Transformations of the Human Element of Sensation and Thought from the Fourth to the Fifth Cultural Epoch

GA 165 — 6 January 1916, Dornach

First Lecture

It is my task to say a few words about the difference in the way of thinking and mental imaging in our fifth post-Atlantic period compared to the fourth post-Atlantic period. In particular, I would like to indicate today the elements of thinking and feeling in relation from which much has changed from one period, from one cycle to the other. And I would like to indicate in particular the extent to which certain types of mental images and feelings have, as it were, descended into a deeper sphere, in order to then indicate what is particularly necessary in the fifth post-Atlantic period, in which we ourselves are, so that humanity can once again undertake an ascent.

For a long time, I have attempted to research how this matter can be most vividly presented, and today, based on this research, I would like to try to illustrate it. For this reason, I would like to begin by telling you something, let us say, in a kind of novelistic form, which has come together for me from certain things.

I would like to tell you about a family that lived not so long ago that was closely related to another family. And because all kinds of events that occurred to one family were extremely interesting and significant to a member of the other family, this member of the other family tried to get to the bottom of the reasons for these events. I will start from the fact that in this first-named family there was a young girl—as I said, the matter belongs to the past to some extent—who had not yet reached her twenties. The father of this girl was a warrior, and the time we are now looking at in particular was before a major war that the father of this girl had to take part in. But the girl was engaged, so to speak, to another warrior who also had to go to war, and she was extremely fond of him, so that she was deeply, deeply unhappy about him having to go to war. And since she thought that her father was partly to blame for the outbreak of the war, she also harbored a kind of resentment against him, without her father noticing at first. And the more the time approached, the more this young girl's ideas and feelings became confused. She could not bear the thought of losing her beloved. And because these feelings were so deep within her, her image of her own father became completely distorted. The resentment within her grew more and more. The war came. But what had taken hold in the young girl's soul grew almost to the point of mental confusion, to the kind of mental confusion that doctors in our time regard as a kind of mental illness. And so this young girl had all kinds of mental experiences, especially when the war broke out, but they were already on the verge of mental illness: visions and all sorts of similar things. In particular, she had a strong vision that her lover would fall in the war, and that everything she could have achieved in the world with her lover would be lost with his death, and that she would actually become a victim of the war with all that lay in her intentions. The mental illness worsened more and more. The doctors decided that it would be best to move her to a rural area far away, where she was well supervised and where she also had a beneficial effect on some of the people around her, as can happen with such patients. However, there was never any hope that the full abnormality of the mental illness would not reappear if she were removed from the circumstances and placed in different ones. And so she lived there for years.

The war was long over, and other fatal circumstances had occurred in the family, which I will not characterize in detail, all sorts of fatal circumstances, including the fact that after quite a number of years, the brother of this girl also suffered from mental illness. The strange thing was that the brother, who had transformed the girl's mental illness into masculinity, was now, after all sorts of other decisions that had been made, brought by a reasonable person to the very place where the girl was. And lo and behold, the quite remarkable fact emerged that the brother, despite also being considered mentally ill, had a favorable effect on the girl, and that they recognized each other in their loneliness, in which they had met among the other people, and through the whole environment, despite not having seen each other for many years, and recovered together. So that the girl could return home and establish a kind of asylum in her homeland that was designed in such a way that especially those who were as ill as they both were could be healed in a reasonable way, through knowledge of the causes, in a spiritual way. The asylum she founded had a deeply religious character.

Now, I said, this family, to which these events belonged, was closely related to another family. A member of that other family was very interested in all these strange events and said: This must be investigated, what a curious case actually exists. The events that I am now describing had happened just a few years ago. So he turned to a man with a background in medicine and science, a doctor whom he knew and who called himself a psychopathologist because he specialized in psychopathology. Let's call this doctor, this psychopathologist, Lövius, Professor Dr. Lövius. He first told the doctor what he knew, namely about the two children, about how the girl's illness had come about through resentment towards her father; how he had been able to observe her, what he had seen of the matter. Professor Dr. Lövius listened very carefully, made an extraordinarily serious face, thought deeply and said: “There must be a hereditary predisposition to a high degree. Hereditary burden, that is quite unquestionable, we have to do it with a hereditary burden. There we must look exactly in the family records, we must explore every single one!

And lo and behold, all sorts of things were found in the family records. As luck would have it, it turned out that the characteristics and qualities of the ancestors could be researched far back, to the grandfather, great-grandfather and even to the great-great-grandfather. Professor Dr. Lövius studied this case for a long time, and more and more people found it confirmed that they were dealing with an extraordinary case of hereditary strain, as it was called, not with a typical case of hereditary strain, with an exceptional case. Professor Dr. Lövius, who had already examined the psychopathy of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Viktor Scheffel, Hebbel and others, found this teaching case extremely interesting and compiled all the data from which this teaching case could be explained.

Let us try to follow this schematically. So, first of all, we are dealing with the daughter of that warrior and her brother, whose situation we know about – we begin these with these two individuals. If we go further, we come to the father. The father was the first to be targeted by Professor Dr. Lövius, who found that he had something extraordinarily violent in his character and was an ambitious man, albeit also a man with a lot of initiative. He had qualities that were found in his brother in a very peculiar way, as qualities that had been converted into strength – in such a case, one has to examine the entire family relationships. But the father of the two siblings was an extremely ambitious man who was extraordinarily full of initiative.

Such excess of ambition, drive, and a certain resistance to the world, of course, must be traced further back in the line of inheritance. So they went up to the father's father first. So we come to the father's father, who in turn had a brother. It turned out to be extremely interesting that the brothers had certain similarities and also differences through two generations. There was the father of the father, that is, the grandfather of our young girl, who – while the father was just an overly ambitious and energetic man – was already a kind of ruffian. In the father, the trait had weakened. But the brother was an amiable man who, through his kindness, actually degenerated into the pathological, into the abnormal. Abnormal – that is the similarity – they both were in the generation before last, but one degenerated into a ruffian and the other into kindness. And then Professor Dr. Lövius came to the conclusion that this ruffian, who was the grandfather of our young girl, was always out to sow discord and mischief in his brother's family. And this ruffian really managed to corrupt his brother's sons completely, as stated by Professor Dr. Lövius – we are now with the grandfather. He made one of them a gambler and corrupted the other in some other way. In short, he thoroughly corrupted his nephews. This much could be gleaned from the family records: all sorts of evil things had happened. It was not possible to get to the bottom of the matter. But this much was clear: ultimately, one man had behaved so badly towards his brother, the other man, that the whole family, all the sons, had degenerated, with only one remaining who decided to avenge his father on his brother. But by doing so, he only brought more disaster into the families through these acts of revenge, namely into the family of our girl's father. All kinds of unpleasantness ensued.

And now Professor Dr. Lövius said to himself: You have to go further up the line of descent. For this young girl had shown very strange visions at the beginning of her madness. She dreamt constantly of very distant regions, where she had not been during her girlhood, but which corresponded strangely with a certain locality. From a family diary, Dr. Lövius found out that in these visions something was alive from the area where the great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had once been. “Oh,” the professor said to himself, ”this is a particularly interesting case study: heredity appears in the visions; the great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather were somewhere other than in the area where their descendants last lived! And what earlier generations had experienced was inherited in such a way that the great-granddaughter or great-great-granddaughter had visions of it in madness! - Of course, this was something extraordinarily interesting for the professor. So he came to the conclusion that the grandfather had a father again, who, as I said, according to an old family diary, had emigrated from a completely different, foreign region, where the culture was very different. I will not mention any localities because it is so unpleasant now: the nations are so opposed to each other, and if you mention localities now, it will immediately evoke feelings. So great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather came from a foreign region. Now, from this diary it turned out that this great-grandfather was also a strange person. He had done all sorts of crazy things in this remote area, and was also a ruffian who occasionally became violently insane. Since he had done all sorts of things in his rages, he could not remain in the area, he had to emigrate and wandered to the area where the descendants were. But in the area where the descendants were, he immediately caused trouble again, even though he later became a very respected man. In the area where the descendants were, he caused trouble by simply killing the father in a duel because he was in love with a woman and her father did not want to permit the marriage. That's how he got the daughter. The matter was, as they say, covered up, and he was able to become a respected man.

Now, thanks to the family diary, Professor Dr. Lövius was able to trace his family back to his great-great-grandfather. And this great-great-grandfather was a particularly remarkable person. He lived in a very exotic place and was someone who had acquired a kind of deeper insight into the secrets of history. He was a very spiritual person. But, said Professor Dr. Lövius, someone who exaggerates spirituality as much as this great-great-grandfather did, there is already something wrong with him upstairs. And when he looked further into the family records, he found that this great-great-grandfather, despite being thoroughly versed in spiritual matters, had retained certain human qualities. Above all, he could not stand all the other people who had not come to spiritual knowledge in his way, but in some official way. They were a thorn in his side. And to do some kind of mischief to them was something he found almost like a spiritual delicacy. What I am going to tell you now is an event that took place in the 1760s. But things repeat themselves: Eduard von Hartmann did something similar with the philistine people of the 19th century, which I have often told about. This great-great-grandfather of mine once published something like a writing – but he did not put his name to it, but had it appear anonymously – in which he very thoroughly refuted everything that was his own teaching. He presented everything as confused and stupid and foolish, and always in such a way that the others could really delight in it, because he always cited their reasons, what they might have said: these were delicacies for the others; he had played a great trick on them.

Then Professor Dr. Lövius said to himself: Now, there you see it all! Even as far back as the times of the great-great-grandfather, one can see in the line of inheritance what has now manifested itself in such a terrible way in the descendants. Even the good side of the great-great-grandfather, his spiritual gift, showed itself again in the great-great-granddaughter, who founded a kind of spiritual asylum. As you can see, all good and bad qualities are hereditary burdens in this teaching case to the highest degree! So this story was of extraordinary interest to Professor Dr. Lövius. It was a matter of course that he had set out to write a thick book about this typical teaching case and he once explained it to a colleague. And you see, on this occasion, someone was listening who didn't want to, but couldn't help it, he listened. One who not only had knowledge of human nature, but also knowledge of the world in the sense of the development of humanity, listened and had all sorts of thoughts while Professor Dr. Lövius was telling his case. I will present these thoughts to you in a version – the version is not very important – and I will always refer to this family tree, to the family tree of the teaching case of Professor Dr. Lövius.

Thus the following thoughts came to people: Once upon a time, in the course of human evolution, there was a respectable family. That the fate of the founder of this family, Tantalus, was atoned in Tartarus, is well known in the widest circles. He was initiated into the secrets of the gods. The Greeks express this by saying that a person who is privy to the secrets of the gods can even take part in the meals of the gods. But he had something that he felt was like a thorn in his side, or one could also say, like a delicacy, to deceive the gods, the officially recognized gods. And so he offered them – as you all know – as a delicacy for the gods, his own son, whom he had cut into pieces. And the gods, who with all their omniscience made a mistake, ate of it and also drank of the blood. For this, Tantalus was thrown into Tartarus, and he had to endure the Tantalus torments, of which the Greek myths tell. Through a series of crimes that took place from link to link, the revenge of the gods was now inherited by the last descendants. First, Pelops, the son of Tantalus, was expelled from heaven, into which the gods had taken him. He wandered across Asia Minor to Greece, and won Hippodamia by defeating her father to make her his wife.

The listener was not aware of the fact that the professor Dr. Lövius had a duel with the father and thereby acquired the wife. As his luck proved, he had not yet been deprived of the grace of heaven. But soon he made himself so unworthy of her favor through various actions that the gods blessing left his house. From his marriage with Hippodamia sprang the two sons Atreus and Thyestes, who fled to Argos with the guilt of murder stained on their souls, where they inherited the throne of this kingdom from their cousin Eurysthes. There the pair of brothers committed new atrocities, so that the royal palace of Mycenae was the scene of a blood feud that destroyed the individual members of the two families from child to child. The worst crime was the so-called ‘Thyestes’ meal. Atreus, who learned that his wife had been seduced into infidelity by Thyestes, invited the latter and his two sons to a banquet. The guilty man accepted the invitation and came to the meal.

This reminded this judge of character very much of the quarrel between the grandfather and his brother, who had seduced his sons and got them into all sorts of trouble, causing the sons to perish, as it was written in the family records.

But this horrible thing happened: Atreus presented his brother with his secretly-slaughtered pair of sons. He drank of the blood. — This is actually also “inherited guilt”: the old Tantalus had already done this to the gods, now his grandson is doing it! — This was an atrocity that made Apollo turn his sun-horse away in horror as he looked down on Mycenae. Their avenger was a son of Thyestes, named Aegisthus, who was born later. Aegisthus, informed of the terrible incident, first killed his uncle Atreus and then also waylaid his children.

Atreus had two sons by his wife Aerope, Agamemnon and Menelaus, who were called the Atrides or Atreus Sons. Aegisthus, the last son of Thyestes, hatched treacherous plans of revenge against them. But he could not emerge from hiding until the two related brothers had undertaken the great military expedition to Troy. After their departure, he knew how to beguile the passionate queen. Clytemnestra had borne her husband three daughters and a son – the daughter of most interest to us is called Iphigenia – and the son Orestes. Iphigenia, the eldest daughter, was offered as a sacrifice on the altar of Artemis, or Diana, for this goddess had conceived a fierce resentment against the departing Greeks and had to be reconciled by the daughter. The mother hated her husband and went along with the whispered thoughts of murder. Now we know that Iphigenia was taken to Tauris and came to in the enclosure of a temple. We know that she was transported to a rural area, to an environment where she was harmless, a fate similar to that of our great-great-great-granddaughter. I need not recount the further events in the house. But now the myth reports the following: After Orestes had found his sister Iphigenia in Tauris and she had cured him of his madness, he brought her back to Greece. Then it is further related that Iphigenia, after she had returned to Greece, built a kind of oracle, a place of sacrifice for the Taurian Diana, which translated into Greek would be roughly the same as if someone were to build an asylum for the sick according to such spiritual scientific principles as I have mentioned.

What I wanted to say is this: the same process is conceivable in ancient Greece and in more recent times. It takes place depending on the times. For you can see that the process from the 19th and 18th centuries, which I have just related, could have taken place exactly as I have related it. No one will be able to doubt the slightest detail. Likewise, no one will be able to doubt the whole story that I have developed. But there is a certain difference: namely, how one feels about this case, how one thinks about it.

We have seen how Professor Lövius stated in the 19th and 20th centuries: “Hereditary burden! A textbook case!” The Greek said to himself: “When something like this happens, it expresses the deeper forces at work in the history of humanity,” and he created a myth about it. Professor Dr. Lövius did not exist in ancient Greece, but a poet did who, in a deeper sense, understood these one, two, three, four, five generations (see drawing) and wrote a poem about them in such a way that poets have continued to write about them ever since, right up to Goethe's magnificent “Iphigenia”. And yet the difference is not that great. For just think, today you only need to pick up a psychology or psychiatry book by one of the many natural scientists that deals with the study of the soul and mental faculties, and you will find everywhere that it says the following: the healthy person as such is extremely difficult to study in terms of his or her mental characteristics. But at the bedside of the sick and in the clinic and through the dissection of the mentally ill, one also learns a great deal about the normal workings of the healthy soul, and an enormous amount is inferred from the sick soul about the healthy one. I need only recall that, for example, the speech center, the place where speech is concentrated, was thought to be recognized by examining it in a sick person who suffers from a lack of speech ability. So they said to themselves: it is precisely by what is out of order that we can learn what prevails in the healthy.

Now, if we think of this not in the 19th century, but in the language of the Greeks, it would sound like this: If we want to know what forces prevail in the course of human development, we must not go to those people and study them who, in their mental life and all that they are, show only what is so-called healthy, but we must go to all kinds of people who, compared to the normal, have abnormal characteristics. And so, these Greek poets, who were still in some respects Greek sages because they combined wisdom and beauty, tried to understand what happened to the Greeks. And so it came about that these Greek poets portrayed the fate of Greek civilization in these abnormal generations.

But the Greeks were different in some ways. The big difference between the way Professor Dr. Lövius speaks and the way the Greek speaks is that the Greek knows something about the secrets of the human soul. There is a great difference between what is evoked in the soul by the story of the extraordinary myth of the Atrides, Iphigenia, Tantalus and Pelops, and all the ideas that are attached to our soul when we hear the bespectacled Professor Dr. Lövius say, “All hereditary burden!” For “hereditary burden” is what the textbook case fulfills in its full form according to modern science, according to the knowledge of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In this we have the opposite of a person who is still completely within Greek thinking. Imagine the Greek who also wanted to describe how Iphigenia, after she had lived through what the Greek expressed in the events at Aulis, would then have been transported to a foreign land, to Tauris, where she would have experienced the reunion with Orestes and so on, and imagine how all this was taken up again in Goethe's Iphigenia! Imagine the single moment when King Thoas of Tauris stands before Iphigenia, in Goethe's dictum, when he woos Iphigenia and she feels obliged to utter the words: “Listen! I am of the house of Tantalus!” — “You speak a great word calmly.”

All Greekness is revived in what the Greeks or the resurrected Greek says in such a case of the soul life of the Greeks: “I am of the family of Tantalus.” And then it seems as if, after this has been said, Professor Dr. Lövius chuckles in through the window: “He he he! Hereditary burden!” — There you have the whole difference between what the fourth post-Atlantic period offered and what the fifth, our post-Atlantic period offers. Because in fact the two things can be compared. I have not exaggerated in the slightest sense, but have described this quite objectively. The two things may be compared with each other, and that is because the place of the creation of Greek myth, the place of what was meant by Greek myth, has now been taken by the doctrine of hereditary burden, even in poetry. For ultimately, one need only compare Sophocles or Aeschylus with Ibsen to see exactly the same contrast in poetry, except that in Greek times, scholarship and poetry were not so divorced from one another. You only need to read what I have said about the mysteries and the origin of art and religion from the mysteries to understand that there was no Greek Professor Dr. Lövius alongside the Greek Ibsen: they would have been one and the same. But they would have been the ones who composed the whole myth, that which the myth contained as truth. For what health was, what the art of healing was, what the art of Mercury with the Mercury staff was, in ancient Greece this was also presented in the form of stories, just like this story of Tantalus' lineage and Iphigenia. In those days it was not usual to speak in abstract terms; one spoke in images. And through images one presented the truth. And that which filled the life of the Greek soul, that which organized this Greek soul quite inwardly, that bears relation to what is accepted today as the truth, for the original character of truth, such as: “Listen! I am of the house of Tantalus!” to: “He he he! Hereditary burden”.

That, my dear friends, is what one must write into one's soul about something that has descended from ancient Greece to the present day. It can give us guidance about what needs to be developed in order to ascend again. That would take us too far today. I will present the continuation of these reflections tomorrow for those who still want to hear it.