Knowledge of Soul and Spirit

GA 56 — 16 April 1908, Berlin

Hell

We must go back a long way in humanity's quest to solve the mysteries of the world if we want to consider the origins of the two mental images that immediately come to mind when we approach these mysteries in a deeper sense, especially in a spiritual sense: the two mental images of good and evil.

Human thinking will always seek to rise to the mysterious forces that condition and permeate our development from the spiritual world. We are constantly confronted with attempts in various forms to relate the beneficial forces of life that serve the salvation and progress of human development to the destructive, repulsive, and inhibiting forces. But time and again, the intimate relationship that exists between these two forces, despite their seemingly strong opposition, presents itself as a mental image to the keen observer. We need only think of Schiller's words about fire, already mentioned on another occasion:

Beneficial is the power of fire
When man tames and guards it
But terrible is the power of heaven
When it breaks its chains
And follows its own path
The free daughter of nature.

One might say that such words encapsulate the question that concerns us today and in the next lecture, the question that has also been clothed at various times in the words hell and heaven, whereby one must not imagine that these words, wherever they appear, have the superstitious meaning that many adherents to these mental images attach to them, but also by no fewer of those who today, without knowing their deeper meaning, would like to combat them.

If we take just a quick look around, we can already see our question arising from ancient Persian culture, where a realm of good forces, Ormuzd, and a realm of evil forces, Ahriman, are sharply contrasted with each other. And when we see how, in a remarkable mental image, the hidden forces that advance in the world in a good sense are interfered with by the forces of hatred that hold them back, until finally the power of light prevails, we have before us one of the great images in which human fantasy and imagination clothe our problem. From the Greek Tartarus to the Norse mythology, we encounter a realm of hell, we encounter names associated with the concept of hell. It is the realm to which all those are condemned who have not died an honorable death in the physical world in accordance with the direction of culture.

We may notice a peculiarity when we recall this legend of the realm of hell. Let us pay close attention to it, for it must be said from the outset that the legends sometimes contain a deeper wisdom than that which is explored in our time with abstract concepts.

It is remarkable how the ancient Norse mythology derives the current state of the world from a “Nifelheim” filled with cold mist, the Norse land that, according to Germanic mental image, was devoid of sunlight in ancient times, and from the other realm, “Muspelheim,” the warm realm. The interaction of the two realms gave rise to the present state of the earth. And it was not from the warm Muspelheim, but from the cold, fog-filled Nifelheim that the most important forces now serving humanity were derived. It was there that the higher human forces underlying today's culture first developed. At the same time, however — and this is the strange thing that touches on our question in a wonderful way — we are told that Hel, who takes the unworthy dead to herself, is banished by the gods to this misty realm, where those who have not died a worthy death go. It is remarkable that the realm and the forces of ascent are brought together with the place and the personality that represent the power of death and decay.

And when we leave such ancient times behind and approach our own era, we find that, above all, those whom Pochhammer, in his edition of Dante, said should be the teachers of adults as well as the educators and teachers of youth, resort to the mental image of a world in which evil is concentrated when they want to explain our existence from the depths of the world's existence. How magnificently and powerfully Dante describes this world to us right at the beginning of his overwhelming poem, which depicts man's purification and development toward the higher spiritual worlds! And again, a poet was compelled to resort to these mental images in order to depict the forces dwelling in the human soul when Goethe wrote his “Faust.” Therefore, he contrasted what Faust was to lead to the bright, light powers with the representative of the hellish powers, Mephistopheles.

You can find many meaningful statements in Goethe's “Faust” that describe Faust's peculiar relationship with Mephisto and the two with the world's existence. Only two of them will be recalled here in this context, in which Goethe again juxtaposes the two concepts of good and evil in a strange way that echoes Norse mythology. One quote is where Mephistopheles is called “a part of that power which always wants evil and always creates good.” Here, the concepts of good and evil are placed in a very intimate connection with the whole of worldly existence. And we should not fail to mention another of Goethe's sayings, which on the one hand takes us deep into Goethe's soul, but on the other hand also takes us quite deep into our problem, for it deals with the whole relationship of the good powers in Faust to what Mephisto wants to achieve in him, namely evil. Very significantly, Goethe has Faust say the following words at the moment when he is about to conclude the pact with Mephisto that determines the conditions under which he is to fall prey to Mephisto:

I will say to the moment:
Stay! You are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
Then I will gladly perish!
Then let the death bell toll,
Then you will be free of your service,
Let the clock stand still, the hands fall,
Let time be over for me!

“I will say to the moment: Stay, you are so beautiful” is an expression with which Goethe makes it clear to us that Mephistopheles did not understand it in its full extent. But Faust knows that he can only fall prey to the powers of hell if he finds himself in a position to say to the moment: “Stay, you are so beautiful.”

This should be placed at the beginning of our consideration today because it can show us in which direction, on the one hand from the world of legends and on the other hand from deep human thinking accompanied by poetic garb, that which occupies us today is directed. Of course, those who today believe that they can construct a whole worldview from a few cobbled-together concepts of the material world will very easily dismiss the concepts of hell and heaven. They are not concerned with what we have now placed at the beginning of our reflection. They simply say: We only need to trace the development of the various religions and childlike worldviews, and it becomes clear to us that either the peoples themselves in their distress or some individuals invented what we call heaven and hell, partly to comfort the peoples for the suffering they endure on earth, and partly to spur them on to turn their selfish instincts to good through fear of hell.

Those who speak in this way know nothing of the real motives and reasons why mental images such as heaven and hell have been introduced into the souls and hearts of human beings.

Today, we will not seek an answer to the question that humanity has always asked itself in randomly collected observations, images, judgments, and reasoning, but rather we want to gain mental images about what can be said about this question from what we have based all our winter lectures on in a certain way.

Let us recall the lecture I was privileged to give here on the subject of “Man, Woman, and Child.” There we were able to speak about the great development of human beings on earth and teach us about the various forces that play a part and have a say in human development. If we look at this human development from the perspective of Spiritual Science — as we said at the time — then, in order to gain an understanding of it, we will draw on the way in which the spiritual scientist views the developing child, how it comes towards us from the first moments of its life in the light of day and increasingly brings its powers and abilities to light.

Those who observe this developing human being with the keen eye of Spiritual Science see how the child's abilities develop in a fascinating way from their seeds. A materialistic science would have us believe that what gradually emerges in such a fascinating way is attributable solely to characteristics inherited from parents, grandparents, or other ancestors. The word “heredity” plays a major role in this question today. It has often been pointed out that spiritual science today is called upon to play a role that not so long ago — less than three hundred years ago — was played by a great natural scientist: the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi. He was the first to express something that is now common knowledge among both laymen and scholars. In his day, however, it was not only the belief of laymen, but also of all natural scientists, that not only lowly animal creatures, but also earthworms, fish, and so on could arise from inanimate matter, from river mud. Today, it is believed that it was only religious prejudices that prevented people from attributing everything to a purely mechanical world order. However, it was not only the secular scholars, of whom there were only a few at that time, who assumed that living things could arise from non-living matter; even St. Augustine held this view. You can see from this that it was not at all contrary to St. Augustine's religiosity to hold such a view.

But what is it that contradicts such an assumption? A real, deep observation of the world, both external and internal, physical and not supernatural experience of things. It was physical and non-supernatural experiences that gradually led people to the conclusion that Redi then expressed: living things can only arise from living things. Modern Spiritual Science today finds itself in the same situation as the natural scientist Redi was in at that time — and he only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. The statement that is disputed today is applied here to a spiritual realm and reads: Spiritual things can only arise from spiritual things. — What we see developing first from the predispositions of the child's germ cannot be traced back to physical processes. We trace it back to the spiritual, just as we trace the living back to life. And then the spiritual leads us back to a spiritual-soul aspect. When we see this spiritual-soul aspect clothed, as it were, in those characteristics that are linked to the physical or to the other envelopes of the human being, then we trace only this physical aspect, which colors and shades the spiritual and soul abilities and characteristics, back to the entire line of heredity as it is presented to us in parents, grandparents, and so on. When people repeatedly draw our attention to how the characteristics gradually accumulate in the line of heredity and then finally appear in a descendant, we say that this does not surprise us at all from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. We find it natural that the characteristics of physical heredity appear in the bodies in which the spiritual germ appears. For how do we view this physical heredity? Let us take the following example:

We take a plant seed and plant it in fertile soil with all kinds of substances that can provide the plant with abundant nourishment. And then we plant the same seed in another soil that contains only the bare minimum of substances that the plant needs. The plants carry within them the characteristics of the soil from which they sprouted. Thus we see the plant unfolding its own deeper origin, its plant seed, and on the other hand we see that which develops and unfolds this plant seed, that which envelops it, that which is attached and filled in from the soil from which the plant has sprung. And so the human being, like the plant, has sprung from an earlier plant, from a spiritual-soul being of former times. He has grown on soil that has been prepared in the line of inheritance, and this spiritual-soul germ also contains characteristics that it brings with it from the soil of the line of inheritance. We are not surprised that the whole process is like this and that it appears to the external, physical observer of the world in such a way that he could fall into the errors indicated. When it is said that one should look at how the characteristics of ancestors accumulate in a particularly gifted personality, and that a musician comes from a family of musicians and a mathematician from a family of mathematicians, the spiritual scientist does not need to deny these things in any way or present them in a different light. For Spiritual Science, the situation is as follows:

There are long periods of time within which that which is our spiritual and soul life arises again and again. In spiritual research, we speak of repeated earthly lives when we say that what is spiritual and soul-like in us refers us back to earlier lives in which the spiritual seeds for our present life were sown. Everything that we now contain and everything that we now achieve will unfold in future times and have its effect. This spiritual-soul seed has nothing to do with what is propagated in the physical line. When a human being comes into existence, this spiritual-soul seed enters the physical body, and this physical body that it inhabits is built up by the forces that are inherited in the family. Thus, there is indeed a duality within the human being, one part of which, the spiritual-soul part, can be traced back to a purely spiritual line of evolution, while the other, the physical part, can be traced back to the inherited line of evolution. Heredity and reincarnation are the two things that interact here, which is quite obvious from any meaningful consideration. But look, it is said, these characteristics are present in one ancestor and those characteristics in another. Ultimately, these characteristics accumulate and become a Goethe or a Beethoven. And geniuses usually appear at the end of a long line.

Let us consider this statement: genius appears at the end of a generational line. — It is strange that genius is attributed to heredity because it has a body that is organized for genius. If the Bernoullis repeatedly become mathematicians, it is clear that they need special bodies for this. It is not surprising that when the spiritual and mental germ is immersed in what is hereditary, in what is the soil for the mathematical mind, it also brings these characteristics with it. Or is it surprising that someone who goes into the water comes out wet? So it is also natural that when someone is born into a family, they carry the characteristics of that family.

So what the above statement really means is something self-evident, something fundamentally trivial. But how could it be proven that genius itself is hereditary? By the fact that it stands at the beginning and not at the end of a generational series! If it stands at the end, this is proof that it is precisely the characteristics of genius that are not hereditary! It is a strange way of reasoning to say that one can see that the characteristics are inherited, and then to add the assertion that genius is at the end of a series. Sound logic can only say that genius, by reincarnating, cannot pass on its spiritual characteristics; otherwise it would have to be at the beginning of the generational series. This brings us to two lines of development, one spiritual and one physical. If one does not accept this, one cannot cope with sound logic.

We see a child who lived another life centuries ago, developing and using the characteristics that are now available to it. Thus we see the child entering life. And how do we see the human being leave life? We have already pointed this out. Now let us consider the events that occur when that which has entered physical existence through birth leaves life again by passing through the gate of death. Here we must consider not only death, but also something we already considered in our last reflection: the alternating states of sleep and wakefulness, and the alternating states of life and death.

We know from our last consideration that when a person sinks into so-called dreamless sleep in the evening, certain members of their being separate themselves from what we call the actual human inner being, the innermost being, the core of the human being. In the sense of Spiritual Science, we distinguish in such a sleeping person between what lies in bed, so to speak, and this core of being. The physical body lies in bed, which will be surrendered to the elements of the earth at death. But when a person lies in bed, the physical body is not as it will be when it is surrendered to the earth. The physical body is still impregnated with the etheric or life body. The physical body is alive, the life functions are maintained, so that the physical body and the etheric or life body lie in bed. First of all, we find the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, and all the sensory impressions that ebb and flow during the day: warmth and cold, smell and taste, the bearer of the whole life of thought and imagination, from instincts and passions to moral ideals. This is what sinks down into an indefinite darkness when we fall asleep. But it is also what returns in the morning like an influx of light. It is the light of consciousness.

We must make another precise distinction within what is lifted out of the human body, both the physical and the etheric body, during the night: it is human self-consciousness and its bearer, the human I. We call the bearer of pleasure and pain, of instincts and passions, of fluctuating sensual sensations the astral body, and the bearer of self-consciousness, the fourth member of the human being, the I. These two members, the bearer of the I and the bearer of pleasure and pain, are lifted out of the physical and etheric bodies during dreamless sleep.

Why can you not perceive in that world? We have found the answer to these questions in our lectures, because as human beings are now developed, the ego and the astral body of human beings have no organs. Human beings perceive their physical environment through their organs, their eyes and ears. Only in the morning, when the ego and the astral body submerge into the physical body and make use of these organs, does the human being perceive the environment. So we have a four-part being: a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego body. — That is the essence of the alternating states of waking and sleeping.

But now let us consider the mental image of the moment of death. We can do this by drawing on the facts available to someone who has applied the methods of initiation to themselves and learned to use the higher senses that lie dormant in human beings. But even ordinary logic can understand this, because these facts are presented in such a way that they can show us the path of human beings through death. At death, something occurs that happens only in exceptional cases during the entire life between birth and death. Throughout life, the etheric body remains united with the physical body. Only in death does it separate from it, and thus the physical body becomes a corpse. It now follows the purely physical-chemical forces from which it was torn between birth and death by the indwelling of the etheric body. This etheric body is, as has often been said, a faithful fighter throughout life against the decay of the physical body, for the physical body has within it the chemical and physical forces. This becomes apparent when it is left to itself after death: it decays, it is an impossible mixture. The etheric body separates from the physical body and remains for a while together with the astral body and the ego.

This connection is of great importance. Now, at the moment of death, a comprehensive picture of the life between birth and death appears before the human being. It is as if a vast panorama of the life we have lived were standing before our soul. This vision, this memory image, is accompanied by a feeling of expansion, of the human being becoming greater. It is as if the human being were expanding and the images of the past life were appearing on the inner side, as in a wonderful panorama.

Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that the etheric body is the carrier of memory. As long as it is in the physical body, it is bound to the physical body and can only survey what it has experienced in the physical body between birth and death. The physical body is an obstacle. Because the etheric body is an unclouded, pure carrier of memory, the entire past appears in a single image after death. People who were close to death in a drowning or a rockslide and suffered a shock remember that in a moment their whole life stood before their soul. I could tell you a lot about this, but I will only mention what is written in a book that I have already referred to earlier. The criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt, a man who would consider everything else that has been said here to be utter nonsense and fantasy — but that doesn't matter — recounts that when he was once close to drowning, his entire life appeared before his soul like a large painting. What happens in such a case? There is a spontaneous loosening between the physical body and the etheric body, which is immediately reversed. The result is that the contents of the memory of the whole life appear before the human soul for a very short span of time.

So first this memory image appears before the human soul. Then comes the time when the etheric body separates again from the astral body and the ego. But a remnant of the etheric body remains connected to the human being, something that could be called the extract of the last life, something like a short excerpt. Imagine this short excerpt, this essence of life, as if you could artfully summarize the contents of a thick book on one page, but in such a way that a person could reconstruct the contents of the book from this extract. Something like this essence of life is incorporated into the human being for all future times, after he has discarded what he cannot use for his further evolution. We want to remember this in particular. What is incorporated into the human being for their future development is the fruit of their last life. Each life forms something like a page in the great book of life, and all our earthly lives are recorded on such a page. They are incorporated into our being. We take such fruit from one life into all future ones. This fruit is of great importance for the further development of the human being.

But before we can discuss the significance of this extract of life, we must take a closer look at the further course of human beings after death. After this picture of life has existed for a very short time, another time begins for human beings after death, which we can characterize in the following way. Now the human being has his ego, his astral body, and this extract of which I have just spoken. Let us now consider how the astral body, the bearer of drives, desires, and passions, can work. We can form a mental image of this activity of the astral body from logical considerations. Let us take one of the ordinary experiences, the experience of a gourmet who enjoys a delicious meal. What causes this enjoyment? It would be easy to attribute it solely to the physical body. But that would be absurd. It is not the physical body, but the astral body that is the bearer of desires, of pleasure and pain. The astral body enjoys the food, and it is also the astral body that develops the desire for the delicious food. The physical body is an apparatus of physical substances, of physical and chemical forces. It provides the tools for the astral body to satisfy these desires. This is the relationship between the astral body and the physical body in life. The astral body cries out for the satisfaction of its desires, and the physical body provides it with the tools, the palate, the tongue, and so on, through which it can satisfy its desires. What happens now in death? The physical body is discarded, and with it all the instruments of satisfaction. But the astral body is still there, and it is easy to see that this astral body does not simply abandon its lust for pleasure, its desires, because the physical tools have been taken away. After death, the astral body retains its desires, its cravings, even though it lacks the physical tools with which to satisfy them. The astral body thus develops a craving for delicious food and so on, but it lacks the palate. Or it is as if a person suffering from burning thirst is in an environment where there is no water far and wide. The only reason why he is unable to satisfy his cravings after death is because he has no organs with which to do so. Thus he suffers pain from his cravings until he has eradicated them completely through non-satisfaction.

This is the time that a person has to go through after death in what is called Kamaloka. Kama means desire, Loka means place. This is a symbol. The time of suffering only ends when the person has eradicated the desire and addiction that are rooted in the astral body and can only be satisfied in the physical world. It is a time of weaning, of purification.

But if we now ask ourselves whether this time of purification can occur in all possible degrees, we must answer: Yes! — Let us take two people, one who is completely absorbed in sensual pleasures, whose life from morning to night is filled with all kinds of pleasures that can only be had in the physical world, where the tools for their satisfaction are available. He identifies his entire inner being with what his physical body is. A person who identifies in this way with the physical body will have a more difficult existence after death than someone who, even in this life, sees through the sensual things to what is supersensory, spiritual, and soulful. Take, on the other hand, someone who contemplates a beautiful landscape or a piece of music. In the smallest, most insignificant things, people can see a manifestation of the spirit. People like to choose a beautiful landscape or a good piece of music as an example because it makes it easier to illustrate the point. Those who hear the mysteries of the eternal in the world rustling in the harmonies and melodies of a piece of music, who allow the spiritual harmonies and relationships in a beautiful landscape to affect their soul, who, as spiritual beings, already in this life between birth and death, tear themselves away from what is bound to the physical. And that which shines through the physical, which is felt resonating through the physical, is a possession that remains with us and for which we do not have to undergo purification or weaning; for that which falls away from us is merely the outer garment. Think deeply within yourself about how something that is purely spiritual manifests itself in a piece of music. It is no different from the sensory manifestations in that it is hidden within them and penetrates you through the medium of sensory manifestation. This is something that belongs to the spirit, to the soul, and from which human beings do not need to tear themselves away after death.

So you see that there are degrees of what must be endured, and these degrees depend on how strongly the human being has identified with what he can experience and enjoy in the physical world only through his organs.

Now there is, so to speak, a perspective that certainly does not need to be an immediate, real reality in the present for any human being, because there is no human being for whom the conditions for this perspective are completely fulfilled. But it is nevertheless present. Let us take a person who devotes his entire self to what can only be enjoyed through the physical body and its organs in connection with the physical outside world, who has lost himself completely to this sensual outside world and who has no interest whatsoever in anything that underlies this sensual outside world as spiritual and soul content; a person who only looks at the earth and identifies only with what shapes their body. What will be the result? We can recognize this if we explore the mysteries of the human being in even greater detail.

If we want to do this, we must consider a little what the human being takes with them as the essence of life from their etheric body. What becomes of what they take with them as the essence of life? From this fruit of their previous life, human beings build their next embodiment, the body of their next life. For what appears to us as the human being who gradually unfolds is indeed a product of heredity. But these products of heredity are elastic in a certain sense. Human beings do not merely allow their bodies to be built from the characteristics of heredity, but what they have brought with them from previous lives also works and weaves within them, as in an elastic physicality. Thus, in addition to the inherited characteristics, we see in a human being the fruits of previous lives, and of all previous lives, woven into them. And when we ask ourselves: What is the consequence of human beings living in this way from incarnation to incarnation? — we can say: The consequence is what we can call the process of human perfection through earthly lives. When humans entered earthly life, they entered their first incarnation with powers that were primitive in comparison to the powers that are at work in most humans today. When they entered their first incarnation, humans had only a little soul power with which they could direct the soul into the physical and etheric bodies. Then they enjoyed the fruits of their first life, took the fruit of their first life with them, and as a result, their next life could be a more perfect one. For by adding the experiences of subsequent lives to the limited powers they had in their first existence, human beings create for themselves, insofar as these powers are concerned, an ever more perfect, self-contained, harmonious earthly existence. Each new life appears to us on a higher level. But there you see two forces interacting. After the human being has passed through the gate of death, you see the extract of life, the forces of the previous life, which are preserved for the future, the forces that can make the human being more and more perfect. Thus, from life to life, the power of the ever more perfect human being is potentiated. But at the moment when the ego leaves the physical body, you see the forces that repeatedly chain it to its past physical existence. In fact, human existence after death consists of what we can call the forces that continue to develop and the forces that form within them and inhibit them.

Now consider once more briefly these inhibiting forces we have spoken of, those things that human beings must tear out of themselves root and branch after death. If nothing else were added, human beings would be equipped after death only with those fruitful forces for future existence that they have brought with them from their past lives. It is true that human beings tear themselves away from everything that chains them, so to speak, to their past lives; they tear themselves away from all desires and cravings. But there is one thing they cannot tear themselves away from. A remnant remains. This remnant, which appears after death as something that human beings must tear out of themselves, is prepared between birth and death. It is not there when the human being enters life. After entering life, they grow into the physical world, and their attachment to the pleasures of the physical world presents itself as something that the human being first acquires in the course of this life, something that they first draw into their being. Now we can form the mental image that what the human being gradually draws into his being is something that does not contribute to his further development, something that would even make this further development impossible if he were solely at the mercy of these forces. Because they bring all this into their lives and because it has the potential to be absorbed by life, it is life itself between birth and death that carries the inhibiting forces into human beings. On the one hand, it gives us the life experience that we take with us as fruit, and on the other hand, it forges us together with the physical world, which we then carry within us continuously. It is that which, on the one hand, wants to lift us out of embodiment and, on the other, brings us back into this world again and again until we are ready to have completely overcome everything that connects us to the physical world at the end of our existence. Thus, human beings constantly have a force within them that propels them forward and another that is inhibiting, a retarding force. We see human existence as composed of these two forces, one that develops forward and one that inhibits.

You can see in detail how these forward-developing and retarding forces interact. Take the human eye from ordinary, seemingly physical life. The eye, as Goethe says, is “formed by light for light.” If we did not have eyes, we would not see light. But if there were no light, there would be no eyes either. It is light that has developed the eye. By creating the eye, light simultaneously creates an inhibition of the development and the flow of development that preceded it. Because light acted on the human body in the distant past, this eye was drawn out of it. To do this, it first had to inhibit the force that would otherwise have been a sprouting and sprouting life force in a different direction. After the other forces have been at work for a long time, the eye will only then be ready to become an organ that brings development forward again. So you can see from this example that inhibitions, the counteracting forces, are essential.

Now we see how wonderfully wise human life is arranged, with the forward-pressing force of evolution on the one hand and the counteracting forces on the other. It is these repulsive forces that forge human beings together with the physical world, which provides them with the organs in the physical world between birth and death through which they regain the strength for progress. If the inhibiting forces were not there, human beings would not enter into life between birth and death, and would not grow into the shells through which the spiritual-soul appears to them. Now they act through the life that is created out of the inhibiting forces. Thus, human beings owe the fruits of progress to the inhibiting forces.

Therein lies a great mystery, that in life the progressive forces must work together with the inhibiting ones. Now it may happen that the human being maintains a balance in his nature between the progressive and the inhibiting forces, or that he connects himself completely with the inhibiting forces in one life, that he once becomes completely intertwined with the forces that are only generated in the physical body as a means of progress, but regards them not as a means, but as an end in themselves, as something for themselves. In this case, the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being would break away from all progress. It would fall away, and what would be the Kamaloka period, the period of weaning, of purification, which consists in the human being casting off what connects him in a small way with the physical world, this period would become something absolute. This is the extreme that lies before us. But because human beings never become completely overgrown with the sensory world, because they are able to escape this extreme perspective in their soul, in their inner being, they will escape the extreme. But if they were such that their interest never clung to what shines through as spiritual and soulful — this is a perspective that exists but cannot be achieved in this life — then this would intrude into the active forces of life and stand in such a way that human beings, through their fusion with the physical and sensory world, would tear themselves away from everything spiritual and soulful. Let us assume this to be the case. Now, after death, the human being is to be transferred to the spiritual-soul world. He brings with him nothing for the spiritual-soul world but an invincible attachment, an invincible fusion with the physical-sensory world. This memory image now clings to him and weighs on him like a lead weight. The hardened material, transformed into the spiritual, is brought by the human being into the spiritual world. He is inseparably connected with the forces that halt and inhibit all development and all evolution. This is the idea of hellish existence. Therefore, in the final perspective, the period of purification extends to that state where, without understanding the spiritual-soul world, the ego has attached itself to the purely physical-sensual and brings with it nothing but an understanding of the physical-sensual. This understanding of the physical-sensual is the torment of hell in the spiritual, even if it may be an infinitely satisfying sensual pleasure in sensual existence.

And now let us try to understand the above-mentioned words of Faust. If the hellish messenger wants him, what must be achieved? It must be achieved that Faust does not suck the seed of further development out of the moments of physical existence, but that he must devour himself in these moments of physical existence in such a way that he wants to hold them in his sensuality. “I will say to the moment: Stay, you are so beautiful...” — then you have me! That is the alliance that man can make with the powers of hell, that he connects himself with the powers that hinder progress. But at the same time we see that there was no other way in human evolution than for these hindering forces to come into being.

Next time we will examine what human beings were like when they first appeared in physical bodies, and where they brought this with them from. Now we know that human beings are composed of forces that strive forward and forces that want to go backward. If human beings had not had any inhibiting forces when they first entered the physical body, they would have remained in the spiritual form they had before incarnation. As the inhibiting organs developed within them, the spirit penetrated the sensual and was able to take the fruits of the sensual with it, enriching itself more and more. The forces from which progress springs are those that must first create the organs of progress. They must inhibit earlier development in order to make later development possible. No one has the right to complain about the inhibiting phenomena of life. That which is a blessing, the conservative element, as long as it serves humanity, becomes a stumbling block when it is made an end in itself. So it is after life, in death. The stumbling block, viewed in the service of the spirit, is the highest bearer of progress. But if it is regarded as an end in itself or used selfishly, then it is the germ of hell. Thus, that from which all human abilities on this earth spring forth can become an end in itself, the germ of hell, if man connects with it at the wrong time.

Now we understand the Norse saga. The spiritual seed for the present culture sprang from Nebelheim. It had to pass through the ancient cultures, but it also had to go beyond them by bringing the fruits into the present incarnation. Those people who do not use the present incarnation in a spiritual-soul sense condemn themselves to be thrown back to a level that was beneficial in its own way, that was a means of progress in its time, but that now has a hindering effect. Thus, what was a means of progress in its time becomes a hellish element when it persists in human existence. Nebelheim was not always ruled by hell. The good elements of human beings held Nebelheim fast until the time when they had developed themselves.

Thus we see good and evil, hellish and heavenly elements interacting and flowing out of human life together, as described in the above-quoted poem by Schiller: The beneficial becomes a consuming, inhibiting element when it is not used in the right way — just as fire is beneficial when man controls it, while it can become terrible when it “breaks free from its bonds and follows its own path.” In the same way, the hellish powers also appear when they follow their “own path” in human life.

Thus we understand why the great minds who thought or felt such profound connections thought and felt the same things that Spiritual Science presents to our souls. If we have now recognized the hellish element as something necessary in our lives, we will next get to know even more closely the element that will bring us light about the whole. In the light of true Spiritual Science, we will also get to know the light element of heaven. But already from today's lecture we can see that what Dante says in the last line of his canto about hell is true. Dante believed that he first had to consider the strong, inhibiting forces in life before he could form a mental image of those progressive forces in which all salvation and all human development lie. We will also gain point after point of reference for ordinary, everyday life if we are able to bring backward progress and forward progress into the right balance. It will become clear where the inhibiting forces threaten to become hellish for human beings, and where they prove beneficial by rising to become truly progressive forces, as Dante describes when, under Virgil's guidance, he finds himself surrounded by hellish forces, but then emerges victorious over all inhibiting forces, and to him, whose soul is “swollen with joy,” the shining stars appear in the distant canopy of heaven.