Lecture V

If we go back beyond the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, we find many more people than we do now who not only knew of the physical body but who really knew that something lived in the physical body that we nowadays call the etheric body, people who actually perceived something of the aura of the physical body. By the Middle Ages of course these were only the last remnants of an ancient perception. Even in the tenth century, though, people did not look into a person's eyes like we do today when we simply see the physical eyes. When they looked at other people's eyes, they still saw something of the aura, the etheric. They had a way of seeing uprightness or falsehood in the eyes, not through any kind of external judgment but through direct perception of the aura around the eyes. It was also like this with other things.