7. Jacob Boehme

When there was already a widely diffused, wonderfully detailed science over in the East, in the Orient, whose wisdom we admire if we learn to know it, we still find the very simplest spiritual culture on Central European soil. We find that something lives in all the souls of Central Europe which is like an intimate connection of the forces in the depths of the soul with the forces of nature and the nature-beings, and that the people threw twigs on the ground and saw in the “Runes” which took form all kinds of riddles which they sought to solve. These human beings were decipherers of “Rune riddles.” And of all that speaks out of the souls of the human beings in the forests of ancient Germania about what lives in nature, about what rustles through the trees, or lives mysteriously in human souls themselves,—we feel as if something of all this were active in Jacob Boehme's soul.