I
n the evening
hours of
our Christmas Gathering
[See
Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der
Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft.
Jahresausklang und Jahreswende
1923/24 by Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works, Dornach 1962.],
I should like to give
you a kind of survey of human evolution on the earth, that may
help us to become more intimately conscious of the nature and
being of present-day man. For at this time in man's history,
when we can see already in preparation events of extraordinary
importance for the whole civilisation of humanity, every
thinking man must be inclined to ask: ‘How has the present
configuration, the present make-up of the human soul arisen?
How has it come about through the long course of evolution?’
For it cannot be denied that the present only becomes
comprehensible as we try to understand its origin in the
past.
The
present age is however one that is peculiarly prejudiced in its
thought about the evolution of man and of mankind. It is
commonly believed that, as regards his life of soul and spirit,
man has always been essentially the same as he is to-day
throughout the whole of the time that we call history. True, in
respect of knowledge, it is imagined that in ancient times
human beings were childlike, that they believed in all kinds of
fancies, and that man has only really become clever in the
scientific sense in modern times; but if we look away from the
actual sphere of knowledge, it is generally held that the
soul-constitution which man has to-day was also possessed by
the ancient Greek and by the ancient Oriental. Even though it
be admitted that modifications may have occurred in detail, yet
on the whole it is supposed that throughout the historical
period everything in the life of the soul has been as it is
to-day. Then we go on to assume a prehistoric life of man, and
say that nothing is really known of this. Going still further
back, we picture man in a kind of animal form. Thus, in the
first place, as we trace back in historical time, we see a
soul-life undergoing comparatively little change. Then the
picture disappears in a kind of cloud, and before that again we
see man in his animal imperfection as a kind of higher
ape-being. Such is approximately the usual conception of
to-day.
Now
all this rests on an extraordinary prejudice, for in forming
such a conception, we do not take the trouble to observe the
important differences that exist in the soul-constitution of a
man of the present-time, as compared even with that of a
relatively not very far distant past, — say, of the 11th,
10th, or 9th century a.D. The difference goes
deeper when we compare the constitution of soul in the human
being of to-day and in a contemporary of the Mystery of
Golgotha, or in a Greek; while if we go over to the ancient
Oriental world of which the Greek civilisation was, in a sense,
a kind of colony, we find there a disposition of soul utterly
different from that of the man of to-day. I should like to show
you from real instances how man lived in the East, let us say,
ten thousand, or fifteen thousand years ago, and how different
he was in nature from the Greek, and how still more different
from what we ourselves are.
Let
us first call to mind our own soul-life. I will take an example
from it. We have a certain experience; and of this experience,
in which we take part through our senses, or through our
personality in some other way, we form an idea, a concept, and
we retain this idea in our thought. After a certain time the
idea may arise again out of our thought into our conscious
soul-life, as memory. You have perhaps to-day a
memory-experience that leads you back to experiences in
perception of some ten years ago. Now try and understand
exactly what that really means. Ten years ago you experienced
something. Ten years ago you may have visited a gathering of
men and women. You formed an idea of each one of these persons,
of their appearance and so on. You experienced what they said
to you, and what you did in common with them. All that, in the
form of pictures, may arise before you to-day. It is an inner
soul-picture that is present within you, connected with the
event which occurred ten years ago. Now not only according to
Science, but according to a general feeling, — which is,
of course, experienced by man to-day in an extremely weak form,
but which nevertheless is experienced, — according
to this general feeling man localises such a memory-concept
which brings back a past experience, in his head. He says:
— ‘What lives as the memory of an experience is present
in my head.’
Now
let us jump a long way back in human evolution, and consider
the early population of the Orient, of which the Chinese and
Indians as we know them in history were only the late
descendants: that is, let us go back really thousands of years.
Then, if we contemplate a human being of that ancient epoch, we
find that he did not live in such a way as to say: ‘I have in
my head the memory of something I have experienced, something I
have undergone, in external life.’ He had no such inner feeling
or experience; it simply did not exist for him. His head was
not filled with thoughts and ideas. The present-day man thinks
in his superficial way that as we to-day have ideas, thoughts,
and concepts, so human beings always possessed these, as far
back as history records; but that is not the case. If with
spiritual insight we go back far enough, we meet with human
beings who did not have ideas, concepts, thoughts at all in
their head, who did not experience any such abstract content of
the head, but, strange as it may seem, experienced the whole
head; they perceived and felt their whole head. These men did
not give themselves up to abstractions as we do. To experience
ideas in the head was something quite foreign to them, but they
knew how to experience their own head. And as you, when you
have a memory-picture, refer the memory-picture to an
experience, as a relationship exists between your
memory-picture and the experience, similarly these men related
the experience of their head to the Earth, to the whole Earth.
They said: — ‘There exists in the Cosmos the Earth. And
there exists in the Cosmos I myself, and as a part of me, my
head; and the head which I carry on my shoulders is the cosmic
memory of the Earth. The Earth existed earlier; my head later.
That I have a head is due to the memory, the cosmic memory of
earthly existence. The earthly existence is always there. But
the whole configuration, the whole shape of the human head, is
in relation to the whole Earth.’ Thus an ancient Eastern felt
in his own head the being of the Earth-planet itself. He said:
‘Out of the whole great cosmic existence the Gods have created,
have generated the Earth with its kingdoms of Nature, the Earth
with its rivers and mountains. I carry on my shoulders my head;
and this head of mine is a true picture of the Earth. This
head, with the blood flowing in it, is a true picture of the
Earth with the land and water coursing over it. The
configuration of mountains on the Earth repeats itself in my
head in the configurations of my brain; I carry on my shoulders
my own image of the Earth-planet.’ Exactly as our modern man
refers his memory-picture to his experience, so did the man of
old refer his entire head to the Earth-planet. A considerable
difference in inner perception!
Further, when we consider the periphery of the Earth, and fit
it, as it were, into our vision of things, we feel this air
surrounding the Earth as air permeated by the Sun's warmth and
light; and in a certain sense, we can say: ‘The Sun lives in
the atmosphere of the Earth.’ The Earth opens herself to the
Cosmic universe; the activities that come forth from herself
she yields up to the encircling atmosphere, and opens herself
to receive the activities of the Sun. Now each human being, in
those ancient times, experienced the region of the Earth on
which he lived as of peculiar importance. An ancient Eastern
would feel some portion of the surface of the Earth as his own;
beneath him the earth, and above him the encircling atmosphere
turned towards the Sun. The rest of the Earth that lay to left
and right, in front and behind — all the rest of the
Earth merged into a general whole.
Thus if an ancient Oriental lived, for example, on Indian soil,
he experienced the Indian soil as especially important for him;
but everything else on the Earth, East, West, South of him,
disappeared into the whole. He did not concern himself much
with the way in which the Earth in these other parts was
bounded by the rest of Cosmic space; while on the other hand
not only was the soil on which he lived something important,
but the extension of the Earth into Cosmic space in this region
became a matter of great moment to him. The way in which he was
able to breathe on this particular soil was felt by him as an
inner experience of special importance.
To-day we are not in the habit of asking, how does one breathe
in this or that place? We are of course still subject to
favourable or unfavourable conditions for breathing, but we are
no longer so conscious of the fact. For an ancient Oriental
this was different. The way in which he was able to breathe was
for him a very deep experience, and so were many other things
too that depend on the character of the Earth's relation and
contact with cosmic space. All that goes to make up the Earth,
the whole Earth, was felt by the human being of those early
times as that which lived in his head.
Now
the head is enclosed by the hard firm bones of the skull, it is
shut in above, on two sides and behind. But it has certain
exits; it has a free opening downwards towards the chest. And
it was of special importance for the man of olden time to feel
how the head opens with relative freedom in the direction of
the chest.
(See Drawing).
And as he had to feel the
inner configuration of the head as an image of the Earth, so he
had to bring the environment of the Earth, all that is above
and around the Earth, into connection with the opening
downwards, the turning towards the heart. In this he saw an
image of how the Earth opens to the Cosmos. It was a mighty
experience for a man of those ancient times when he said: ‘In
my head I feel the whole Earth. But this Earth opens to my
chest which carries within it my heart. And that which takes
place between head, chest and heart is an image of what is
borne out from my life into the Cosmos, borne out to the
surrounding atmosphere that is open to the Sun.’
A
great experience it was for him, and one of deep meaning, when
he was able to say: ‘Here in my head lives the Earth. When I go
deeper, there the Earth is turning towards the Sun; my heart is
the image of the Sun.’ In this way did the man of olden times
attain what corresponds to our life of feeling.
We
have the abstract life of feeling still. But who of us knows
anything directly of his heart? Through anatomy and physiology,
we think we know something, but it is about as much as we know
of some papier-mâché model of the heart that we may
have before us. On the other hand, what we have as a
feeling-experience of the world, that the man of olden times
did not have. In place of it he had the experience of his
heart. Just as we relate our feeling to the world in which we
live, just as we feel whether we love a man or meet him with
antipathy, whether we like this or that flower, whether we
incline towards this or that, just as we relate our feelings to
the world — but to a world torn out, as it were, in airy
abstraction, from the solid, firm Cosmos — in the same
way did the ancient Oriental relate his heart to the Cosmos,
that is, to that which goes away from the Earth in the
direction of the Sun.
Again, we say to-day: I will walk. We know that our will lives
in our limbs. The ancient man of the East had an essentially
different experience. What we call ‘will’ was quite unknown to
him. We judge quite wrongly when we believe that what we call
thinking, feeling and willing were present among the ancient
Eastern races. It was not at all the case. They had head
experiences, which were Earth experiences. They had chest or
heart experiences, which were experiences of the environment of
the Earth as far out as the Sun. The Sun corresponds to the
heart experience. Then they had a further experience, a feeling
of expanding and stretching out into their limbs. They became
conscious and aware of their own humanity in the movement of
their legs and feet, or of their arms and hands. They
themselves were within the movements. And in this expansion of
the inner being into the limbs, they felt a direct picture of
their connection with the starry worlds.
(See Drawing).
‘In my head I have a picture of the Earth. Where my head opens
freely downwards into the chest and reaches down to my heart, I
have a picture of what lives in the Earth's environment. In
what I experience as the forces of my arms and hands, of my
feet and legs, I have something which represents the relation
the Earth bears to the stars that live far out there in cosmic
space.’
When therefore man wanted to express the experience he had as
‘willing’ human being — to use the language of to-day,
— he did not say: I walk. We can see that from the very
words that he used. Nor did he say: I sit down. If we
investigate the ancient languages in respect of their finer
content, we find everywhere that for the action which we
describe by saying: I walk, the ancient Oriental would have
said: Mars impels me, Mars is active in me. Going forward was
felt as a Mars impulse in the legs.
Grasping hold of something, feeling and touching with the
hands, was expressed by saying: Venus works in me. Pointing out
something to another person was expressed by saying: Mercury
works in me. Even when a rude person called some one's
attention by giving him a push or a kick, the action would be
described by saying: Mercury was working in that person.
Sitting down was a Jupiter activity, and lying down, whether
for rest or from sheer laziness, was expressed by saying: I
give myself over to the impulses of Saturn. Thus man felt in
his limbs the wide spaces of the Cosmos out beyond. He knew
that when he went away from the Earth out into cosmic space, he
came into the Earth's environment and then into the starry
spheres. If he went downwards from his head, he passed through
the very same experience, only this time within his own being.
In his head he was in the Earth, in his chest and heart he was
in the environment of the Earth, in his limbs he was in the
starry Cosmos beyond.
From a certain point of view such an experience is perfectly
possible for man. Alas for us, poor men of to-day, who can
experience only abstract thoughts! What are these in reality,
for the most part? We are very proud of them, but we quite
forget what is far beyond the cleverest of them, — our
head; our head is much more rich in content than the very
cleverest of our abstract thoughts. Anatomy and physiology know
little of the marvel and mystery of the convolutions of the
brain, but one single convolution of the brain is more majestic
and more powerful than the abstract knowledge of the greatest
genius. There was once a time on the Earth when man was not
merely conscious as we are of thoughts lying around, so to
speak, but was conscious of his own head; he felt the head as
the image of the Earth, and he felt this or that part of the
head — let us say, the optic thalamus or the corpora
quadrigemina — as the image of a certain, physical
mountainous configuration of the Earth. He did not then merely
relate his heart to the Sun in accordance with some abstract
theory, he felt: ‘My head stands in the same relation to my
chest, to my heart, as the Earth does to the Sun.’ That was the
time when man had grown together, in his whole life, with the
Cosmic Universe; he had become one with the Cosmos. And this
found expression in his whole life.
Through the fact that we to-day put our puny thinking in the
place of our head, through this very fact we are able to have a
conceptual memory, we are able to remember things in thought.
We form pictures in thought of what we have experienced as
abstract memories in our head. That could not be done by a man
of olden times who did not have thoughts, but still had his
head. He could not form memory pictures. And so, in those
regions of the Ancient East where people were still conscious
of their head, but had as yet no thoughts and hence no
memories, we find developed to a remarkable degree something of
which people are again beginning to feel the need to-day. For a
long time such a thing has not been necessary, and if to-day
the need for it is returning it is due to what I can only call
slovenliness of soul.
If
in that time of which I have spoken one were to enter the
region inhabited by people who were still conscious of their
head, chest, heart and limbs, one would see on every hand small
pegs placed in the earth and marked with some sign. Or here and
there a sign made upon a wall. Such memorials were to be found
scattered over all inhabited regions. Wherever anything
happened, a man would set up some kind of memorial, and when he
came back to the place, he lived through the event over again
in the memorial he had made. Man had grown together with the
earth, he had become one with it with his head. To-day he
merely makes a note of some event in his head. As I have
pointed out already, we are beginning once more to find it
necessary to make notes not only in our head but also in a
note-book; this is due as I said, to slovenliness of soul, but
we shall nevertheless require to do it more and more. At that
time however there was no such thing as making notes even in
one's head, because thoughts and ideas were simply
nonexistent. Instead, the land was dotted over with
signs. And from this habit, so naturally acquired by men in
olden times, has arisen the whole custom of making monuments
and memorials.
Everything that has happened in the historical evolution of
mankind has its origin and cause in the inner being of man. If
we were but honest, we should have to admit that we modern men
have not the faintest knowledge of the deeper basis of this
custom of erecting memorials. We set them up from habit. They
are however the relics of the ancient monuments and signs put
up by man in a time when he had no memory such as we have
to-day but was taught, in any place where he had some
experience, there to set up a memorial, so that when he came
that way again he might re-experience the event in his head;
for the head can call up again everything that has connection
with the earth. ‘We give over to the earth what our head has
experienced’ — was a principle of olden times.
And
so we have to point to a very early time in the ancient East,
the epoch of localised memory, when everything of the
nature of memory was connected with the setting up of signs and
memorials on the earth. Memory was not within, but without.
Everywhere were memorial tablets and memorial stones. It was
localised memory, a remembering connected with place.
Even to-day it is still of no small value for a man's spiritual
evolution that he should sometimes make use of his capacity for
this kind of memory, for a memory that is not within him but is
unfolded in connection with the outer world. It is good
sometimes to say: I will not remember this or that, but
I will set here or there a sign, or token; or, I will
let my soul unfold an experience about certain things, only in
connection with signs or tokens. I will, for instance, hang a
picture of the Madonna in a corner of my room, and when the
picture is before me, I will experience in my soul all that I
can experience by turning with my whole soul to the Madonna.
For there is a subtle relation to a thing belonging so
intimately to the home as does the picture of the Madonna that
we meet with in the homes of the people, when we go a little
way eastwards in Europe; we have not even to go as far as
Russia, we find them everywhere in Central Europe. All
experience of this nature is in reality a relic of the epoch of
localised memory. The memory is outside, it attaches to the
place.
A
second stage is reached when man passes from localised to
rhythmic memory. Thus we have first, localised memory;
and secondly, rhythmic memory.
We
have now come to the time when, not from any conscious, subtle
finesse, but right out of his own inner being, man had
developed the need of living in rhythm. He felt a need so to
reproduce, within himself, what he heard that a rhythm was
formed. If his experience of a cow, for instance, suggested
‘moo,’ he did not simply call her ‘moo,’
but ‘moo-moo,’ — perhaps, in very ancient times,
‘moo-moo-moo.’ That is to say,
the perception was as it were piled up in repetition, so as to
produce rhythm. You can follow the same process in the
formation of many words to-day; and you can observe how little
children still feel the need of these repetitions. We have here
again a heritage come down from the time when rhythmic memory
prevailed, the time when man had no memory at all of what he
had merely experienced, but only of what he experienced in
rhythmic form, — in repetitions, in rhythmic repetition.
There had to be at any rate some similarity between a sequence
of words. ‘Might and main,’ ‘stock and stone’ — such
setting of experience in rhythmic sequence is a last relic of
an extreme longing to bring everything into rhythm; for in this
second epoch, that followed the epoch of localised memory, what
was not set into rhythm was not retained. It is from this
rhythmic memory that the whole ancient art of verse developed
— indeed all metrical poetry.
Only in the third stage does that develop which we still know
to-day, — temporal memory, when we no longer have
a point in space to which memory attaches, nor are any longer
dependent on rhythm, but when that which is inserted into the
course of time can be evoked again later. This quite abstract
memory of ours is the third stage in the evolution of
memory.
Let
us now call to mind the point of time in human evolution when
rhythmic memory passes over into temporal memory, when that
memory first made its appearance which we with our lamentable
abstractness of thought take entirely as a matter of course;
the memory whereby we evoke some-thing in picture-form, no
longer needing to make use of semi-conscious or unconscious
rhythmic repetitions in order to call it up again.
The
epoch of the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory
is the time when the ancient East was sending colonies to
Greece, — the beginning of the colonies planted from Asia
in Europe. When the Greeks relate stories of the heroes who
came over from Asia and Egypt to settle on Grecian soil, they
are in reality relating how the great heroes went forth from
the land of rhythmic memory to seek a climate where rhythmic
memory could pass over into temporal memory, into a remembering
in time.
We
are thus able to define quite exactly the time in history when
this transition took place, — namely, the time of the
rise of Greece. For that which may be called the
Motherland of Greece was the home of a people with
strongly developed rhythmic memory. There rhythm lived. The
ancient East is indeed only rightly understood when we see it
as the land of rhythm. And if we place Paradise only so far
back as the Bible places it, if we lay the scene of Paradise in
Asia, then we have to see it as a land where purest rhythms
resounded through the Cosmos and awoke again in man as rhythmic
memory, — a land where man lived not only as experiencing
rhythm in a Cosmos, but as himself a creator of rhythm.
Listen to the Bhagavad-Gita and you will catch the after-echo
of that mighty rhythm that once lived in the experience of man.
You will hear its echo also in the Vedas, and you will even
hear it in the poetry and literature — to use a modern
word — of Western Asia. In all these live the echoes of
that rhythm which once filled the whole of Asia with majestic
content and, bearing within it the mysteries of the environment
of the Earth, made these resound again in the human breast, in
the beat of the human heart. Then we come to a still more
ancient time, when rhythmic memory leads back into localised
memory, when man did not even have rhythmic memories but was
taught, in the place where he had had an experience, there to
erect a memorial. When he was away from the place, he needed no
memorial; but when he came thither again he had to recall the
experience. Yet it was not he who recalled it to himself; the
memorial, the very Earth, recalled it to him. As the head is
the image of the Earth, so for the man of localised memory the
memorial in the Earth evoked its own image in the head. Man
lived completely with the Earth; in his connection with the
Earth he had his memory.
The
Gospels contain a passage that recalls this kind of memory,
where we are told that Christ wrote something in the Earth.
The
period we have thus defined as the transition from localised
memory to rhythmic memory is the time when ancient Atlantis was
declining and the first Post-Atlantean peoples were wandering
eastward in the direction of Asia. For we have first the
wanderings from ancient Atlantis — the continent that
to-day forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean — right across
Europe into Asia, and later the wanderings back again
from Asia into Europe. The migration of the Atlantean peoples
to Asia marks the transition from localised memory to rhythmic
memory, which latter finds its completion in the spiritual life
of Asia. The colonisation of Greece marks the transition from
rhythmic memory to temporal memory — the memory that we
still carry within us to-day.
- Localised Memory.
- Rhythmic Memory.
- Temporal Memory.
And
within this evolution of memory lies the whole
development of civilisation between the Atlantean
catastrophe and the rise of Greece, — all that resounds
to us from ancient Asia, coming to us in the form of legend and
saga rather than as history. We shall arrive at no
understanding of the evolution of humanity on the Earth by
looking principally to the external phenomena, by investigating
the external documents; rather do we need to fix our attention
on the evolution of what is within man; we must consider how
such a thing as the faculty of memory has developed, passing in
its development from without into the inner being of man.
You
know how much the power of memory means for the man of to-day.
You will have heard of persons who through some condition of
illness suddenly find that a portion of their past life, which
they ought to remember quite easily, has been completely wiped
out. A terrible experience of this kind befell a friend of mine
before his death. One day he left his home, bought a ticket at
the railway station for a certain place, alighted there and
bought another ticket. He did all this, having lost for the
time the memory of his life up to the moment of buying the
ticket. He carried everything out quite sensibly. His reason
was sound. But his memory was blotted out. And he found
himself, when his memory came back, in a Casual Ward in Berlin.
It was afterwards proved that in the interval he had wandered
over half Europe, without being able to connect the experience
with the earlier experiences of his life. Memory did not
re-awaken in him till he had found his way — he himself
did not know how — into a Casual Ward in Berlin.
This is only one of countless cases which we meet with in life
and which show us how the soul-life of the man of to-day is not
intact unless the threads of memory are able to reach back
unbroken to a certain period after birth.
With the men of olden time who had developed a localised
memory, this was not the case. They knew nothing of these
threads of memory. They, on the other hand, would have been
unhappy in their soul-life, they would have felt as we feel
when something robs us of our self, if they had not been
surrounded by memorials which recalled to them what they had
experienced; and not alone by memorials which they themselves
had set up, but memorials too erected by their forefathers, or
by their brothers and sisters, similar in configuration to
their own and bringing them into contact with their own
kinsmen. Whereas we are conscious of something inward as the
condition for keeping our Self intact, for these men of bygone
times the condition was to be sought outside themselves —
in the world without.
We
have to let the whole picture of this change in man's soul pass
before our eyes in order to realise its significance in the
history of man's evolution. It is by observing such things as
these that light begins to be thrown upon history. To-day I
wanted to show, by a special example, how man's mind and soul
have evolved in respect of one faculty — the faculty of
memory. We shall go on to see in the course of the succeeding
lectures how the events of history begin to reveal themselves
in their true shape when we can thus illumine them with light
derived from knowledge of the human soul.
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