Lecture I

Thus we have looked up to beings who became men three stages before the earth-man attained his human stage, and we have seen how they place themselves consciously in mankind, and influence our earth evolution. In the next lecture we shall have to show how far the work of the Archangels, working down from above, from their ‘I’ which has already formed Manas or Spirit-self and is now working on the etheric or life-body of man, is expressed in the productions, the attributes and the character of a people. Man is in the midst of this work of the higher beings, it directly surrounds him, for as a member of a people he is placed in it. It is true that man is in the first place a human individual, the expression of an ego, but he also belongs to a certain people, i.e., something over which as a human individual he has at first no control. How can a man, because he belongs to a certain people, help speaking the language of that people? That is not an individual acquirement, neither does it belong to what we call individual progress, it is the stream into which he is received. Individual human progress is a very different thing. While we see the Folk-souls living and working, we must remember of what human progress consists, and what a man requires in order to make his way through it. We shall see what belongs not only to his evolution, so to speak, but to the evolution of other quite different beings.