolution, 
for what was to become a spiritual revelation at the turn of the 19th and 2oth 
centuries,—a revelation fitly adapted to the course of time. For this new spiritual 
revelation had to come after the Michael event, and in the time when the old, 
dark Age of Kali Yuga had run its course and a new Age was to arise for humanity. 
Today we have a third thing to add. We must first bring before our souls 
these three spiritual conditions, which were able to draw together a number of 
human beings even before they descended into the physical world in the last 
third of the 19th or at the turn of the 19th and 2oth centuries. For only when 
we are aware of these conditions, shall we be able to understand certain extra- 
karmic events which flowed into the streams of life that are welded together in 
the Anthroposophical Movement. 

The peculiar attitude to Nature on the one hand and to things spiritual on 
the other, which has evolved so greatly by our time, comes down to us only from 
the period that began in the 14th (15th) century. Before that time, the relation- 
ship of mankind especially to the things of the Spirit was very different. Man 
approached the Spirit not in concepts and ideas but in living experiences that 
still penetrated to the Spiritual, however slightly. 


53 


We to-day, when we speak of Nature, have a dead abstraction—empty of all 
being. And when we speak of the Spirit, we have something vague whose exist- 
ence we presume somehow or other in the world, and comprise it in abstract 
concepts or ideas. It was not so in the time when the souls who are now finding 
their way together in the longing for a new Spirituality, had their important 
former incarnation,—when in that incarnation they harkened to what Initiates 
and Leaders of Mankind had to tell them for their inner needs. To begin with 
we have the age that goes on into the 7th or 8th century, when we still find a 
delicate connection of the human soul with the spiritual world—a_ conscious 
experience of the spiritual world itself. Even the men of knowledge and learning 
in that time were still in a living relationship to the spiritual world. Then we 
have the age beginning in the 7th or 8th century and going on to the great turning 
point in the 14th and 15th,—the time when the human souls who had lived in 
the first Christian centuries, partaking in that former period upon the Earth, 
were once more in the life between death and a new birth. 

But though—from the 6th, 7th or 8th century onwards—there was no direct 
connection with the spiritual world, nevertheless a certain awareness of this 
connection still found a haven of refuge, if I may put it so, in isolated centres of 
learning. In isolated centres of learning men still spoke, in knowledge, in the 
way they had spoken in the first Christian centuries. Nay more, it was possible 
for single, chosen human beings to receive deep inner impulses from the way 
in which the spiritual world was spoken of,—impulses enabling them, at certain 
times at least, to break through into the spiritual world. There were indeed 
isolated centres where teachings were given in a manner of which the people of 
today can have no conception. 

This only came to an end in the 12th, 13th century ; when at length it all 
flowed into a great poem in which it found as it were its consummation for the 
experience of mankind. I mean the Divina Commedia of Dante. 

In all that lies behind the origin of the Commedia we have a wonderful 
chapter of human evolution. For at this moment the influences from the Earth 
and from the Cosmos are found in perpetual interplay. The two were ever 
flowing into one another. Human beings on Earth had lost, to some extent, 
the connection with the spiritual world. And in those who lived above—who, 
while on earth, had still experienced such a connection,—the earthly conditions 
which they now beheld called forth a strangely painful feeling. They saw the 
slow death of what they themselves had still experienced on Earth. Then from 
the supersensible world they enthused—inspired—inspirited—certain individual- 
ities in the world of sense, so that here or there at any rate there might arise a 
home and centre for the real connection of man with the spiritual world. 


54 


Let us clearly bear in mind what I indicated here many years ago. Even 
until the 7th or 8th century—in a kind of echo of pre-Christian initiation— 
Christianity was taught in centres that had remained as the high places of know- 
ledge, relics of the ancient Mysteries. In those centres human beings were 
prepared, not so much by way of instruction, but by an education towards the 
Spirit—a training both bodily and spiritual. They were prepared ‘for the moment 
when they might have at least a delicate vision of the spirituality that can manifest 
itself in the environment of man on Earth. Then they looked outward to the 
realms of mineral and plant-nature and to all that lives in the animal and 
human kingdoms. And they saw, springing forth like an aura and fertilised 
in turn out of the Cosmos, the Spiritual-elemental beings that lived in all Nature. 

Then above all there appeared to them as a living Being, whom they addressed 
as they would address a human being—only it was a being of a higher kind,—the 
Goddess Natura. She was the Goddess whom they saw before them in Her 
full radiance, in full reality of soul. They did not speak of abstract laws of Nature, 
they spoke of the creative power of the Goddess Natura, working creatively in 
all external Nature. 

She was the metamorphosis of Proserpine of antiquity. She was the ever- 
creating Goddess with whom he who would seek for knowledge must in a certain 
way unite himself. She appeared to him—appeared to him from every mineral, 
from every plant, from every creeping beast, from the clouds, the mountains, the 
river-springs. Of this Goddess who alternately in winter and in summer creates 
above the earth and beneath,—of this Goddess they felt : She is the hand-maid of 
that Divinity of whom the Gospels tell. She it is who fulfils the Divine behests. 
And when the seeker after knowledge had been sufficiently instructed by the 
Goddess about the mineral and plant and animal natures, when he was introduced 
into the living forces, then he learned to know from Her the nature of the four 
Elements :—Earth, Water, Air and Fire. He learned to know the waving and 
weaving within the mineral and animal and plant kingdoms of the four elements 
which pour themselves in all reality throughout the world :—Earth, Water, Fire, 
Air. He felt himself with his etheric body interwoven with the life of Earth in its 
gravity, Water in its life-giving power, Air in its power to awaken sentient con- 
sciousness, Fire in its power to kindle the flame of the I. In all this he felt his 
human being interwoven, and he felt : This was the gift of instruction from the 
Goddess Natura—the successor, the metamorphosis of Proserpine. ‘The teachers 
saw to it that their disciples should gain a feeling, an idea of this living inter- 
course with Nature—Nature filled with divine forces, filled with divine substance. 
They saw to it that their pupils should penetrate to the living and weaving of 


the elements. 


25 


Then when they had reached this point, they were introduced to the planetary 
system. They learnt how with the knowledge of the planetary system there 
arises at the same time the knowledge of the human soul. ‘ Learn to know how 
the wandering stars hold sway in the heavens, and thou shalt know how thine 
own soul works and weaves and lives within thee.’”’ This was placed before the 
pupils. And at length they were led to approach what was called “ The Great 
Ocean,”—but it was the Cosmic Ocean, which leads from the planets, from the 
wandering stars, to the fixed stars. Thus at length they penetrated into the 
secrets of the I, by learning the secrets of the Universe of the fixed stars. 

Mankind today has forgotten that such instructions were ever given; but 
they were. A living knowledge of this kind was cultivated until the 7th or 8th 
century in the last relics of the ancient Mysteries. And as a doctrine—as a 
theory—it was still cultivated even until that turn of the 14th and 15th centuries 
of which we have so often spoken. In certain centres we still see these old 
teachings cultivated, though with the greatest imaginable difficulties. They were 
well-nigh shadowed-down to concepts and ideas; yet the concepts and ideas 
were still living enough to kindle, in one man and another, the upward vision of 
all the Realities of which I spoke just now. 

In the 11th and especially the 12th Century, reaching on to the 13th, a 
truly “wonderful School existed. In this School there were teachers who still 
knew how the pupils in preceding centuries had been led to a conscious experience 
of the Spirit. It was the great School of Chartres. Here there flowed together all the 
conceptions that had issued from the living spiritual life which I have ‘described. 
~~ Wonderful 1 masterpieces of architecture are to be seen in Chartres to this 
day. ‘Thither there had come above all a ray of the still living wisdom of Peter 
of Compostella, who had worked in Spain. He had cultivated a living exemplary 
Christianity, speaking still of Natura the handmaid of Christ, and describing 
still how when great Nature has introduced man to the elements, to the planetary 
world, to the world of stars, then and then only does he become ripe to make 
acquaintance in very reality of soul with the seven helpmates, who come before 
the human soul, not in abstract chapters of theory, but as the living Goddesses : 
Grammatica, Dialectica, Rhetorica, Arithmetica, Geometria, Astronomia, Musica. 
The pupils learned to know them as Divine-spiritual figures, living and real. 

Those who were around Peter of Compostella spoke of them still as living 
figures. His teachings radiated into the School of Chartres. In the same School 
of Chartres there lived, for example, the great Bernard of Chartres, who inspired 
his pupils, for though he could no longer show them the Goddess Natura, nor 
the Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts, still he spoke of these, in so living a way 
that their imagined pictures at least were conjured before his pupils. 


56 


There taught Bernardus Silvestris, raising before his pupils in mighty 
and powerful descriptions what had been the ancient wisdom. 

And above all there was John of Chartres who spoke of the human soul 
with an inspiration truly majestic. It was here that John of Chartres, also known 
as John of Salisbury, unfolded the conceptions wherein he dealt with Aristotle, 
—Aristotelianism. His chosen pupils were so influenced that they arrived at a 
new insight. ‘They saw that such teaching as had existed in the first centuries 
of Christendom could no longer exist on Earth, for earthly evolution could no 
longer bear it. It was made clear to them :—There was an ancient, almost 
clairvoyant knowledge, but it grew darkened. We can only know of Dialectic, 
Rhetoric, Astronomy, Astrology—we can no longer behold the Goddesses of the 
seven Liberal Arts. 

Henceforth Aristotle must work—Aristotle who already in antiquity was 
equal to the concepts and ideas of the fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. 

With an inspiring force, what had thus been taught in the School of Chartres 
was then transplanted to the Order of Cluny, where it was turned to a more 
worldly form in the ecclesiastical enactments of the Abbot Hildebrand—Abbot 
of the Monks of Cluny—who afterwards became Pope under the name of Gregory 
the 7th. 

Meanwhile in the School of Chartres itself these teachings continued to be 
given with remarkable purity. The whole of the 12th century was radiant with 
them. And there was one who was in reality greater than all the others,—who 
taught in Chartres, with what I would call a true inspiration of ideas, the Mysteries 
of the seven Liberal Arts in their connection with Christianity. I mean Alain 
de Lille, Alanus ab Insulis. Alain de Lille at Chartres in the 12th century fired 
his pupils with a true enthusiasm. His great insight showed him that in the 
coming centuries it would no longer be possible to endow the Earth with spiritual 
teachings such as these. For these teachings were not only Platonism ; they 
contained the teachings from the old seership of the pre-Platonic Mysteries, 
with the difference that it had since received Christianity into itself. 

To those in whom he presumed an understanding for such things, Alain de 
Lille taught already in his life-time that an Aristotelian form of knowledge would 
now have to work for awhile on Earth,—Aristotelianism with its sharply defined 
conceptions and ideas. For in this way alone would it be possible to prepare 
for what must come again as a Spirituality in later time. 

To many a human being of to-day who reads the literature of that day, it 
appears dull and dry. But it is by no means dry, when we gain some conception 
of what stood before the souls of those who taught and worked in Chartres. 

And in the poetry too, which went out from Chartres, how vitally do we 


57 


feel the sense of union with the living Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts. In 
the poem ‘ Bataille des Sept Arts,’ deeply penetrating as it is for anyone who 
understands it, we feel the living spiritual breath of the seven Liberal Arts. All 
these things were working in the 12th century. 

You see, all this was living in the spiritual atmosphere ofthat time, and 
was still making itself felt. It was still to some extent akin to the Schools that 
continued to exist in Northern Italy, in Italy generally, and in Spain, though 
their existence was sporadic. Nevertheless these things became transplanted in 
a living way into all manner of spiritual currents on the Earth. ‘Towards the 
end of the 12th century much of this was still working at the University of Orleans, 
where remarkable teachings of this kind were cultivated, and something was still 
present of an inspiration from the School of Chartres. 

And then, one day down in Italy, an Ambassador who had been in Spain, 
standing at that moment under a great historic impression, received a kind of 
sun-stroke, and there arose in him as a great and mighty revelation all that he had 
received as a preparatory training in his School. All this became a mighty 
revelation under the influence of the slight sun-stroke which came over him. 
Then he saw what man could see under the influence of the living principle of 
knowledge : He saw a mountain mightily arising with all that lived and sprang 
forth from it, minerals, plants, and animals, and there appeared to him the 
Goddess Natura, there appeared the Elements, there appeared the Planets, there 
appeared the Goddesses of the seven Liberal Arts, and at length Ovid as his 
guide and teacher. Here once again there stood before a human soul the mighty 
vision that had stood before the souls of men so often in the first centuries of 
Christianity. Such was the vision of Brunetto Latini which was afterwards 
handed down to Dante and from which Dante’s Divina Commedia took its source. 

But there was still another outcome for all those who had worked in Chartres, 
when they passed again through the Gate of Death, and, having passed through 
the Gate of Death, entered the spiritual world. Deeply significant was the 
spiritual life which they had led: Peter of Compostella, Bernard of Chartres, 
Bernardus Sylvestris, John of Chartres (John of Salisbury), Henri d’Andeli, 
author of the poem “ Bataille des Sept Arts,’”’ and above all, Alain de Lille. 
Alain de Lille, in his own style of course, had written the book “‘ Contra Hereticos,” 
where on behalf of Christianity he turned against the heretics, writing directly 
out of the old vision which was in fact the vision of the spiritual world. And 
now, all these souls, these individualities who had been the very last to work 
within the echoes of seership, the wisdom seen in fulness of spiritual light,— 
they all of them entered into the spiritual world. And in that spiritual world 
they came together with other souls, of great significance, who were preparing 


58 


for a new earthly life just at that time. For they were preparing to descend in 
the very near future into an earthly life where they would work in the sense that 
was necessary, to bring about the subsequent turning-point : the turning-point 
of the 14th and 15th century. We have a great spiritual life before us, my dear 
friends. The last great ones of the School of Chartres had just arrived in the 
spiritual world. Those individualities who afterwards brought forth the full 
flower of Scholasticism were still there in the spiritual world, and at the beginning 
of the 13th century there took place one of the most important exchanges of ideas 
behind the scenes of human evolution,—an exchange of ideas between those who 
had carried up the old Platonism, inspired by spiritual vision, from the School of 
Chartres i into the supersensible world, and those on the other hand who were pre- 
paring to carry Aristotelianism down to Earth, as the great transition to bring about 
a new Spirituality that was to flow into the evolution of mankind in the future. 
- They came to an agreement with one another. The individualities from the 
School of Chartres spoke, as it were, to those who were preparing to descend 
into the physical world of sense, who were preparing to cultivate Aristotelianism 
in the Scholastic system which was right for that age. They spoke to them as 
it were, and said: For us it is impossible to work on Earth for the present ; 
for the Earth is not now in a condition to cultivate knowledge in this living way. 
What we, the last bearers of Platonism, were still able to cultivate must now 
give place to Aristotelianism. We will remain up here. 

Thus the great spirits of Chartres remained in the supersensible world, nor 
have they returned hitherto in any earthly incarnations of significance. But they 
were working mightily, helping in the formation of that mighty Imagination in 
the Spiritual World that was formed in the first half of the 19th century and of 
which I have already told you. They worked in full harmony with those who 
descended with their Aristotelianism to the Earth. 

The Dominican Order, above all, contained individualities who lived in this 
kind of “ supersensible contract,” if I may so describe it, with the great spirits of 
Chartres, for they had agreed with them: “ We will descend in order to continue 
the cultivation of knowledge in the Aristotelian form. You will remain up here. 
On Earth too we shall remain in union with you. Platonism for the present 
cannot prosper on the Earth. We shall find you again when we return, and then 
together we will prepare for that time when the period of Scholastic Aristotelianism 
will have been completed in earthly evolution, and it will be possible to unfold 
Spirituality once more in communion with you, with the spirits of Chartres.” 

It was, for example, an event of deep significance when Alain de Lille, as 
he had been called in earthly life, sent down to Earth a pupil well instructed by 
him in the Spiritual world. For in this pupil he sent down on to the Earth all 


59 


the discrepancies, it is true, which could arise between Platonism and Aristotelian- 
ism, but he sent them down so that they might be harmonised through the 
Scholastic principle of that time. Such was the spiritual working, especially in 
the 13th century, to the end that there might flow together the workings of those 
who were on Earth,—who were on Earth for instance in the garment of Domini- 
cans,—and those who had remained in yonder world. For the time being, these 
latter could find no earthly bodies in which to stamp their spirituality. For 
theirs was a spirituality which could not come down to the Aristotelian element. 

So there arose in the 13th century a wonderful cooperation of that which 
was being done on Earth with that which was flowing down from above. Often 
those who were on Earth were not conscious of this working from the other side, 
but those who were working on the other side were all the more conscious. It 
was a truly living co-operation. One would say, the principle of the Mysteries 
had ascended to the Heavens and sent down its Sun-rays thence upon all that 
was working on the Earth. 

This went into all the details and can be traced above all in the detailed 
things that happened. Alain de Lille, in his own earthly life as a teacher of 
Chartres, had only been “able to go so far that at a certain age of life he put on 
the garment of the Cistercians. He became a priest of the Cistercian Order, 
In the Cistercian Order at that time, in the exercises of that Order, the last relics 
of a striving to awaken Platonism—the Platonic world-conception, in unison 
with Christianity—had found a refuge. 

_ The way in which he sent a pupil down to Earth expressed itself in this : 
he sent his pupil down to continue through the Dominican Order the task that 
was now to pass over to Aristotelianism. 

The transition expressed itself outwardly in a remarkable symptom. For the 
pupil of Alanus ab Insulis of whom I am speaking,—his pupil, that is to say, in the 
worlds above the Earth,—having descended to the Earth, first wore the garment 
of a Cistercian, which he only afterwards exchanged for that of a Dominican. 

Such were the individualities who worked together: those who afterwards 


became the leading Schoolmen and their pupils,—human souls long connected 


with one another,—and these in turn united with the great spirits of the School 
of Chartres, united in the sensible and supersensible worlds during the 13th 
and on into the early 14th century. 

Such was the mighty world-historic plan. Those who could not descend 
to Aristotelianism upon Earth remained in the spiritual world above, waiting 
until the purposes in which they were all so intimately united should have been 
carried forward by the others upon Earth, under the influence of the sharply 
outlined concepts and ideas proceeding from Aristotelianism. 


60 


It was really like a conversation upward and downward from the spiritual 
to the earthly world, from the earthly to the spiritual world, in that 13th 
century. 

Indeed it was only into this spiritual atmosphere that true Rosicrucianism 
was able to pour its influence. 

When those who had descended to Earth to give the impulse of Aristotel- 
ianism had accomplished their task, they too were lifted into the spiritual world 
and went on working there: Platonists and Aristotelians together. And now 
there came and gathered round them the souls of whom I have already spoken 
to you—the souls of the two groups I mentioned. 

Thus we find entering into the Karma of the Anthroposophical Movement 
a large number of disciples of Chartres. Entering into this discipleship of Chartres 
we find the souls who had come from one or other of the two Streams of which 
I spoke here in the last few days. It is a large circle of human beings, for many 
are living in this circle who have not as yet found their way to the Anthroposo- 
phical Movement. Nevertheless it is so: what we find in the field of Anthro- 
posophy to-day has been prepared for through these manifold experiences. 

A remarkable influence came over the Cistercian Order for example, when 
Alain de Lille, Alanus ab Insulis, put on the garment of a Cistercian—when he 
with his Platonism became a Cistercian Priest. Indeed this element never left 
the Cistercian Order. In relation to these things which we must now unveil, 
I may perhaps be allowed a few personal observations that could not be included 
in my “‘ Lebensgang.’”’ ‘There was a circumstance in my life which was destined 
to lead me to the knowledge of many an inner connection in this domain, (other 
connections were revealed to me from different quarters). I was led to many 
things through the circumstance that in my life, before the Weimar period, I 
could never escape from the presence, in one way or ‘another, of the Cistercian 
Order ; and yet again I was always somehow kept at a distance from it. I grew 
up, so to speak, in the shadow of the Cistercian Order, which has important 
settlements in the. neighbourhood of Wiener-Neustadt. Those who had to 
educate most of the youth in the district where I grew up, were Priests of the 
Cistercian Order. I had the robe of this Order perpetually before me, the white 
robe with the black band around the anil, or as we call it the stola. Had I had 
occasion to speak of such things in my “‘ Lebensgang ”’ I could have said : Every- 
thing in my life tended in the direction of a Classical Education at the Gymnasium 
and not of that D Modern Education which I actually underwent in the Real-Schule 
in Wiener-Neustadt. Now the Gymnasium in that place was at that time still 
in the hands of the Cistercians. It was a strange play of forces that drew me 
to them and at the same time held me at a distance. 


61 


Again, the whole circle of monks in the Theological Faculty at the University 
of Vienna,—the circle around Marie Eugenie delle Grazie,—consisted of Cister- 
cians. With these Cistercians I had the most intimate theological conversations 
—the most intimate conversations on Christology. I only indicate this fact, 
seeing that it enters into my perception of that period of the 12th century, when 
the flower of the School of Chartres poured its life into the Cistercian Order. 
For indeed, in the peculiarly attractive scholarship of the Cistercians there lived 
on—albeit in a corrupted way—something of the magic of the School of Chartres. 
Important and manifold enquiries were pursued by Cistercians whom I knew 
well. And to me those things were most important which revealed to me: It 
is indeed impossible for any of those who were the disciples of Chartres to incarnate 
at present, and yet it seems as though some of the individualities connected with 
that School became incorporated, if I may call it so, for brief périods, in some of 
the human beings who wore the Cistercian garment. 

Separated, if I may put it so, by a thin wall only, there ever continued to 
work on Earth what was being prepared as I have described it in supersensible 
worlds, leading to that great preparation in the first half of the 19th century. 

And for me it was a highly remarkable experience to have that conversation 
to which I referred in my “ Lebensgang,”—that conversation on the Christ Being 
with a Priest of the Cistercian Order, which took place not in Delle Grazie’s 
house but as we were going away from her house together. For the conversation 
was carried on, not from the present-day dogmatic standpoint of Theology, but 
from the standpoint of Neo-Scholasticism. It went with full depth into the 
things that had once existed upon Earth, with Aristotelian clarity and definition 
of concept, and yet at the same time with Platonic spiritual light. 

That which was to arise in Anthroposophy shone through already, though 
in secret and mysterious ways, through the events of the time. Though indeed 
it could not shine through into human souls where they were harnessed to one 
religious or social group or another, nevertheless it shone through, through the 
connections which certain human souls still had with the great spiritual currents 
that do, after all, work upon the Earth. 

Between the beginning of, the Michael Age and the end of the Kali Yuga, 
it was indeed possible to recognise, in much that was working in individual human 
beings in the most varied domains of life, the language of the Spirit of the Time. 
For the speaking of the Spirit of the Time was a great call for the Anthroposophical 
revelations to come. We saw the living rise of Anthroposophy, as of a being 
that was to be born but that was still resting in a mother’s womb. For it was 
resting in the womb of preparation, that had worked from the first Christian 
centuries towards the School of Chartres, then to be continued in supersensible. 


62 


spheres, in co-operation with what was here on Earth, in the Aristotelian defence 
of Chi Christianity. It was out of these impulses, as we find them expressed in 
Alain de Lille’s work ‘‘ Contra Hereticos,” that there afterwards arose such a 
work as the “ Summa Fidei Catholicae contra Gentiles” of Thomas Aquinas. 
And there arose that characteristic feature of the time which speaks to us from 
all the pictures, where we see the Dominican Doctors of the Church treading 
Averroes, Avicenna and the others under foot. For this indicates the living and 
spirited defence of Spiritual Christianity, and yet withal the transition to In- 
tellectualism. 

My dear friends, I cannot describe this world of facts in any theoretic way ; 
for by theorising, these things are weakened and made pale. Facts I wanted to 
place before your souls,—facts from which you will feel whereto your gaze must 
be directed if you would see those souls, who passed before their present earthly 
life through a spiritual experience between death and a new birth, in such a 
way that when on Earth, they longed for Anthroposophy. 

The most divergent, the most opposite conceptions work together in the 
world, weaving a living whole. 

And today, those who were working in the great School of Chartres in the 
12th century, and those who were united with them at the beginning of the 13th 
century in one of the greatest spiritual communities,—albeit in the supersensible 
world—today again they are working together. The great spirits of Chartres 
are working with those, who in unison with them subsequently cultivated Aris- 
totelianism on the Earth. It matters not, that some of them are working here 
on Earth, while others cannot yet descend to Earth. They are working together 
now, intending a new Spiritual Epoch in earthly evolution. And their great 
purpose now, is to collect the souls who for a long time have been united with 
them,—to gather together the souls with whose help a new spiritual age can 
then be founded. Their purpose is, in one way or another and within a com- 
paratively short time, in the midst of an otherwise decadent civilization, to make 
possible a renewed co-operation in earthly life between the spirits of Chartres 
from the 12th century and the spirits of the 13th century who are united with 
them. ‘Their purpose is to prepare, so that they will be able to work together 
in an earthly life, cultivating Spirituality once more within the civilization which, 
apart from this, is sailing on into destruction and disintegration. 

Intentions that are being cherished today, not upon Earth but as between 
Earth and Heaven, such intentions I have wanted to explain to you. Enter 
deeply into all that lies in these intentions, and you will feel, as a living influence 
upon your souls, the spiritual background, of which the necessary foreground is 
the streaming together of human souls in this Anthroposophical Movement. 


63 


LECTURE 7. 


THE NEW AGE OF MICHAEL. 


Dornach, 28th July, 1924. 
My DEAR FRIENDS, 


We have traced the events in the physical and super-physical worlds which 
underlie what is now striving to make itself known to the world in Anthroposophy. 
We know, my dear friends, that in the last few decades two very important 
incisions have occurred,—important for the whole evolution of Mankind. There 
is the one to which I have so often drawn attention, I mean the end of the so- 
called dark age at the turn of the 19th and 2oth centuries. An age of light has 
now begun as against the preceding age of darkness. We know that the age of 
darkness led eventually to that condition of the human soul which closed the 
spiritual eyes of man completely to the supersensible world. We know that in 
ancient times of human evolution it was a common condition of mankind to see 
into the spiritual world, albeit in a dream-like and more or less instinctive way. 
To doubt the reality of the spiritual world was utterly impossible in olden times 
of human evolution. But if that old condition had continued—if mankind had 
lived on in that instinctive vision of the spiritual world—there would never have 
arisen in human evolution what we may call the Intelligence of the individual 
human being, the manipulation of the intellect or reasoning faculty by the 
individual, personal man. And this, as we know, is connected with that which 
leads the human being to freedom of will. The one is unthinkable without the 
other. ‘Thus in that dim, instinctive condition which once belonged to mankind, 
wherein they experienced the ever-present spiritual world, man could not attain 
to freedom, nor could he attain to that independent Thinking which we may 
call: the use of Intelligence by the single human individual. 

The time had to come for these two things: The free and personal use of 
Intelligence, and the freedom of the human Will. Hence for human consciousness 
the original, instinctive vision that penetrated to the spiritual world had to dis- 
appear. All this has now been accomplished. Though it is not quite clear to 
every single man, yet it has been accomplished for mankind in general. With 


64 


the close of the 19th century, the dark age—the age that darkened the spiritual 
world, yet at the same time opened up the use of Intelligence and of Free Will 
to man—had run its course. We are now entering upon an age when man must 
once again be touched—in the ways that are possible—touched by the spiritual 
world in its reality. 

True, we cannot say that this age has begun in a very light-filled way. It is 
as though the first decades of the 2oth century had brought over humanity all the 
evil that mankind has ever experienced in the course of history. And yet in spite 
of this, the possibility has come into the general course of human evolution, to 
reach the light of spiritual life. It is only by a kind of inertia that men have 
persisted in the habits of the age of darkness. They have carried these habits 
on into the 2oth century ; and just because the light can now arise, illumining: the 
truth, these habits of the age of darkness have come forth in a far more evil form 
than \ was possible in the Kali-Yuga when they were justified. 

__ Now we also know that this direction of all humanity towards a new age 
of light was prepared for through the fact that at the end of the 1870’s the age 
of Michael began. Let us place again before our souls what it means to say 
that the age of Michael began with the last third of the 19th century. 

We know that as we are surrounded here by the three kingdoms of outer 
Nature, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms in the physical world of sense, 
so we are surrounded in the spiritual world by the higher kingdoms of which we 
have spoken in so many connections as the kingdoms of the Hierarchies. Even as 
we descend into the kingdoms of Nature, beginning with man and coming down 
to the animal kingdom, so, as we ascend to the supersensible, we come to the 
kingdom of the Angeloi. The Angels have the task of guiding and protecting 
the individual human being as he passes from earthly life to earthly life. Thus 
the tasks that fall to the spiritual world in relation to the individual human being, 
are allotted to the Beings of the kingdom of Angeloi. 

We then go on up to the Kingdom of Archangeloi, who have the most varied 
tasks. Now it is one of their tasks to guide and direct the fundamental tend- 
encies of successive ages in relation to man. 

- Thus for about three centuries before the end of the eighteen-seventies, 
there was what we may call the dominion of Gabriel. For one who studies the 
evolution of humanity, not on the surface as is customary to-day, but in the 
depths, this dominion of Gabriel is expressed in the fact that the deepest and 
most important impulses in the process of humanity during that time were 
implanted in those forces which we may call the forces of heredity. Never were 
the forces of physical inheritance that work through the generations so important 
‘as in the three centuries preceding the last third of the rgth century. 


65 


Let us see, my dear friends, how this expresses itself. We know that in the 
19th century the problem of heredity became the most pressing and important 
in the consciousness of men. Man felt how his qualities of soul and spirit are 
dependent on heredity. It was as though at the last moment he came to feel 
what had been holding sway in human evolution as a real Law of Nature in the 
16th, 17th, and 18th, and in a great part of the 1gth century. 

During that time it was so indeed: man carried even into his spiritual 
development the qualities he had inherited from his parents and ancestors. 
During that time those qualities became especially important which are connected 
with physical reproduction. Again we find an outward sign of this fact in the 
great interest which was felt at the end of the 19th century in the question of 
reproduction and indeed in all sexual questions. In the centuries to which I 
have just referred, the most important spiritual impulses had approached humanity 
in this way, they had sought for realisation through physical inheritance. 

Now the age in which Michael leads and guides humanity will stand in 
complete contrast to all this. I mean, therefore, the age that began at the end 
of the seventies of the last century,—the age in which we are, and the impulses 
of which are interwoven with what we are also learning to know as the new age 
of Light beginning in the 20th century. For the streams of these two impulses 
work together. 

To-day we will dwell upon this question : What is the characteristic feature 
of an age
…[truncated]