Sun,
Moon and Stars
Berlin, 26 March 1908
Tips to the close coherence of the human
being with the physical life appear repeatedly. If we find such
hints in scientific writings about variations of the grain
prices within certain periods and one points in this regard to
the changes of the glaciers or of the water gauge of the
Caspian Sea, it seems at first sight that one could not relate
these things seriously. However, always-new relations as well
as also their confirmations are found. One will still be able
to ascertain many facts and some mistakes will have to be
eliminated, but science has furnished evidence for the
mysterious interaction. Many such events relate to the activity
of the sun, among other things also to the increasing and
decreasing number and size of the solar spots. Their maxima and
minima appear with a certain regularity. After about 11 1/9
years, such a maximum can be determined in each case.
Furthermore a comparison of the observations which have been
done up to now shows that, perhaps, one could also calculate on
a period of twenty-two and a half years.
One cannot deny changes
of the climatic conditions, caused by the activity of the solar
spots. It seems that a maximum of the solar spots causes a
decreased heat emission of the sun, which causes big changes
then in nature. Thus, for example, the good wine years followed
themselves in indeed varying distances of eleven years. How the
35-year period of Brückner's (Eduard B., 1862–1927,
geographer, meteorologist, glaciologist and climate scientist)
climate variations relate to it, is not yet
determined scientifically.
Science also relates the
ice ages — it assumes four of these immense changes of the face
of the earth — to the solar activity and the position of the
earth's axis. Thus, the wholly mechanical thinking relates the
events on the sun to the earth evolution. In other times, one
regarded these matters in another way which science discounts
with its feeling of superior wisdom.
However, what we must
feel if we see how one of the greatest scholars and such a
careful thinker like Aristotle speaks of the fact that
according to ancient doctrines the stars are gods. All
remaining that folk lore tells about the gods is worthless and
added by the people. Aristotle expressed himself with care
concerning this doctrine, but he treats it as something that
one must face with esteem and reverence.
Such an echo of ancient
wisdom on which the modern naturalist looks down with a shrug
has also survived in astrology in mutilated, brainless way,
however, it leads still back to the old wisdom of humanity. It
is not easy to make clear what such old wisdom contains. Today
the human being regards the stars and the earth as wholly
physical bodies wandering through the space. He says that it
was a childish idea to think that the other world bodies could
signify anything for the human destinies. At that time, one
felt just different if one compared the human being with the
remaining world. One did not think of bones, muscles and
senses, but of the feelings and sensations that lived in him.
The stars were to him the bodies of spiritual-divine beings,
and he felt penetrated by their spirit.
Whereas today the human
being recognises that mechanical forces are effective in the
solar system, at that time he saw mental-spiritual forces
working from star to star. The great initiates taught not
wholly mathematical forces, but effects based on wholly
spiritual forces from star to star.
It is quite
comprehensible that this world feeling has changed in our
materialistically coloured worldview, but only someone who
believes that the view of the last fifty years is valid for
good, can close his heart against the idea of that which lived
in the not materialistic but spiritual experience of the world.
This also applies to the view, which puts the earth in the
centre of creation.
In the context with the existence of Christ on earth
one explains that this earth is only a grain of sand among the
other stars and, hence, nobody can assume who is not prejudiced
in terrible hubris that just to this unimportant earth a divine
being descended. Not from nothing, this change took place. At
that time, the human beings raised their eyes to absorb the
spiritual content of the space, and were not yet far advanced
concerning the control of the physical space. With the
emergence of the materialistic worldview, the physical world
has been conquered most extensively. We do not want to
criticise, but to understand how this change took place. It was
initiated for a long time, but just in the 19th century, it
made miraculous advances.
The modern worldview
faces us crystal clear in Kant and his followers. The picture
that they made of the origin of the solar system is known in
general: in order to illustrate the formation of a heavenly
body, one pours a drop of oil in some water in a vessel. One
brings it in a rotary movement. Smaller and bigger spherical
parts thereby separate. As well as here these oil particles,
the worlds went adrift from the primeval nebula.
I only need to mention
that in the 19th century the admirable advances of the natural
sciences and astronomy corrected the worldview of Kant and
Laplace and continued it in changed form, however, the
main features remained the same. The great discovery by
Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, German physicist) and
Bunsen (Robert B., 1811–1899, German chemist), the spectral
analysis, also seems to confirm this, while they could detect a
big number of those mineral materials that compose our earth on
the other heavenly bodies. On the sun itself, one has detected
more than two thirds of all known elements. It is very typical
and more significant that one of the best experts of this
worldview (Simon Newcomb, 1835–1912, Canadian astronomer)
pronounced the sentence: if one pursues the figure of the world
edifice, it turns out that the primeval nebula formed with a
necessity similar to that of a functioning clock, which shows
that one has winded up it once.
You can visualise the
emergence of the world body by that experiment. However,
the logical thinking demands to think all things to an end.
Then it turns out that one has forgotten something, namely just
the most important by which the globules separate. By the
movement that the experimentalist carries out!
However, one forgets him applying
the results of this experiment to the hypothesis of the
emergence of the heavenly body. One completely ignores this
“trifle” with the worldview proven this way.
One wants to know nothing about the
experimentalist. Without being opponent of modern natural
sciences, you can put this question to yourselves.
One can completely stand
on the ground of scientific thinking without forgetting the
uncomfortable experimentalist. He is the spirit who stands
behind everything, the sum of the spiritual beings who reveal
their nature in the phenomena of the sense-perceptible world,
as the results of exact research of spiritual science can show
them. Spiritual science does not need to deny anything that
modern science has investigated. It admits its results
completely, as far as these are obtained by strict and
objective observation, experimentation and thinking. It
recognises the necessity of such, only to the sense-perceptible
world directed research. However, it also knows that the time
has come where humanity must be pointed to the fact that the
spirit is the reason of all matter and that the matter is the
external expression of the spiritual beings.
Spiritual science looks
not only at the mechanical processes of attraction and
repulsion; it examines which spiritual forces correspond to
them. In order to gain a living picture of the plant according
to its method at first, one has to proceed as
follows:
The plant turns its root
downward, its stalk upwards. We see two forces active, one of
which assigns itself to the centre of the earth whereas the
second tries to wrest the plant from the earth's tentacles.
Someone who does not look at the plant only with the outer eye
realises how root and blossom show the expression of both
forces. Supersensible forces of attraction and repulsion are
active here. The former ones come from the earth, while the
other forces shine down from the sun. If the plant only faced
the solar forces, its development would happen very fast, it
would develop leaf by leaf and atrophy, if the other force were
absent, the restraining force working from the
earth.
Thus, the plant becomes the result, the expression of
the forces of sun and earth. We do no longer regard it as a
separated thing. It appears as a being that is a member of the
entire earth organism, as the hair is a part of the human
organism. The earth becomes a living entity, a manifestation of
the living, of the spiritual, as the human being is the
expression of soul and spirit.
The animal is more
independent, not as plant and hair only a part of an organism.
It owes its partial independence that the animal soul ensouls
it. This is, in contrast to the human soul that is an
individual soul, a group soul. The animal is its revelation and
relates to it like the finger to the entire organism. The
animal is thereby less tied to the earth organism.
In order to understand
this, one must think that the spiritual research recognises the
forces of attraction and repulsion as the earthly images of
that which corresponds in the spiritual to these forces causing
the planetary motions, which the Kant-Laplace worldview knows,
with all its later modifications and additions, like gravity.
These as well as its consequences arise as facts of the
sensuous observation of the things. Their spiritual prototype
that causes and carries the physically discernible appearance
is also a fact, which arises as a result to the exact spiritual
research. The animal group souls orbit their planets, and
thereby the animal realm is independent from the planet. Any
planet has its plant realm in common with the solar system with
which it is connected. However, any planet has its own orbital
forces and thereby its own animal realm, as far as it is able
to have the animal realm.
If one looks at the human
being now, one must draw the attention to a fact that is deeply
significant. As an embryo, the human being is subject to the
lunar influence. The human embryo needs ten lunar months for
its development. Lunar forces control it, as long as the human
being does not yet appear as an independent being. The creative
plant forces that press forward to the blossom and fruit are
solar forces. The human body depends on the moon as far as it
concerns its form. These formative forces relate to the solar
forces in a certain way. Sun and moon form the contrast of life
and form necessary for the human development. If only the
persisting lunar forces were effective, any other development
would be excluded and a kind of lignification would take place,
while the solar forces solely would lead to combustion. The
light that shines from the moon is not only reflected sunlight,
but it contains formative forces. The sunlight is not only
light, but forces of light, of too intense light, so that the
human being would be immediately very old after his birth [if
he were exposed to it only]. The human form is the result of
the moon, his life that of the sun.
The spectral analysis can
recognise the mineral-chemical compounds of the sun, not the
spiritual forces of vitality, which flow down to the earth.
With the help of the telescope, one sees the moon only as
stiffened heavenly body, not the formative spiritual force. In
the sun, the physical researcher recognises glowing gas masses,
flooding movement, metals surging up and down, solar spots and
protuberances, but not the body of a spiritual being, the
regent of the processes of life. This is a chapter of a new
research that only starts developing and has to conquer field
by field only. Nevertheless, these things are of the highest
significance.
Goethe is one of the
first modern naturalists who saw more than only
mechanical-physical processes in the light without receiving
acknowledgement. Already years ago, on the occasion of a
birthday celebration of Goethe I pointed to the fact that
Schopenhauer deplored bitterly that those who celebrated Goethe
did very wrong by him concerning his theory of colours. The
scholars speak only reluctantly about that. For the physicist
it is more a nice, poetic but impossible thought compared to
the wholly physical theory of colours. However,
spiritual science stands completely different towards that. If
once the time is ripe to understand Goethe's theory of colours
properly, one will also realise that the light consists not
only of seven basic colours, of material oscillations, but that
behind the earthly light life is flowing down from the sun.
Then one also understands what Goethe meant if he says of the
rainbow colours that they are deeds of the light.
From the stars, from the
sun and moon flow not only light beams, but spiritual life
streams down to us. As long as one only sees the physical
light, one cannot understand this, because one can guess the
spiritual only with artistic imagination, can experience it in
the sensuous-extrasensory beholding as a picture by spiritual
research.
The human being is a
multi-membered being. If he sleeps, only his physical and
etheric bodies rest in the bed. The astral body with the ego
separates from the lower members and lifts out itself in the
spiritual world. It receives forces, more elated ones than the
human being gets from the sun and moon during the
day.
Because the astral body
is integrated in the much lighter substantiality of the astral
world, the stars can influence it stronger. As in the wake
state the physical forces work on the physical body, the stars
work on the astral body now, because the human being is born
out of the universe, by the same universal spirit as the starry
sky.
If we raise the eyes to
the sun, moon and stars that way, we can understand which
forces work there, get to know the spiritual in the
universe.
We cannot guess a manlike
universal God, however, we can guess the spiritual forces
behind the universal nebula and realise only in which way the
worlds originate. We start experiencing the forces of leading
beings behind the working forces.
Schiller thought also
that way calling to the astronomers who investigate the
physical stars only: “Do not chat so much to me about
nebulae and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you
to count them? True, your object is the most elated one in
space; but — friends — the elated does not live in
space.”
If we look only at the
outer forces, we do not find the elated. However, if we search
the spiritual, and return from the immense universe to
ourselves, we are able to see a drop of the spiritual life in
ourselves that flows through the space.
If we face the heavenly
bodies with such attitude, we understand Goethe's word better:
oh, what they would be, the countless millions of suns, if they
did not reflect themselves in the human eye and did not delight
a human heart at last?
It could sound
presumptuous, and, nevertheless, it is modest if we understand
it properly. If we look up at the sun from which life streams
go out it works so powerfully that we could not stand them if
the lunar forces did not paralyse them. Thus, we see the spirit
in the universe; however, we know that we have organs with
which we can perceive the spirit in the universe. Then we let
it reflect in the organs as the sun is reflected to which we
can also not see directly, but its shine is reflected in the
waterfall, as well as it is expressed in Goethe's words where
he lets Faust say, after he has led back him again to the life
on earth:
I am content to have the sun behind me.
The cataract there storming through the cliff —
the more I watch it, the more is my delight.
From fall to fall it swirls, gushing forth
in streams that soon are many, many more,
into the air all loudly tossing spray and foam.
But see how, rising from this turbulence,
the rainbow forms its changing-unchanged arch,
now clearly drawn, now evanescent,
and casts cool, fragrant showers all about it.
Of human striving it's a perfect symbol —
ponder this well to understand more clearly
that what we have as life is many-hued reflection.
(Faust II, Verses 4715–4727)
|