The Bridge Between the World Spirit and the Physical Body
GA 202 — 28 November 1920, Dornach
Third Lecture
If we look back at what we discussed yesterday and the day before, a more intimate relationship between human beings and the surrounding cosmos must reveal itself to us. And we have been able to relate the physical body of the human being to the whole cosmos according to the organization of the head, the rhythmic organization, the metabolic organization; we have also been able to relate the human being in terms of soul and spirit to the whole cosmos. What appears to you there as the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, as the human being's complete integration into the world, had to be viewed differently in ancient times than it must be viewed now and than it will have to be viewed more and more as humanity strides towards the future. We have often mentioned how in ancient times an instinctive, primeval wisdom was spread over humanity; a wisdom that man did not work out inwardly, but that he, one might say, felt rising within him as if half in a dream. It was given to him, and he actually had nothing to do but open his soul's receptive organs and accept what came to him from the cosmos as a gift from the gods.
Since the human being is a threefold creature, this instinctive, primeval wisdom must also have presented the human being's entire relationship as a threefold one. By turning his attention more to that to which he belonged before his birth and which shone into the time between birth and death as a spiritual essence, which is essentially that which appears in the expanse of the cosmos, man spoke that what presented itself to him was beauty; the cosmos in beauty, and man, in terms of his brain organization, in terms of his organization of thinking, in terms of his being awake, born out of this world of beauty. Prehistoric man sensed that it was benevolent spiritual beings that revealed themselves around him; for prehistoric man did not see natural phenomena as dryly and soberly as we see them today when we merely indulge in ordinary consciousness. Prehistoric man saw spirituality and soulfulness revealing themselves everywhere. That revealed itself to him. And this cosmos, which was the revelation of the spiritual and soul and which revealed itself to his instinctive consciousness as in mighty dream images, that is what prehistoric man called the cosmos in beauty.
Then man felt, so to speak, standing on his planet. He felt connected to his planet. From it came his food, on it he had his location. He felt, as it were, his power, which permeated him physically, which revealed itself in the soul as will, which strengthened him out of the state of sleep. He felt this power, in turn, as the gift of benevolent divine spiritual beings and called it strength. The planet in strength permeates me - that is roughly how prehistoric man felt what he could not, however, express in sharply modulated words.
Thus he felt, as it were, standing in the midst of what was taking shape in his mind, taking form in his perceptions, and revealing itself in his awakening consciousness. And he felt himself standing on the planet in relation to the power that lived in his limbs, a power that he sensed as coming to him from the planet. He said to himself: “The same thing that works as a force in the stone when it falls to the ground, making a hole when the stone falls, lives in my legs when I walk. That connects me to the earth planet through my legs as my strength. That also lives in my arms when I work, that permeates my muscle strength. And he felt as if he were standing between beauty and strength, and felt that it was his task to bring about a balance in rhythm between the above, the beauty, and the below, the strength, in wisdom. And again he felt supported by the fact that he had to bring about this balance between beauty and strength, from the spiritual beings who were the bearers of wisdom, who illuminated him with wisdom.
Thus man felt what the cosmos gave him as beauty, wisdom and strength. Beauty, wisdom and strength were the things that made primitive man feel connected to the whole universe, that made him feel strengthened by them. In a sense, he felt the external world that surrounded him, the internal world that he sensed within himself, and the balance between the two, as beauty, wisdom and strength.
In the various secret societies, what remained were the keywords wisdom, beauty, strength, whereby it sometimes becomes quite clear how only the words remained, how the deeper understanding is missing. For a time has come for humanity when this feeling and this knowledge, even if it is instinctive knowledge, has been pushed more into the darkness by our connections with the cosmos. Man lived, as it were, in subordinate perceptions and subordinate feelings. He drove the impulses of his will out of subordinate elements of his own being. He forgot what he once sensed in beauty, wisdom and strength, for he was to become a free being. A central power had to emerge, as it were, from his inner chaos, to which was not revealed what revealed itself full of light and strength to the primeval man. But the newer humanity will not progress if it does not resurrect from within what once revealed itself from the cosmos as beauty, wisdom and strength. From the outside, the cosmos will not reveal itself again in beauty to humanity, as long as it is humanity on earth. These times are the times of the instinctive primal wisdom. These times are past times. These times are not those in which the free human being has developed, but rather those in which the human being could only develop who was driven, as it were, in bondage, in instincts. These times will not return, but out of his own inner being, man must resurrect what has come to him from outside in the way of wisdom, beauty and strength.
What has been absorbed, I would say, sucked in as power of beauty from the universe, man has, so to speak, taken in during old, very old earthly lives. In the middle earth-lives that followed, which we have gone through in the Egyptian, in the Greek, in the modern time, in these earth-lives, it was absorbed, but it did not come before human consciousness. Now mankind is ripe to bring it out of consciousness, and it will be brought out. What has been absorbed as the power of beauty will arise again from the inner being of man, and spiritual science is the instruction for this, how it is to arise from the human inner being. It will arise from out of the inner being through imagination. And all that is now consciously imparted through imagination in spiritual science is nothing other than the resurrected life of beauty, as it existed within the original wisdom. And all that man has experienced within himself in feeling the power of his planet, in which, however, was contained all the power of the cosmos, only that it was centered in the planet or is centered in the planet, all that must rise again, in that man grasps it from within through the realization of intuition. Beauty, drawn from the universe, becomes imagination for the future of humanity from the present on. Strength becomes intuition, grasped through one's own free human power, and wisdom becomes inspiration.
Thus man has left an age in which beauty, wisdom and strength were bestowed upon him from the outside. I would like to say that these buzzwords of wisdom, beauty and strength have been merely parroted in certain secret societies, in freemason orders and so on, without further cultivation of inner understanding. If one would understand the matter inwardly, one would know that these are ancient traditions that must revive as imagination, as inspiration, as intuition. It is therefore a rather inferior wisdom when all kinds of members of this or that order come and find a similarity between what occurs in spiritual science and what they have as their tradition, which they mostly do not understand. In spiritual science, the connection is lifted out of the spirit-knowledge itself.
Thus, people have left an ancient age in which the secrets of the universe were revealed to them in beauty, wisdom and strength. Humanity must now approach an age in which the secrets of the universe will be revealed to them through the imagination, inspiration and intuition of those who want to or are meant to come to these powers of knowledge and who can reach them in some way. Today, everyone can understand what is brought forth from inspiration, intuition and imagination, if only they want to.
But now the old age was exposed to a certain danger. And this danger, I would say, arose most strongly in the then civilized world, in Egypt, the Near East, India and so on, towards the end of the 2nd millennium BC. The danger was this: that people did not receive in the right way what revealed itself, as if by itself, out of the universe, I would say by grace, to the human being who only had to receive it in his cognitive instinct. One could succumb to this danger in the following way.
You have to imagine what it means that not only what appears to today's sober consciousness as nature and as natural laws is revealed in the nature surrounding man, but that grandiose beauty, that is, beautiful appearance in mighty, pictorial revelations of spiritual beings, which looked out from every source, from every cloud, from everything. It was particularly during this time, towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Christian era, not as in even older times, when of course all this was also there; but it was, I would say, more naturally there. In those days, man had to partake of this grace by doing something himself. He did not have to do it in the way that we, now in full consciousness, seek higher spiritual development, but he could — and it was even a rather doubtful ability — develop a desire for this spiritual that revealed itself in nature; he could fire up his forces of need, his driving forces; then, as it were, the spiritual revealed itself to him out of nature. And in this kindling of the driving forces, of the forces of need, lay a strong satanic gift.
Most of you know, of course, how natural it was for man in the old Atlantean time to see the appearance of elemental beings. But this appearance still resonates for the clairvoyance of the post-Atlantean time. But it gradually faded away, and then man knew how to conjure it up in a certain way from natural phenomena through his powers of perception. That was the Luciferic danger that arose. Man could, so to speak, shake himself up, fire himself, in order to unite spiritual beings with himself. But this kind of arousal was something Luciferic in him. Therefore, the world of culture and civilization at that time was strongly contaminated by Lucifer at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. We have pointed out this Luciferic contamination from other points of view on other occasions; I have traced it back to its other causes; but now let us look at it from the point of view adopted in these three lectures.
This former Luciferic infestation of the world is now facing another, an Ahrimanic one. And this Ahrimanic infestation is currently on the march with a tremendously strong force. It is quite dreadful how the civilized man of the present day sleeps in the face of what is actually developing. Just consider how mechanical and machine power has developed in recent times. I have spoken of this before from other points of view. It is not so very long ago that people had to do everything with their own muscular strength, whereas today they can leave certain things to machines, which they only have to operate. The forces that man brings out of the earth by mining the coal underlie what takes place in the machines. The coal provides the power that then works in our machines.
When man now brings it about that a machine works alongside him, it is the case that he, so to speak, hands over to the machine what he used to have to do himself. The machine does it. The machine stands beside him and does the work that he used to have to do himself. One measures what the machine produces in horsepower, and if one wants to measure on a large scale, one measures what is produced within a certain territory in the horsepower that a horse can muster in a year when it does its daily work. Now take the following: in 1870 – we can calculate this from coal production – within Germany – I am deliberately choosing the war year – a total of six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years were worked by machines. That is, in addition to what people have worked, the machines have worked six and seven-tenths million horsepower-years. This is therefore a force that has been worked out of the machines themselves. In 1912, 79 million horsepower-years were worked by machine power in Germany alone!
Since Germany has a population of almost 79 million, this means that a horse works all year long next to every human being. And consider the increase from 6.7 million horsepower-years to 79 million horsepower-years within a few decades!
And now consider these conditions in relation to the outbreak of the terrible catastrophe of war. In the same year of 1912, France, Russia, and Belgium together could muster 35 million horsepower-years; Great Britain 98 million horsepower-years. Essentially, the war in 1870 was fought by people, because there was not much in the way of mechanical forces that could be mobilized. In Germany, there were only 6.7 million horsepower years available. In the few decades that followed, things changed. You know, in this war, it was essentially the machines that worked against each other. What confronted each other at the fronts came from the machines, so that actually the horsepower years of the mechanisms were led to the front.
Now the fact of the matter was that it took Great Britain a long time to mobilize its 98 million horsepower-years. But then, in terms of the mechanical power of these empires, 133 million horsepower-years stood against 79 million horsepower-years from Germany; about 92 million horsepower-years could be mustered if Austria were added. Now, this was initially offset by the fact that, as I said, Great Britain could not convert its horsepower years so quickly from land cultivation to the front. In this terrible war catastrophe, it was not the wisdom of the generals that was at issue – they did give certain directions, but the main thing that was at issue was the mechanical forces that collided at the fronts, and these did not depend on the generals, but on the inventions that man had previously made based on his natural science.
And what, then, had to happen as a matter of fate and destiny, as it were? Let us assume that the horsepower years of the United States of America, amounting to 139 million horsepower years, were still being sent to the front.
You see, the human race had produced so much machine power in just a few decades that the fate of the world was predetermined, quite apart from the genius of the generals. Nothing could be done about this fate of the world, about this necessity, where the results of the mechanical forces on the fronts simply collided.
So what exactly are we dealing with here? Man has constructed the mechanisms based on his thinking. By constructing them, he had placed his intellect, his scientific understanding, into the mechanisms. In a sense, reason had run away from his head and become the Horsepower Years in his environment. They now worked, having run away, themselves. The frantic speed with which this creation of a world, which is inhumanly-extra-human, has occurred in recent decades through humans, is not easily imagined by the sleeping civilized man of the present.
The person I referred to at the end of the 2nd millennium BC had the luciferic contamination around him; the spiritual beings for whom he developed his needs appeared to him from nature. When that is a natural object, the spiritual being appears in it (it is drawn). Now man lets his spirit flow into matter, into mechanisms. It becomes so in there that, for example, in Germany every person has created a horse alongside him out of the human mind, which now works alongside him, which was not a horse but machine power. This is separate from man, as these elemental beings were once separate from man, only in a different sense. They were so separate that man had to turn his Luciferic power to them. Now he turns his Ahrimanic power to them. Now he mechanizes them, materializes them. We live in the age of Ahrimanic contamination. Men do not even notice that they are actually withdrawing from the world, and that they are incorporating their intellect into the world and creating a world alongside them that is becoming independent. And the great, I might say, diabolical experiment has been carried out since 1914; that the one Ahrimanic entity against the other Ahrimanic entity has basically turned out to be the decisive factor. We have been dealing with an ahrimanic struggle over almost the whole earth. Man has accepted the ahrimanic character by creating a new ahrimanic world in the mechanism that surrounds him. And it is a new ahrimanic world. If you look at the figures: From 6.7 million to 79 million horsepower-years in just a few decades, the increase in non-human mechanical power – the ratio is the same in the other countries – how quickly Ahriman has grown in recent decades!
Should we not ask ourselves whether man should lose completely what is placed in his will, what is placed in his power of initiative? The question can be asked whether man should be led more and more towards the illusion that he is doing things, while in truth the Ahrimanic forces, which can be calculated in horsepower years, are working against each other? Those who have an overview of the world are only interested in Foch and Ludendorff and Haig from a moral point of view. From the point of view of full reality, they are interested in those forces that come from the coal and that clash on the fronts, that are led from the mechanical workshops to the fronts, depending on the inventive powers of previous years, and that turn into a simple mathematical calculation what must happen.
Thus, the Ahrimanization of the world is a simple mathematical calculation to know what must happen. And what is man's place in all this? He can stand by as the stupid one whose machines ultimately run towards when he finds somewhat more complicated combinations of forces.
This Ahrimanization is the modern counterpart to the Luciferization of the world of which I spoke earlier. That is what we must look at. For is this not perhaps the most eloquent illustration of the necessity for man to create from within? We will not stop this Ahrimanization, nor should we stop it, otherwise we would stand before every new mechanization like the Nuremberg Medical Council in 1839 or like the Berlin postmaster before the construction of the railroad, who said: People want to run a railroad from Berlin to Potsdam — I run post coaches out there twice a week, and there is no one inside! — One cannot stop mechanization, because culture must go in this direction. Culture demands the Ahrimanization. But it must be placed alongside what is now working from within the human being, what draws wisdom, beauty, power, and thus strength from within the human being, in the imagination, in the intuition, in the inspiration. For the worlds that will arise will be man's worlds, they will be those that stand before us in spirit and in soul, while without the forces of Ahriman are at work. And these powers that arise from imagination, from inspiration, from intuition, will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm the human being around him, out of the frantic pace of Ahrimanization. What comes from the spiritual world, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, is stronger than all the horsepower years that can still spring from the mechanization of the world. But the mechanizing forces would overwhelm man if he did not find the counterweight for them in what he can find from the revelations of the spiritual world, which he must strive for.
It is not some invention, some abstract ideal, some slogan that appears with spiritual science and strives for the realization of imagination, inspiration and intuition, but it is something that can be clearly seen in its necessity from the course of human development. And it must be pointed out that man would be overwhelmed by the non-human, which he himself has created in a world Ahrimanized in calculable horse power. When man received from without that which gave him wisdom, beauty and strength, he had not yet the Ahrimanized world around him, he could receive it in grace or through grace, and on earth he had at most what he acquired through the power of fire or through the simplest mechanical tools, which did not add much to his own strength. And only since about the second half of the nineteenth century have we a new world, I might say, a mighty new geological layer covering the earth. To all the layers, diluvium, alluvium, is added the Ahrimanic layer of mechanized forces, which forms like a crust over the earth. So what overwhelms man rises up from the depths if man does not place himself in the outer world with that world that comes to him from the spirit, that is, from imagination, intuition and inspiration.
Truly strong impulses arise out of the knowledge of the course of the world, which point to the necessity of spiritual-scientific culture and civilization. These are necessities that can already be grasped today. For is it not terrible that alongside man, this, let us say, super-geological layer is emerging with such furious haste like a new earth crust, and that many people today still think as they have been taught, as for example in Germany only 6.7 million horsepower years were produced by mechanization? Do people think about what actually drives the course of the world? Do we have a clear picture of what is really happening? We do not, otherwise we would truly recognize from the knowledge of what is happening the necessity to find a new way of imbuing people with what past ages called beauty, wisdom, strength, and what we must call imagination, inspiration, intuition after the path that the human personality must take to attain it.
We are therefore looking into a world that is riddled with Ahriman. I have said before that I do not want to use the word “transition period” carelessly, because basically every period is a transition period; but a time in which something as special as Ahrimanism has developed so rapidly as it has since the last third of the 19th century is not always there. And the Biedermeier period, which immediately preceded it for a large part of Central Europe, truly cannot be compared with what has actually happened in reality in the last few decades. One must feel the full gravity of these modern events. And one must feel the following.
When you look at an event such as the war that took place in Central Europe in 1870/71, you can reflect on it and keep thinking about it. But just look at how people still try to visualize the events of the last few years in the same way! They still think the way they did when there were only 6.7 million horsepower years in Germany! They do not understand that you have to think differently when 79 million horsepower years are working outside of humans! This requires a completely different way of thinking. Without turning to spiritual science, the riddles that arise from these events will not be solved at all. If man mechanizes the world around him through external science, then he must all the more develop an inner science from within himself, which in turn is wisdom. This will have the power to direct what would otherwise overwhelm him.