Cultural Phenomena — Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy

GA 225 — 23 September 1923, Dornach

XII. Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, Swedenborg

The contemplation of the world of dreams, as we did yesterday, has drawn our attention to the fact that in the moment when we enter from the world that is spread out before our senses as the world of natural laws into another world, the natural laws actually cease. I would like to say that they cease gradually, they cease little by little. In dreams, one can still clearly see how they are still based, on the one hand, on what is natural and lawful, but how, on the other hand, moral and ethical connections play into the dream, how one thing is connected to another in such a way that something is expressed in the context, such as, let us say, the moral value of the dreamer or the like. The dream is just a gentle transition from the physical-sensual world into completely different worlds, into worlds that then have nothing at all to do with the merely natural-law contexts.

Now, however, through such ideas and feelings, as they can be aroused by directing one's soul towards such transitions as are given in dreams, a, I would say, human understanding of world connections must be brought about, which otherwise should simply stand before the human soul as unrevealed secrets. You will soon feel what I actually mean. What matters is not intellectual comprehension of these things. What matters is to gain a totally human understanding, to gain a human relationship to the things with which man is connected, connected in his whole life and through the fact that he belongs to humanity. And it is impossible to say or present something about certain things in life if you have not allowed your feelings to be touched by something like what was discussed yesterday about 'Iraum. The things that depend on this coloring that the feeling gets as a result. And so today, in response to what was said yesterday about dreams and the strange utterances of the experimental magician, I want to put forward something that is linked to phenomena of life that should actually be felt as much greater mysteries than is usually the case. In connection with yesterday's considerations, such people, who from a certain point of view, bear the collective name “somnambulists”, people who show all kinds of deviations in their lives, which, for my sake, even go so far as to get up from their beds at night, climb around on roofs without falling off, and so on, that is, those people who are somnambulistic.

And secondly, from a certain point of view, I would like to discuss an appearance today that we have already discussed several times from other points of view, an appearance like that of Jakob Böhme or, for that matter, Paracelsus. And thirdly, in connection with this, I would like to discuss the appearance of Swedenborg. It can be said that today's humanity has become indifferent to everything, because the kind of interest that I would call a feuilletonistic one has spread so tremendously. Basically, phenomena such as somnambulists, Jakob Böhme or Swedenborg should be eating at people's souls, for they are quite different human phenomena that are placed in human life than ordinary citizens are.

Let us now try to understand such phenomena. Take the ordinary somnambulists. You know that in a certain way what they represent is connected with the manifestations of the moon. We have just recently spoken about the significance of the moon in the universe, and therefore this belongs in this context. I have told you that those beings who once were on Earth and brought man the original wisdom, which gradually faded away but which we find when we go back in history, that these entities have withdrawn to the Moon, as it were, to a kind of world colony, and that they populate the Moon internally. It is really the case that only the last remnants of what is characteristic of these beings have remained on earth in a coarser form. People were quite different back then, when these present-day moon beings were still on earth as the great teachers or guides of earthly humanity.

What these entities have left behind on earth are physical phenomena, the facts of reproductive life. These facts of reproductive life in its present form were not present on earth at the time when these entities gave people the original wisdom. Just as when you have dissolved any substance in a liquid, the liquid can look quite pure and even, but when the substance turns out to be sediment, then the substance is coarse and the liquid is even finer than it used to be – that is roughly what I mean here. What lives on earth today as the reproductive life is coarse in relation to what it once was. And what these beings have taken with them into the sphere of the moon is infinitely refined, has become infinitely more spiritual. But both belong together, both have been differentiated from each other. And what the moon really exerts on the earth as a force, what still works on the earth today as lunar force, is, as I told you when I discussed the position of the moon in the cosmos, that the moon actually reflects everything that is in the cosmos, not just the light of the sun, but actually reflects everything. So that we have two things in the moon: the interior of the moon, which is not currently emerging to the outside, but has closed itself off and been given a different task in the world, and that which is reflected back.

Now, in relation to his physical body, man is subject to the most powerful earthly force, gravity, in the way he moves, and also, incidentally, in the way he sits. It is always gravity that he appeals to. If he did not succumb to gravity with his physical body, he would not have these different states of equilibrium when walking, sitting, standing, and so on.

But with his etheric body, man is not so exposed to the earth force, but to the moon force. He is exposed to this force radiated back from the universe, and it pulls him out. While the force of gravity on earth pulls him down, this lunar force pulls him out into the cosmos. And this lunar force is temporarily predominantly active in somnambulant personalities. For moments, the lunar force overcomes the earthly force, and these personalities behave as if they had only an etheric body with which they can freely follow the lunar force. They drag their physical body along with them, and, as I said, climb around in the most daring way possible, as only the etheric body can, as the physical body cannot at all, but it is dragged along in such moments. So it is essentially, I would say, a breaking in of special lunar effects that occur in these somnambulistic personalities.

But now we must ask further, because everything is part of the great cosmic context, which ultimately leads back to nothing but beings. For the phenomena outside of the beings are only apparent, only the beings in the universe are truly real. So the beings in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, are truly real, as are the human beings, the angels, the archangels and so on. These are the realities; individualized beings are the realities. The other is something that takes place between beings, the other is an appearance, it is not a reality. So when we speak of realities, we are dealing with beings.

Now, when such beings appear, individualized human beings, that is, sleepwalkers, how does the appearance of such sleepwalkers fit into the whole of the universe? How is it that there are sleepwalkers at all in the context of the universe?

Now you really must grasp what I am about to say not in a logical, intellectual context, but in an emotional one, for that is the right logic in this field. Try to penetrate your feeling with the idea that one must go, I would say, from the world of natural law, beyond the currents of the dream-like into quite different worlds where natural laws no longer apply but where other connections prevail. Try to really feel your way into it, then you will also feel that one can speak of it: what is it like for those people who, in some earth life, appear as somnambulists, with what is not of this earth life, let us say, in the pre-earthly existence or in the post-earthly existence?

Surely, we could point out all the shortcomings and dark sides of the somnambulist, and even include the mediumistic aspect, but you know all that already, or at least you can know it. They behave differently in life, they act differently, they are different. Now, if they are different in earthly life, then one would have to ask, if one were to reach the spiritual world with its feelings in this way, I would like to say, quite literally through dreams: Are they perhaps also different in the neighboring extraterrestrial life, in the pre-earthly existence? What are they like there?

You see, it is evident from such entities, which are somnambulists in earthly incarnation, that in their pre-earthly existence they were actually extremely hostile in the spiritual world towards all spiritual beings.

If we use the means that already exist and that I have often spoken to you about, to investigate a somnambulant to find out what it was like in the pre-earthly existence – since the French Course we have often spoken of this pre-earthly existence in its concrete details – if we now investigate: What were such somnambulants like before they descended to their earthly existence? As grotesque as it may seem, it must be said: they were quite out of place in their pre-earthly existence – but they were materialists in the spiritual world in their pre-earthly existence.

Of course, one is not so materialistic there as to develop theoretical views about materialism. One moves, after all, first in the world of sympathies and antipathies; not in the world of concepts and judgments, but in the world of sympathies and antipathies. These somnambulists lived in the spiritual world, but most of what they experienced in the spiritual world was unpleasant to them. Everywhere they encountered spiritual beings they felt a sense of hatred for them. And so, when they descended to earthly existence, they could not anchor their astral body in the right way within themselves. One must indeed consolidate the astral body when one descends into earthly life. This consolidation suffers from the fact that these beings have constantly taken up these forces of antipathy towards the spiritual. And then the karma, which I would call cosmically directed, arises, that these entities, in their earthly life, because they have a physical body, must be connected to this physical body in just the way that a not quite consolidated astral body must be connected to the physical body.

Now I have also shown you how one passes through the sphere of the moon when descending back to earth, how one absorbs the lunar forces. Such beings have too little independence in relation to the lunar forces. They are not sufficiently consolidated in themselves, so that a relationship with the lunar forces remains in them when they enter their physical body. The result of this is that such beings actually show less consideration for their physical body than the average person shows for his physical body. And it is this, that they remain subject to the lunar sphere, the means of education in the entire plan of the world, to cure these people of their hostile attitude towards the spiritual. So that one stands with the moon-sick before people who, in this earthly life, are to be educated to get rid of their hostility towards the spiritual by being moon-sick. Through this non-grasping of the physical body, they experience the spiritual on earth, while in the spiritual world itself they have not sufficiently experienced the spiritual.

The normal citizen, who is now firmly seated in his physical body, is much more firmly seated in it today than is desirable for the good of humanity; he is terribly stuck in it. But the somnambulists pay very little attention to this physical body. Therefore, under certain constellations, they may experience moments when they are more given to the forces of the moon than to the forces of the earth.

Let us now move on from these personalities to one who, I would say, stood there in a certain greatness in Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus. Of course, such personalities also appear in history in a less grandiose way, not now in the present time, but it is not so long ago that such personalities were around. I would say there have always been more or less little Jakob Böhmes. Until a few decades ago, you could still find such little Jakob Böhmes, these personalities who, when you look at them so outwardly in ordinary life, are distinguished by the fact that they look into nature in a different way than is the case with the average citizen.

Take a characteristic manifestation in the case of Jakob Böhme. What was in his whole human character was already manifested in his youth. Take the characteristic manifestation: he tends animals like others do, when suddenly he has the urge to leave the animals, the herd and the others who are there, and to go to a place up in the mountains. Driven by instinct, he looks at a particular place. There he finds a hole in the ground, the earth is open. He looks down and finds a treasure down there. It shines up at him. He is amazed by this apparition, but he goes away in prayer. It does not even occur to him to take any of it. He often went back to look again. The hole was no longer there, the treasure must have been covered, and so on. He should have thoroughly convinced himself that what he had seen did not exist in the physical world, but of course, given his whole spiritual makeup, he never came to believe that he had not seen something after all.

Thus, what later emerged as his special way of thinking was prepared in him: to see into the borderline processes of things, the essence of things, everywhere. Anyone who reads Jakob Böhme's writings with even a little understanding will notice that the man saw salt and sulfur differently than a normal chemist of the time, of course. He speaks out of completely different insights. He even speaks out of insights that are not quite so familiar to him, so that language everywhere meets what he sees, because language is really sometimes confused and chaotic, and you have to live in it if you want to understand what this Jakob Böhme actually saw.

Now, to help you visualize the whole phenomenon of Jakob Böhme, I remind you of what I told you about the Druids. They dimmed the physical sunlight with their cromlechs, looked into the shadows, and in the shadows they saw the spiritual that radiates from the sun. For other people, shadows are just shadows, they are not light, they are something negative. For the Druids, however, it was something very real. And the shadow was not only different in its direction, depending on whether it appeared in March or October, but also in its inner attitude, in its coloring, in its coloring, but also in particular in the spiritual that it contained. If you push back the physical rays of the sun, so to speak, then the spiritual that the sun radiates appears precisely in the shadow. But for Jakob Böhme, this was what followed from his entire human essence. I would say that when he gave himself an inward jolt in a certain direction – it's a rough way of speaking, but that's how it is – when he gave himself an inward jolt, he could extinguish the physical sunlight and actually see into the darkness.

And what happens when you look through something where you don't follow the light, so to speak, but where you have something like a boundary in front of you? Something like a mirror appears. But when you look, let's say, like this - I'm drawing the physical eye, but it's not so much the physical eye that matters - there is light everywhere. Well, then you just see the physical things. But when you can extinguish this physical sunlight through your own power, then looking into the darkness actually occurs in the back. You don't even need the shadow, looking into the darkness occurs. But when this looking into the darkness occurs, then it has the effect of a mirror. And because Jacob Böhme could see like this, he saw things as if they were reflected in the darkness, and they gave back to his soul's eye what they had inwardly spiritually. So he saw the most ordinary objects when he tuned into them, especially the characteristic objects he speaks of, salt, sulfur, mercury and so on, not as one sees them when looking at them under ordinary circumstances, but he saw their essence, that which underlies them spiritually, mirrored in the darkness.

This was the special way in which he saw: He saw what underlies things spiritually, mirrored in the darkness. He saw them in the glow of the sun's effects, but excluding the physical effects of light and heat. While the somnambulists bring their will into the lunar effects and are thus less subject to the gravity of the earth for moments, and are more exposed to the lunar effects, while the ordinary somnambulists follow the lunar effects with their organs of will, Böhme was able to follow the solar effects with his organ of knowledge, and was thus a solar man, so to speak, a solar addict in contrast to the lunar addicts. And in such people, as Jakob Böhme was in his particularly characteristic greatness, we again have human individualities that stand out from ordinary humanity through a special relationship to the spiritual: sun people.

Again, with these sun people, we must ask: What were they like in their pre-earthly existence? Yes, you see, the pre-earthly existence of such people is actually extremely interesting. I have often reminded you that in the early days of human development, people always looked back to their pre-earthly existence. Something occurred in their consciousness that allowed them to have a kind of memory of their pre-earthly existence. They knew: I descended from spiritual worlds into the earthly world.

Something like this, not like a personal looking back, but a looking back on the way one looked at the spiritual world before one's earthly existence, emerged atavistically in Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus. As a result, such people have more of a connection to the elemental spirits of nature than to what natural things outwardly represent on their surface. They see more the spiritual entities that are within nature. For example, what is called sulfur on earth is not seen in the pre-earthly existence, but, if I may express it this way, the elemental spirit that underlies sulfur is seen. This is seen in the pre-earthly existence.

The yellow sulfur or sulfur of a different color – this concept does not exist in the pre-earthly existence. For the pre-earthly existence, there is not even an idea of the “sulfur” that people on earth talk about. There is absolutely nothing of the physical sulfur, but there is an idea in the pre-earthly existence of the very different spiritual essence that underlies the sulfur. These are the qualities that people like Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus possess.

As a result, they have precisely the power to exclude physical sunlight and, in physical darkness – I cannot say to see the spiritual effects of the sun, just as one does not see light or color, and so not see the spiritual effects of the sun either – I would say that with the vision, one encounters this physical darkness, but in spiritual elevation, which then reflects the spiritual that is present in the nature beings and natural forces.

And basically it is actually like this: if there were not occasionally people who provide such inspiration – the channels through which such inspiration enters humanity are usually not taken into account – people would not know much about nature at all, because these inspirations are also necessary for even the most abstract knowledge of nature. The others then put everything into intellectual terms. But this looking into the living nature of things comes from such sun people.

You see, it became more and more difficult to express such things in the world the closer we came to the 20th century. Most of you know the biography of Jakob Böhme. You know how he was persecuted. If he had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, or if someone like Jakob Böhme, with the particular way he spoke, had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, he would probably have been locked up in an asylum. He would have fared much worse than he did in his environment at the time, but it was difficult even then to appear. After all, Jakob Böhme had, in a sense, still been able to feel the benefit of that time, and this benefit consisted, for example, in the fact that he was not maltreated with what we already have to learn in schools today. School education, elementary school education, was not so advanced. Please do not think that I am speaking against elementary education, but it must be said that things must also be judged from a different point of view. Perhaps not many of you have lived in such places where some retired shoemaker was a teacher. In such places, children have not learned all that much wisdom in the time that people in the present day have been able to live through in their youth; they remained much more untouched. But what one is exposed to in today's normal school not only trains something, but also kills something. Jakob Böhme had the good fortune not to have been subjected to such a school education, and therefore what was in him as a sun-person could push its way to the surface.

Yes, it is already there in the person; but sometimes it has to come out in a completely different way. I could quote you some compositions from the last third of the 19th century in which I could show you how people, because they went through school education from the end of the 19th century, naturally could not speak like Jakob Böhme - but in some musical compositions it comes out anyway. There is also a keynote and a basic mood as in the writings of Jakob Böhme. It breaks through somewhere, especially in music, but not in what has particularly reached the heights. Don't think that I would have to talk to you about a Wagnerian composition, nor about “Hänsel and Gretel”, of course, when I tell you these things. I would have to mention completely different compositions. But there are such musical achievements where something like this breaks through. Now, as I said, it is precisely such impulses, which are then realized, that have a certain significance for earthly life.

Now we can consider the third type, which has emerged so characteristically in Swedenborg. Swedenborg looks quite peculiar when you look at the externals. Swedenborg had already ascended to the forties of his life on earth; he was a recognized great scholar of his time, encompassing the entire science of his time, as much as one could possibly encompass this science of his time. There are works of his that have been published. But there are an enormous number of manuscripts that were written entirely outside the science of the time, that were written so strongly outside the science of the time – they then remained manuscripts – that a Swedish society of the greatest Swedish scholars has now been formed to publish those works of Swedenborg's that he wrote in the sense of normal science until well into the 1740s.

But then something like this begins with Swedenborg, where people say: He has gone mad. He has just gone mad! — One publishes his works as those of one of the greatest men of his time and explains that not just anyone is good enough to publish them, but that today entire academies are needed to make Swedenborg accessible to the world up to the age of forty-four or something like that. The future is not taken into account! But it is important that Swedenborg lived to a certain age in the intellectual and scholarly environment of his time, which was already so intellectual and scholarly, and that a certain spiritual insight then dawned on him.

Such a spiritual view, as it specifically occurred in Swedenborg, has very special characteristics. It is like this: If you imagine a human being and what the human being has as a brain, then, in a certain way, for the normal person, the etheric body fills the brain. What I have indicated here in red would be the physical brain. The etheric body fills the physical brain and extends somewhat beyond it.

Now, in the normal way, in the right, I could also say bourgeois way, his etheric body was formed, his brain, his head constitution was formed so normally by Swedenborg until he was in his forties. Then a force overcame him that contracted this etheric body somewhat, not behind the skin, of course, but contracted somewhat, into itself, so that it became denser, thereby also becoming more independent of the brain, but still retaining all the cleverness. Because it is not true that he then became more foolish; he was just as clever as before.

When you walk around as a sleepwalker, your astral body is so strongly subject to the power of the moon. The organs of will then often adjust to the power of the moon. When you are like Jakob Böhme, your cognitive faculty is aligned with the powers of the sun, and it repels the physical effects of the sun. When one becomes like Swedenborg, when there is such a contraction of the etheric body, there is the power that causes it, the Saturn power, that power of Saturn – I described it to you cosmically a short time ago – in which there is actually something like a kind of inwardness of our entire planetary system, as one can also say, Saturn contains the powers of the memory of our planetary system. What had been passed on to Swedenborg was precisely this Saturn force, this inwardness of the entire planetary system. This is how he was able to see things in such visions as he just described them. He saw angels, archangels, processes between angels and archangels, as he just described them. But what was it actually? What did he enter through this contraction of the etheric body of his head? He did not succeed in seeing the real processes in the hierarchies. You have to imagine what he saw like this: if this is the Earth, then we are drawing the Earth's ether sphere. This now extends into the cosmic expanse, about which I told you yesterday that we would encounter the Orion Nebula and so on, that there is a lawfulness, not a natural lawfulness, but a lawfulness, as it is in a dream. Where space would end, we would only encounter the processes in the hierarchies. Swedenborg did not see into this with his ability to see, but all the processes that really take place outside the ether sphere are not merely reflected in the ether, but they call forth, I would say, real image processes in the ether. So that something is going on up there in the hierarchies that should be described quite differently, but which has an effect on the ether sphere of the earth, so that the ether forms act in the earth's ether. Figures are acting around us, these are not the real angels, these are the ether figures, the figures formed out of the ether, but which now also implement their deeds in such a way that they are understandable to man.

These – one cannot call them reflections, but perhaps real reflections – these real reflections of the higher hierarchies in the earth's ether were seen by Swedenborg. He did not see what angels were doing, but he saw what one can see when one is up there in the angelic deeds, not seeing them as such, but seeing what is going on down there in the earth's ether in the sphere of men. What the angels do up there cannot have a direct effect on people on earth; it is precisely these real reflections that then have an effect among people. The reflections in the ether have an effect among people, they walk among us. Swedenborg saw them, he became aware of them.

So if those people we call moonstruck cause us to look at their pre-earthly existence, if, when we look at people like Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus, we look at their present earthly existence, then we have every reason to look at the post-earthly existence of people like Swedenborg. Our earthly existence only makes sense when we look forward to the afterlife. For it is these people in particular who are still able, after death, to have an instructive effect on others who have passed through the gate of death, to tell them much of what must remain incomprehensible in the higher worlds if one has not already become acquainted with something of the higher worlds in the earthly world.

And one would like to say: It is so in the general spiritual plan of the world that human personalities of the kind of Swedenborg are introduced here on earth into the real shadows, real mirror images of the processes in the higher hierarchies, so that they are well prepared when they go up there, because they will need it precisely in the post-mortal existence. While the earth-lives of somnambulists, because of their condition, have something of the character of a reformatory in relation to the spiritual worlds, the lives of personalities such as Swedenborg have something preparatory for the achievements they have to accomplish after death. And so we can say that people are different in their individualities, and especially in those who are very different from the others, it can be shown how man can only be understood if we not only consider his relationship to the earthly environment, but if we know that he also has a relationship to the spiritual worlds in every moment of his life, even here in earthly existence has a relationship to the spiritual worlds. Everything that happens here in earthly existence, even in people in whom it manifests itself as strikingly as in Böhme and the others, has a connection to the pre-earthly existence, to the spirit that also lives in earthly existence, or to the post-earthly existence. Only in these special types, somnambulists, the Jakob Böhme type, the Swedenborg type, do we notice very strongly what is present to some extent in every human being: a being of earthly existence in relation to the pre-earthly existence or to the simultaneous earthly spiritual existence or to the post-earthly spiritual existence. In particular, those beings who, I might say, behave in the cosmos as I described to you at the time, that is, the moon beings, sun beings, Saturn beings, they need the forces that play in particular human beings to carry out their tasks.

And that is where a perspective can open up to us, which I will mention only at the end of these reflections. What this perspective opens up, I will talk about when I give the next lecture here. But a very specific perspective can open up for us. We really have to consider that the human interior, even the physical human interior, the ordinary physical human interior, which lies within the human skin, actually falls outside of what we usually call the cosmos.

We can, roughly speaking, say the following: if we have the earth here, then the mineral, plant, animal, physical-human effects and so on happen on it, and so what can be observed with the senses and combined with the mind happens on it. Then there are people on this earth on it. But there is also a world inside people, it is not the same world as outside. I could do it like this: I could draw many people schematically, always showing the inside of the people. What is going on inside the people could be the red, and the white around it could be the natural effects that can be seen with the senses and so on. Now you can make an abstraction. Do you think I will now erase everything that is there in the way of natural effects, I will only leave the red, I will erase everything so that only the inner being of people remains and everything else is gone. So imagine that I would first remove all the minerals from the earth, remove all the plants and remove all the animals, everything else that would be there in the way of natural effects – but if you remove the three natural kingdoms , everything is gone, and then there are the skins, so that you then have the physical skin gone, but not only the skins, but also all the physical matter that you have within you. I would take all that away, then something would remain of the whole globe: these are divine effects. We would still have the hierarchies in it, angels, archangels and so on. We would actually only then have taken away the earth and kept heaven.

And if you follow this sensation, then you come to adjust the human interior in the right way to the actual spiritual supersensible world and to imagine in a comprehensive way where that is that could be called heaven. It is actually in the person, in that which remains when all that is gone that I have described.

If you describe sleepwalkers, Jakob Böhme, Swedenborg as I have today, who are you actually talking about? Then you are not on earth, but in the cosmos. It is necessary in our time that we no longer talk about the human being as if he were a connection between the laws and effects of nature that are outside, as has been the case in the last few centuries. Instead, we must today become aware of what would be there if we were to remove everything – I do not want to repeat the horrible image again repeat the ghastly image — if one were to remove all that I have just said would be removed, and leave only the inner man, then one would not only come upon the spiritual world in a general, vague, abstract-pantheistic sense, but one would come upon the concrete spiritual world of supersensible entities. They have their dwellings in man. And humanity must gradually become aware of this again, that the human body is indeed the dwelling of the gods.

Only when this is taken up in our time consciousness is the right ingredient in this time consciousness, whereby culture, instead of going down, can go up. This is a truth that can be expressed from a variety of perspectives. Today I wanted to present it to you as a link to what I said yesterday about dreams and today about these so-called abnormal states of mind.