Astral Reading: Memory, Cosmic Script, and Folk Soul Consciousness

GA 156 — 12 December 1914, Dornach

First Lecture

Some time ago, we spoke here, at least in some allusions, of what is called occult reading and occult hearing, and today and tomorrow I will take up these considerations of those discussions about occult reading and occult hearing, because then I will be able to develop some important ideas about our structure in connection with them.

If we look at the outer scientific consideration, insofar as it concerns the life of the soul, today, we find many difficulties in this outer scientific consideration, as soon as we want to come to a reasonably satisfactory overview of the relevant concepts. Among the many difficulties, the one that arises when we consider the outer science of human memory is truly no small one.

Now I would have to cite a lot here if I wanted to talk about this or that that external psychology or the doctrine of the soul has to say about human memory. But it would not get us very far if I wanted to explain all of that. I just want to draw your attention to the difficulty for this external science when it comes to understanding memory and its peculiarities.

Human memory presents itself to us in such a way that we can recall to our consciousness at a later time perceptions, concepts, and ideas that we have absorbed at some time in the past. So there is the psychological fact that, for example, we have some kind of perception or experience today, and that after some time, without being confronted with the same fact that caused the perception or experience, we can vividly recall the idea of the fact, of the experience, from within.

This seems to indicate that the human soul stores everything it takes in from the outside. For example, when we meet someone, we get an impression of them. We transform this impression into a mental image and then store this mental image in our subconscious; when we need it, we retrieve it.

Wouldn't it then be the case that our soul, insofar as it develops the power of our memory, would be, let's say, a box in which all ideas and experiences can be placed and stored, and from which they can be taken out when needed to be brought up into consciousness. So all kinds of experiences would be stored down there in this soul cabinet, and they could be retrieved from there.

When you read books about memory today, you get the impression that the authors often believe that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for all kinds of experiences. Now imagine walking around with your soul and carrying a cabinet for all your impressions and experiences with you in this soul. It must be freely admitted that there is a difficulty here. Various scientific concepts have been used to try to bridge this difficulty, but nothing particularly satisfactory has emerged from them. This difficulty will only be overcome when we acquire a deeper insight into the structure of the human being in the physical body, in the etheric body, in the astral body and in the I. For this etheric body of man must indeed be studied if one is to gain a real knowledge of the nature of human memory, and the astral body must be studied no less for this purpose.

Let us assume that we can at least form some kind of idea, comparatively speaking, of what this astral body of man actually is. In the waking hours of everyday life, the human being does not experience himself in his astral body, any more than he experiences himself in his ether body. The human being experiences himself in his I from waking up to falling asleep, and all experiences are I-experiences. In the astral body, the human being does not experience himself. This astral body is, as I have emphasized on other occasions, fundamentally infinitely wiser than the I-human being. It can do much more than the I-human being can do. This astral body can actually read what I have indicated to you as occult writing. The astral body can read this occult writing; it can really read it.

Among many other ideas through which one can evoke an understanding of the astral body, one can also have the idea that it is a reader of occult writing. And the etheric body, on the other hand, is, among many other qualities it has, something like a writing tablet in which the occult writing is continually being inscribed through the processes of the world.

While we live - and we always live, whether we are awake or asleep, between birth and death, and from death to a new birth - processes and events are constantly taking place in the universe, in the cosmos. There is essence in the cosmos. All this is imprinted and written into the etheric body. The etheric body of the human being is indeed a true reflection of the entire cosmos. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not impressively imprinted in the etheric body of the human being and, if one wants to use the expression, imaginatively mirrored. And the human astral body is constantly reading what the world inscribes into the etheric body. This takes place in the subconscious, so that the human astral body reads what the world inscribes into the etheric body.

But now, when we ourselves, in our conscious, waking day-life, encounter an event or even an object that makes an impression on us, we form a mental image of this object. When we form this mental image of the object, the astral body is the first to be involved. It is in a state of vehement movement while we form a mental image of an object or form the mental image of the impression of an external event. What we form as an idea, what we experience as soul, is also written into the etheric body of the human being and remains there. Just as the world with its events continually inscribes itself into our etheric body, we also inscribe into our etheric body what we ourselves experience as soul. It remains there inscribed. When we remember something, a complicated process actually takes place. Our astral body reads what has been written into our etheric body, and the result of this reading is the emergence of an image that we call a memory.

Now, in this way, memory would be traced back to a kind of reading of our astral body in the etheric body. And indeed, as soon as we know this, we will no longer arrive at the naive idea that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for what we have experienced, but we will see: there are in fact few habits - I say explicitly habits, we will understand the word even better tomorrow - into which the astral body repeatedly places itself when it has experienced something, and which it then impresses into the etheric body. Just as our writing has few letters, so our astral body has few, very few habits. And just as we communicate the whole infinite abundance of what human beings have to say to each other about themselves and the world through various groupings of our few letters in writing, so what memory retains is formed from a few habits through their combinations.

If we know that it is a matter of reading, then we will no longer believe that every single experience has to be written down. Instead, a few habits of the astral body are combined and then fixed in the etheric body. Just as we can fix a new word with the old letters when we hear it, so we can fix each new experience in the etheric body with a few habits of the astral body. This is because both our etheric body and, in particular, our astral body are connected to the entire cosmos. We must not take what an older wisdom teaching has emphasized from the cosmos as something that was emphasized by chance, but rather it has a deep meaning and importance.

If we take the twelve constellations of the entire zodiac, we can say that our astral body is indeed in living connection with these twelve constellations. These twelve constellations really do mean twelve certain habits for our astral body, twelve certain ways of moving. And then our astral body is also connected with the seven planets, as we have often discussed. These in turn determine certain habits in him. Through these habits – I say expressly 'habits' – which are ignited in our astral body by the planets of our solar system, something similar arises in the astral body to the vowels; and through the habits that are stimulated in it by the influence of the zodiac, something similar arises to the consonants.

What I mean to say is this: Let us assume that at some moment in our lives – and such moments are always present because we are always in contact with the world – our astral body is in contact with the forces that stream out of the constellation of Aries. Because our astral body is in connection or under the particular influence of that which radiates out of the constellation of Aries, the possibility develops in this astral body to close itself in its particular form, to give itself a boundary; while if the astral body is more under the influence of Libra, a movement develops in it that allows it to be more open to the rest of the world.

Thus a definite tendency of motion develops under the influence of each constellation. Under the influence of this or that constellation, the astral body particularly stretches its upper part upwards, and under the influence of one of the other constellations, it particularly stretches its lower part. Twelve such special movements correspond to twelve such habits, and in turn seven special habits under the influence of the planets. These are more inner movements under the influence of the planets, whereby the inner parts move or bring themselves into a relationship with each other. Thus, our astral body has, in fact, 12 + 7 = 19 habits, implanted by the cosmos.

Just as we can write anything with our characters, with the signs for the vowels and consonants by combining them, if we want to express what we bring to light with our wisdom, so our astral body forms everything it has to form through the combinations of these nineteen habits. When a person comes up to us with a face that looks at us in a certain way, good or evil, our astral body makes certain movements that are combined from these nineteen habits. This is then written into the etheric body, and at a later time the astral body can read what is written into the etheric body. And that is what memory is based on! As soon as you go beyond what the senses and the mind bound to the senses reveal, you immediately come to the relationship of the human being to the cosmos. The physical body only conceals this relationship of the human being to the cosmos.

We therefore have a continuous inner reading, and if we could go back, also historically, to the origin of writing, we would find that in fact in the oldest pictographic writings, man is imitated in this inner reading of man. It is not the case that writing came about by chance, but the original consonant signs were imitations of the signs of the zodiac and the original vowel signs were imitations of the planetary images. The outer reading was nothing more than a reproduction in the outer world of what man had as an inner reading.

This is connected with the attitude that people in ancient times had towards the art of writing. It was considered to be something tremendously sacred because it was taken from cosmic secrets. And it is still known from Egyptian culture that the copyists, if they made mistakes, exposed themselves to the most severe punishments, even the death penalty, depending on the magnitude of the mistake they made, under the strict laws there, if the mistake was big enough. It was considered something infinitely high and sacred to write down what man could know of the sacred secrets, because one still had a sense of the context of these characters and all the sacred secrets of human nature and their connection with the divine.

That is the important thing, as we gradually absorb spiritual science within us, to regain the sense of the sacredness of the hidden pages of human nature. This sense is much more important than the mere theoretical absorption of spiritual-scientific things. But it is also connected with the fact that at the moment when, in the course of the development of humanity, one had to give up all connection with the sacred of Scripture, one also felt that, basically, I would say, something creepy was taking place in the history of humanity. Take a book from a library from the early Middle Ages and try to imagine how such a book came into being, how a monk, I would say, spent years, even decades, writing this book, how he spent a long, long time painting a single letter. Then one knew that writing was considered something sacred. One knew that through writing one was connected to the good gods, and in a sense what one entrusted to writing was a carrying out into the outer world of what comes from the good gods.

But you know, it is a sign of evolution that everything that comes from the good gods can be distorted in the world by Ahriman or Lucifer. The moment when the very ordinary art of printing was created, which then developed into that from which man mainly draws his wisdom today, by bending his head over the paper on which there are horrible signs, which are only the ape-like old characters that reveal to him what people thought or did not think about the world and its secrets, the art of writing was shifted. As a result, the written word has indeed entered a new stage, the stage where it has lost all nimbus of the sacred, where the Ahrimanic stage of written communication has begun, so to speak. And so, just as the ancient characters are the externalization of hidden secrets, albeit in a reproduction, in symbolism, just as these characters are the externalization of hidden secrets into the outer world, and just as these secrets correspond to the nature of the entities of the spiritual world that progress in the good sense. What we have today, especially in the form of printed matter – but in a broader sense it also applies to handwriting – is of a distinctly Ahrimanic character. And the people sensed this when they attributed the art of printing to the 'black forces', calling it a 'black art', and even attributing its invention to the devil.

There is a deeper connection when one associates the invention of the art of printing with Faust, just as Goethe associates the art of printing with what Faust goes through in a certain phase of his life. The Ahrimanic epoch of the art of communication has arrived with the invention of printing. We know, of course, that we must rightly unlearn to make a sign of the cross before all things that are called Ahrimanic. But we also know that we must call things by their right name and understand them. We, as spiritual scientists, must not be among those who say: the art of printing is Ahrimanic, so we must therefore eradicate it. We will not do that, it would never occur to us, because we understand that the Ahrimanic is also necessary in world evolution, that it also belongs to world progress. But we must also see things as they are. We must not reinterpret things in order to make it easier for ourselves, to allow ourselves to live in the world without Lucifer and Ahriman. It is more pleasant not to know that Ahriman stares at us from almost every book we read today. But it is necessary for those who see the world in its true light to endure this state and not to reinterpret it into something else. To understand the world is the task of those who feel more and more drawn to spiritual science.

In our time, we see an external natural science that would like to reduce everything to a kind of mechanical movement of the smallest mass particles. I have often spoken about this world view that external natural science is creating of our world. We are told: Oh, colors - red, yellow, green, violet, blue - are nothing but vibrations in reality! Color is only something that the eye causes. From so and so much vibration of the ether, red arises, from so and so much vibration yellow, from so and so much blue, from so and so much vibration violet. - And one would like to say that the modern world observer has the tendency to erase from the world picture that which he perceives with his senses in the world and to replace it with a material vortex.

One of the last great minds to have rebelled against this, which can be called a whirling dance of material particles, especially in the field of the theory of colors, is Goethe. And because the modern world has increasingly embraced this materialistic view, this obliteration of the manifold world around us, it has not been able to understand what Goethe actually wanted to say in his theory of colors.

Spiritual science will restore some order here, and Goethe's theory of colors will be appreciated to the extent that spiritual science permeates people. For Goethe, it undoubtedly seemed like a kind of madness - I say “madness”, but given his particular expressions, he might also have said “great madness” - to think that the colors flooding the world are nothing more than what the eye evokes from a vortex of vibrations, from a vibrating cosmos.

This vibrating cosmos – I have often referred to it as a fantasy of modern science – was simply not present for Goethe; for him, it was one of Mephistopheles's temptations. With his alert senses, Goethe was truly devoted to the full range of colors and the flood of colors in the world, and he lived in the flood of colors. It would have seemed to him the most desolate gray theory if he had had to replace this flooding sea of colors with the horrible vibrations of modern physics.

Why was that? Because Goethe - one may say the word in the deepest sense - had a universally developed, healthy human nature and through this healthy human nature always strove to place himself in the right relationship to the world. Such a healthy nature - I will now say something seemingly very trivial, but it is not trivial, rather it contains a significant wisdom - such a nature as Goethe's also sleeps healthily. Yes, a trivial truth! But for the spiritual researcher, healthy sleep actually means a great deal. During sleep, the human being is outside of his physical and etheric body, present in his I and his astral body. There he is truly immersed in the experiences that bring his astral body into connection with the entire starry cosmos, for example. Everything that can be influenced by the zodiacal constellations and the planets lights up in the astral body. Just as the human being lives with the external world in a state of wakefulness, so the human being lives with the world of the stars in a state of sleep. But you all know that: the human being does not know very much about this life with the world of the stars, and that is important to understand why the human being does not know much about this coexistence with the world of the stars. Why is that?

You don't overlook a landscape when it is covered with fog. The fog moves across the landscape and the parts of the landscape, the rivers, mountains, plains and so on, do not appear to us when they are interspersed with fog. In the same way, when a person sleeps, they are permeated by a fog, a mental fog. What is this mental fog? It is a fog of desires, consists of desires, and these desires are formed by the longing for the physical body. When the person is out of the physical body and etheric bodies, that is, in the time from falling asleep to waking up, he continually has the desire for the physical body; he wants to return to his physical body. He is taken out of the physical body by the forces of the cosmos, and only when these forces release him does he slip back into the physical body when he wakes up. There his desire for the physical body is satisfied again.

In a person like Goethe, healthy sleep is present because the desire for the physical body is less than in some other people, and therefore the influences from the cosmos are greater than in other people during sleep. You can easily imagine a person like Goethe being more receptive to the influences of the cosmos during sleep, and that is his healthy sleep. The desire for the physical body is there, but healthier than in other people. And why is it healthier? It is healthier precisely because Goethe is so healthily devoted to the impressions of the outside world while awake, because, for example, he did not allow himself to substitute something theoretical, such as vibrations, for colors, but because he observed colors themselves in their reality, in their full-bodied reality. There is a difference between a person like Goethe, who, although full of wisdom, walks through nature and sees green as green, violet as violet, and the relationship of green to violet or to yellow and so on, and thus sees the content directly as color, or whether a dry theorist walks through the field and does not see the colors, but speculates about what kind of a trillion or a million vibrations correspond to green or red or yellow.

Why does he then go through the world as such a dry theorist? Because he is not devoted to the world of colors, but because he is too strongly devoted to his physical body, even if it is initially his physical brain. All gray theory arises from being too devoted to the physical body during the waking hours. We would not have any materialistic theories today if people had not been so strongly devoted to the physical body. The more a person selflessly devotes himself to the things of the world during waking life, the more he has the opportunity to be devoted to the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos during sleep, and then to bring back the healthy after-effects of these impressions into daily life. Then he will not, like the dried-up physicist described above, see swirling atomic vortices behind the flowing colors, but spirit, elementary spirituality, real spiritual activity.

Thus, to know that behind the impressions of the senses is the living spiritual world is an after-effect of healthy sleep. For when one cannot, during the waking hours, selflessly surrender to what is flowing outside in the world, but instead forms horrible theories about it, which are actually phantasms, then when one falls asleep one has a stronger overpowering urge for the physical body and not only darkens one's consciousness towards the impressions during sleep, but also lessens, besides one's consciousness, the intensity and strength of these impressions themselves. This is connected with the fact that, in fact, the more spiritual science is taken to life the human soul life, the more precisely such wisdom as Goethean physics will take hold of people again, compared to the dull theories that are now wreaking havoc in external science.

The assimilation of spiritual science in humanity is connected with many things. It will truly mean a tremendous change when the general consciousness is once imbued with the truth: at night, you as a human being are in the extra-terrestrial universe in a spiritual way and in the daytime you immerse yourself in your physical and etheric bodies. There is much that we will learn to feel and sense together with this knowledge.

For example, let us now turn to something more spiritual. We will have to learn that what we call life with the folk spirit, with the folk soul, to which we count ourselves in the narrower sense, is present when we enter the physical and etheric bodies of the human being. Thus, we are in contact with the national soul from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep, for that which the national soul is, the forces and activities it develops, are poured into the physical body and the etheric body: into the physical body more the racial aspect, into the etheric body more the national aspect. It is poured into the veils we enter when we awaken. In this way we are actually continually exchanging forces with our own folk soul. The science that is universally human, that has nothing to do with the configurations and differentiations that are poured into people through the folk souls, this science must indeed be won by that part of human nature that can free itself, can become independent of the physical, just as a person is independent of it when asleep. This science is necessarily general and human because it is gained through those members of human nature that are independent of the physical body and the etheric body.

If one were to assume that someone who can truly see into the spiritual world and gain knowledge of it could be bound by popular prejudices, then one would simply not take the secrets of initiation into due consideration. Just as life in sleep is quite different from waking life in the cases mentioned above, but the two are related, so it is also with regard to the relationship between the human being and the nature of the folk soul. From the moment a person falls asleep until they wake up, they are not together with the forces that come directly from the folk soul, for these can only be sent into the physical and etheric bodies alone. Thus, anyone who has attained conscious inner experience of their ego and their astral body is, while experiencing this, experiencing what they then have to form into spiritual science, yes, outside of the physical and etheric body; they experience outside of the physical and etheric body. But one is nevertheless not outside the world. While one is with one's folk spirit as soon as one slips into one's physical body and thus also into one's etheric body, one is outside one's own folk soul when one slips out of the physical and etheric bodies, as it is when sleeping or in initiation, which works into the physical and etheric bodies. One is outside, but one is not outside the realm of folk souls in general, because they are spiritual beings. And when one is outside one's physical and etheric body in the spiritual world, one is actually only outside of one folk soul that has a particular significance for one at the present time, namely, one's own folk soul, the one that is active in the physical and etheric bodies. By being in community with it or coming into community with it during waking hours, interest in it is lost during sleep and during initiation. The peculiar fact emerges that during sleep and during initiation one is essentially with all other folk souls, only not with one's own.

So if you imagine the round dance of contemporary folk souls, then as a human being, when you are in your physical body and perceive it while you are awake, you are together with your own folk soul; but when you are asleep or in a state of initiation, you are together with all the other folk souls, except your own. That is an objective truth.

Now you can see how nonsensical it would be for someone who can consciously be with other folk souls to fail to recognize the other folk souls, or to treat them with sympathy or antipathy. It is as if one did not want to recognize the folk souls. Only for the one who has not progressed to initiation does it make sense to feel sympathy or antipathy for this or that folk soul, because he does not know that he is really together with the other folk souls for the sleeping half of his life. But there is a difference now. While in waking life one is connected, so to speak, with one national soul, with one's own, in sleeping life one is connected with the other national souls, thus not with the effects that emanate from one, but with the interaction of the others, so to speak with what the other national souls perform as a round dance in harmony.

So you can easily imagine life with one folk soul and life with the other folk souls. The former is life when awake, the latter is life when asleep. During sleep or during initiation, you are with the interaction of the other folk souls. A person cannot be alone with their own folk soul unless they are constantly awake. It is quite impossible for him to do so, because he would have to be constantly awake. The difference is that when we are awake, we exchange forces with our own folk soul; when we are asleep, we do not exchange forces with our own, but with the totality, with the roundelay of the other folk souls.

But there is a way to be with a particular folk soul even in sleep, to be more influenced by the forces emanating from one folk soul rather than from the totality of folk souls. Then, in sleep, one is, as it were, spellbound by this one folk soul. The remedy for this is to particularly hate this folk soul when awake. A folk soul that one particularly hates while awake is torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and it captivates and fetters one to its particular characteristics. If I may express myself in a trivial way, my dear friends, it must be said - you will not hold it against me in this case: to really hate a national soul in the waking state is to condemn oneself to having to sleep with that national soul! This is truly an occult truth, albeit a distressing one, a truth about which there is really nothing to laugh. This must be faced if one also wants to gain an understanding from a certain point of view of how spiritual science must influence by spreading itself throughout the world, the attitudes of people, how it must permeate all feeling and sensing.

I have deliberately formulated what I have to say about the relationship between the human being and the folk soul in a way that makes you laugh. I had to do that because very often, as an occultist, one has the tendency to help people through what is most harrowing, most tragic, not by saying it in all its tragic gravity, since that would crush people, but by saying it in such a way that it helps people to be able to absorb it like any other scientific idea.

However, it should not be forgotten that spiritual science shows us in a very thorough way to what extent we want to accept the world as Maya. Because as soon as we penetrate into spiritual science with the deepest seriousness, it becomes serious, I would say, it becomes really deeply serious with it and with all that it should be for man. It may be said that most people today still have something against spiritual science because they cannot understand with their intellect what spiritual science is actually supposed to make of man. People today do not understand the basic nerve of spiritual science. But it is not only that they cannot understand it with their intellect, there is something much deeper. When we penetrate deeper into the wisdom of spiritual science, we find that it also makes demands on our minds and wills. It shows us the human being in a light that we usually do not want to have ourselves. Not only does our mind prefer to turn to Maja than to reality, but so does our will.

If I may speak in a trivial way again, I can say: it is extremely uncomfortable to live with the deeper wisdom of spiritual science, because life must take on a different face under the influence of spiritual science. In the moment when one knows what it means when Capesius and Strader stand opposite each other in their spiritual forms and exchange words, but in truth these words cause tumult and turmoil in the most elementary forces of the world, in that moment, when one knows what is is going on in the world, in the whole cosmos, when a person experiences this or that in his soul, then the full seriousness of spiritual science becomes apparent, and only then do we realize how people not only want to live in maya with their minds, but also with their wills. We need only develop this or that sympathy or this or that antipathy, and what we do there then becomes the cause of being driven as a sleeping or dead human being into the realm of this or that being of the cosmos and effecting this or that there. For through our being with this or that being of the cosmos, cosmic events happen again.

With such words, one would like to evoke a feeling of how spiritual science really wants to speak not only to people's minds, but to grasp the whole person, the whole soul, because people's lives today are at a stage from which the signs of the times clearly show us how this life must be grasped if it is to continue, by that wave which encompasses the spiritual secrets and does not merely leave man in Maya, but leads him into true reality. These are the things we must consider if we want to come to a deeper understanding of our spiritual scientific will. And tomorrow we will continue to speak of such things and will probably end up with something that is connected with a fundamental idea of our structure.