74. The Riddle of Death as a Riddle of Life

So let us take the concrete case of “Goethe”. Not true, he had previously incarnated at some point in time. Now he has gone into the spiritual world, then comes the time in the middle between death and new birth: there he is already working down again - and there something happens that brings certain people who live here into relationships. Relationships between people are certainly connected with the karmic relationships of people on the one hand, but they are also dependent on many other relationships. So connections between many people happen when a person begins to work on earth again a long time before he returns, i.e. in the middle of the time between death and a new birth. And these relationships then continue, on and on under the influence of the spiritual world, until finally the relationship between father and mother arises from these relationships, through which the respective incarnation of the soul then takes place. So Goethe was involved in all the relationships that formed in the world, so that in the end Caspar Goethe and Mrs. Rat Goethe could come together, that their parents, their grandparents could come together. And here we can go back centuries in the way in which people are brought together, until what finally results is what leads old Caspar Goethe to the woman who is called “Mrs. Aja”; that they come together, in this the individuality of the man Goethe is already at work. It is the man himself who works through the generations that preceded his parents. It is not the hereditary relationships that make man similar to his ancestors, but it is he [himself] who already organizes heredity through long periods of time. If you think, for example, from our present time up to Charlemagne, that is about thirty generations. You don't need to think any further than that: there are only thirty generations up to Charlemagne. If you imagine thirty people standing one behind the other, gripping each other's hands backwards, you could imagine that they have lived since Charlemagne. Through such a period of time, that which is being worked out up there in the spiritual realm is already working its way down to the physical earth.