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The Evolution of Consciousness
GA 227

31 August 1923, Penmaenmawr

13. The Entry of Man into the Era of Freedom

From the descriptions given yesterday you will have gathered that man has gradually to acquire freedom in the present period of world and human evolution. On looking back into the past evolution of the world, we find how, in respect of his most important activities, his walking, speaking, thinking, man has been prepared from above by divine-spiritual Beings. We see how, in order to ensure that what these divine Beings have accomplished in man during his earthly existence shall take effect, if only unconsciously, he is always led between death and rebirth into association with these Beings.

You will remember that I spoke of a man being led through the forces of Sun and Moon, and then, in the realm of the Sun, through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, into the world of the stars, spiritually understood. To this I would add that when a man in the life between death and rebirth has, so to say, to retrace his steps after, as at present, progressing in the region of the planetoids to a perception of the Saturn impulses, on this return journey he comes into relation with the most sublime divine-spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. These are spiritual Beings whose impulses extend over both spiritual and natural existence. While entering into the laws of nature and infusing them with life and with spirit, they have the purpose of bringing about enduring harmony between these laws of nature and the moral life of the whole Cosmos. They are Beings who have never appeared in any physical form, yet in the spiritual world they exercise a scarcely conceivable power upon the Earth, and make it possible for moral law to be brought into continuous harmony with natural law. And so, because a man during his existence beyond the Earth is able constantly to give new life to impulses of the past, he reaches a point in his evolution when he can work in accordance with these extra-earthly impulses.

In the present epoch of the evolution of world and of man, however, we are faced with the task of taking under our own free control everything that in the past was more or less a matter of compulsion, determined for all human beings by higher Powers.

When we survey this evolution of world and of man we find that at a certain definite time man encountered difficulties which had to be overcome on his way from being led exclusively by divine-spiritual Beings to the conscious work of raising himself to knowledge of these Beings and so to the gaining of human freedom. This point of time, which in a certain sense signifies the greatest crisis in the whole evolution of man, came approximately 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Such dates are only approximate owing to time being reckoned in various ways. According to our present reckoning, it was 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha that this crisis came about.

If we look back at this critical moment, we can describe it more or less in the following way. If the evolution of mankind and that of the Earth itself had continued as they were doing, if men had remained under the guidance of the divine-spiritual Beings who had been leading them up to that time, then, since it was intended by those Beings that men should acquire freedom, it would have been achieved—but with what result? At that time it would have meant upsetting the balance between the two parts of the human astral body.

Think of the connection between the physical body and the astral body: we will keep to the astral body first. Before the year 333 the greater part of the astral body had been active essentially in the upper man, and its smaller part in his lower body—the middle man being between the two. And because in those times the upper part of the astral body was the more powerful, it was through it that divine-spiritual Beings exercised upon man their greatest influence. In accordance with the plan for mankind, human evolution has proceeded in such a way that up to about 3,000 years before Christ those conditions for the astral body held good, but by 1,000 years before Christ the lower part of the astral body was becoming larger and the upper part relatively smaller, until, in the year 333, the two parts had become equal. This was the critical situation 333 years after the coming of Christ, and since then the upper part of a man's astral body has been continuously decreasing. That is the course taken by his evolution.

It is impossible to follow the evolution of man in its reality unless we are able to understand what happens to the human astral body in the course of earthly evolution. If human beings had not undergone this decrease in the upper part of the astral body, their Ego would never have been able to gain sufficient influence and they could never have become free. This decrease in the astral body therefore contributes to the evoking of freedom. I have already said that there is no sense in asking why the Gods have not arranged everything to give human beings pleasure. The Gods had to create a universe that was inherently possible. Much that gives men the greatest pleasure rests on that, besides other things which, until they are enlightened, they do not find at all agreeable. This decrease of the astral body is connected with something else, for on the size of the astral body in the upper part of man—not on its size as a whole—depends his power to control, with his Ego and astral body, his physical and etheric bodies. Hence all men are likely to have their health gradually impaired by this decrease in the astral body. We can form a true conception of human evolution only if we recognise that freedom has to be paid for on Earth by a general weakening of health. Not, of course, in the form of cholera or typhus, but freedom is not to be gained without bringing ill-health of some kind along with it.

If all human forces after the year 333 had remained as they were, men on Earth would have become weaker and weaker, increasingly powerless. And earthly life would have come to an end through this complete decadence of mankind.

At this point there took place what I should like to describe as follows. At a gathering of those divine-spiritual Beings I spoke of as belonging to the Sun, it was decided to send down to the Earth their representative, the Christ, there to go through something that the divine Beings connected with mankind would be experiencing for the first time. Birth and death are certainly not what materialists imagine them to be, but they are part of man's earthly existence. None of the divine-spiritual Beings above man—Angels, Archangels, and so on up to the highest—had ever known death, but only metamorphoses. They change from one form to another, but they are not born and do not die. A man, too, changes form, but at the same time he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, thus making birth and death a more radical change than any change experienced by the higher Hierarchies. So the leaders in the harmonies and impulses of the Sun resolved to send down to Earth the Christ, as a Being who had not yet experienced birth and death, so that He might go through this purely human destiny. The Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, is not merely the concern of mankind; it is also a concern of the Gods, and this can be put into words such as these: The Sun Gods met and held counsel together as to the steps they should take for warding off from mankind the danger of becoming weaker and weaker through the decline of the astral body.

And so the Christ was sent down to Earth and went through birth and death—naturally not as a human being but as a divine Being. The consequence was that through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death, forces came into Earth-evolution for the healing of those other forces which, in the sense already described, were the cause of sickness. Thus Christ became for mankind, in very truth, the great cosmic and terrestrial Healer of mankind. In other words, His forces entered everything that has to be healed in human beings, so that man, having his tendency to decadence on the one hand, but on the other the saving forces of Christ, can find his way to freedom. Therefore, provision was made in world-evolution to ensure that, 333 years before the great crisis, the Mystery of Golgotha should take place.

Human evolution on Earth, accordingly, could not have gone forward without this threat of disastrous universal sickness, to begin in the year 333. Then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came the great universal healing. Everything therefore done by man without Ego-consciousness, everything that derives from the deeper forces tending to his future downfall, can be healed through association with the Christ. That is what the Mystery of Golgotha means for earthly and human evolution.


The situation I have just been explaining was known, until the fourth century after the coming of Christ, to certain men who still had some knowledge of the facts through having absorbed the spiritual life of their time. In all ages before the Mystery of Golgotha there had been old Mysteries, where the pupils were instructed concerning men's past earthly evolution, the coming of Christ, and what was to take place in mankind's future evolution. They were shown in great and powerful pictures the connection of men on Earth with the spiritual Beings of the higher worlds. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still isolated individuals here and there who, though scarcely more advanced than the old Mystery pupils, had preserved some knowledge of these matters—a knowledge later called Gnosis. They were scattered through Western Asia, Africa, Southern Europe. Their knowledge, their wisdom, extended to the source of events in the evolution of Earth and man, and to the mighty part played by the Mystery of Golgotha for dwellers on the Earth. But these men, who still had knowledge of the old Mystery secrets, were filled with anxiety. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew that in the future human understanding would no longer be able to fathom the depths of earthly and human evolution.

Thus, in certain personalities of the first four Christian centuries it is possible to discern anxiety—not about earthly affairs but about the whole course of world-evolution. Will men be truly ripe enough, they asked, to receive what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought? This, in the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, was the great question for those we might call successors of the old Initiates.

From among those who in these first centuries were still initiated in Christian Mysteries there came, for example, a wonderful poem. It told of the coming of Christ to Earth, but it also gave in impressive dramatic form—although as a whole the poem was epic—powerful pictures of the men of the near future, who would no longer be able to understand the need for a healing element in human evolution. After these pictures had revealed something of what the Gods had decreed from the Sun—in the way I mentioned—and the descent of Christ into the man Jesus had been impressively described, the poem went on to picture how in human evolution there was to be, in a new, metamorphosed form, a revitalising of the old Demeter-Isis being. It was shown how this being was to be revered in a special, powerfully depicted human form, coming in the future as a solemn promise to mankind.

These poet-priests, as I might call them, of the first four Christian centuries, or at least the most outstanding among them, described how in the further evolution a certain cult was to arise, practised by all who were to attain to learning and a life of the spirit. For such men a sacrificial act of some kind would be established.

The epic pictured a younger man who was to enter into the whole way in which human evolution at that time was understood. It was shown how he was to pass from youth to maturity by developing a cult of the Virgin. This ritual observance, this sacrificial act, shown as necessary for all who were becoming learned and wise, if humanity was to find connection with what had come to men through the Mystery of Golgotha, was portrayed in vivid colours. A mighty poem, full of colour, came into being in those early centuries of Christianity. And among those living more or less in the atmosphere of this poem there were also painter-priests, who, it is true, painted these scenes in the simple way understood by ordinary folk; but their pictures had power and went straight to the heart.

This is what that poem accomplished. But together with all that came definitely from the Gnosis, it was rooted out later by the Church. We have only to remember how it was merely by so-called chance that later on the writings of Scotus Erigena were saved, and it will not seem absurd when spiritual research claims that this greatest of poems, evoking the New Testament, was exterminated root and branch by the later Church, so that nothing of it was left in the following centuries. Yet this poem had been there. It was rooted out, together with all the simple but impressive paintings connected with it. Concealed in it was all the anxiety felt at the time by the successors of the old Initiates. There rang through this poem the grave tones of an elegy.

Now, among those who did not follow Augustine into a quite different stream, a number of people retained the capacity to understand these things right into the fourth century, even up to the beginning of the fifth. But this understanding could not remain as vivid as it had once been; the spiritual forces of people in Southern Europe were no longer adequate for that. So the fundamentals of understanding became crystallised in the dogmas that have endured, though this could not have happened if the dogmas had not been preserved in a language growing ever more lifeless—the Latin language. This carrying on of Latin into the Middle Ages by learned men had the effect of benumbing a once living understanding, so that finally all that was known about Christ becoming man, about the sending of the Spirit, and about the great healing of which I have spoken, had become rigidified in dogmas. These dogmas were propagated through the Latin tongue, the very words of which had nothing more to do with the true content of the teaching. Thus, in the spreading of Western scholarship through the medium of Latin, there took place a gradual drying-up of the fiery, phosphoric element which had permeated that exterminated poem.

Then came all the youthful peoples of the North, stirred up more from the East, and they received the Christ Impulse in the Latinised form through which it was losing vitality.

We must picture this Christ Impulse coming up from the South, and the peoples who spread over the North accepting a dried-up Christianity because their youthful spiritual forces lacked power to give fresh life to the greatness underlying the frozen dogmas. The aftermath of all this is still with us to-day. Even now in those Northern regions there can apparently be found—for all this is only apparent—forces that seem to have been too late in receiving the Christ Impulse, already rigid in dogma, but are called upon, out of direct knowledge of the spirit, to rediscover all the secrets of the fact of Golgotha and of Christ's entry into earthly life—all of which has, however, to be re-discovered in complete freedom. For even the fact that after the year 333, Christianity, in its benumbed state, made its way up out of Italy, and young races of men swept down, whose successors are now spread throughout Russia, Sweden, Norway, Middle Europe, England, still living under that same influence—all this came about so that, ultimately, human beings should be able to lay hold of the Christ Impulse in freedom.

It is the present task of those peoples who, as representatives of a civilisation, are the first to whom Anthroposophy has to be brought, to accept all that is connected with Christ Jesus, and to recognise that without the Christ Impulse all men would have become mere “pillars of salt”. We can use these physical terms, for the Christ Impulse goes into the physical—right into the healing of the physical. Christ has become the great spiritual Phosphorus working to overcome the salt-forming processes in man. Christus verus Phosphorus—this phrase could be heard on all sides in the first three centuries of Christianity. It was also a leading motif in the lost poem I have described.

So, between past and future, we must take our place in the present, and by the same token be able to look back. Naturally, I have no wish to urge upon you dogmatically what I have just been relating about a lost poem and a forgotten teaching. That is far from my intention. But the methods leading to investigation of man's true spiritual course bring us knowledge of such facts, no less reliable than the facts discovered by modern science and far more reliable than its hypotheses. Just as nobody can be compelled to interest himself in matters which, influenced by present-day materialism, he has always rejected, so will nobody who is as sure of them as of his own life be deterred from speaking of them to those who, with a sound feeling for the whole course of human evolution, are able to perceive the reality of such an impulse at work therein.


After the fourth century of Christianity, the poem referred to no longer existed, but in certain circles many details of it were passed on by word of mouth, and lived on in memory. But the members of these circles were prevented by the growing power of the Church from speaking publicly of any such occurrences during the early Christian centuries. One of those who still had some notion of the poem—though they knew of it only in a greatly changed and weakened form—and some idea of the mood from which it arose, was the teacher of Dante. It may indeed be said that Dante's Commedia, though dogmatically inclined, owed some of its inspiration to what had been there in the first few Christian centuries.

Naturally I am well aware of the objections that can be made to such an interpretation of history—I could make them myself. But recognising, as one must, the care taken by authors of the history taught in our schools, and with all respect for the precision that relies on records and conscientious historical criticism, what is it all worth? It cannot claim to be true history, real history, for it takes no account of those records which have been side-tracked in the course of time. Hence, though documents may be subjected to the most conscientious criticism, true history will be revealed only in the same way as true knowledge of nature and of the heavens—through spiritual investigation. Men must therefore find courage not only to speak about the world of the stars, as we have been doing during our time here, but also to introduce into the usual presentation of history all that it lacks because it was in the interest of certain circles to deprive posterity of relevant documents. But the impulses in those destroyed documents live on in the souls of human beings; live on in those who have come later and crave for the impulses no longer recorded but once so alive in mankind. Hence it will not only be necessary for men—if they wish to reach in their evolution the future intended for them—to transform, to a certain extent, many of their concepts; they will have also to transform their attitude to the truth.

To speak fundamentally: we must find our way again to Christ. Christ must come again. This assumes that during the present century there will be men able to understand in what way Christ will announce His presence, in what guise He will appear. Otherwise terrible disturbances may be stirred up by people who, having in the subconscious depths of their being a premonition of this coming of Christ in the spirit, will represent it to others in a shockingly superficial way. Clear vision into man's evolution during the early future will be possible only when an ever-increasing number of people are sufficiently ripe to see how spiritual research can make real progress; people who are able to discover in the spiritual world what men need for the right shaping of their further course. Failing this, we shall become more and more implicated in all that hinders our approach to the spiritual—not so much where ideas and concepts are concerned, as in our general attitude.

In the ideas and concepts of to-day there is much which looks like a movement towards what must be the true goal of knowledge in our time. In fact, however, this serves somewhat to hinder men from seeing the findings of natural science in the right light. They are left groping for the facts, as it were, in the dark. Observe how to-day—with the general spreading of scientific, medical conceptions—we hear of men who in their later life begin to suffer from nervous troubles that affect their whole physical constitution and lead to genuine symptoms of illness. Our present-day physicians realise, then, how powerless they are to get the better of these symptoms in any obvious way, or to proceed from pathology to therapy. As an immediate contemporary of the outstanding Viennese physician, Breuer, I remember his having a patient in whom physical examination could detect no pathological condition. It was decided to have recourse to hypnosis, which was becoming very popular at that time. Under hypnosis, the patient was found to have had, at an earlier period in his life, a terrible experience, overwhelming him with horror. As far as could be made out, this experience had been repressed into the realm of the subconscious, the unconscious, creating there a “hidden province” of the soul. Though the man himself knew nothing of this, it was there in his life and threatened his health. A man can thus have within him something which, beginning as a soul-experience, has disturbing after-effects; it sets up in his soul an isolated region of which he is unconscious.

It was thought that if the patient recalled his experience, and so became fully conscious of it, this very awareness would lead to his cure.

Cases such as this will be found with increasing frequency in life to-day. But if we are to understand why people are afflicted so often in this way, spiritual knowledge must teach us what happens when the upper part of the astral body decreases, while in its lower part there is a tendency to accumulate subconscious provinces of the soul. We must rise from knowledge of man's soul to the historical knowledge of the spirit, to cosmic spirit-knowledge, in order to explain such phenomena. I knew Breuer well; he was a man of depth; and, because he felt that with our present degree of knowledge no progress was to be made in these matters, he gave up this line of research. He then became involved with other interests, particularly with those of Freud and his followers. Out of that grew psycho-analysis, which rests upon something true, for the phenomena certainly exist. The origin of physical symptoms must be searched for in the soul; the idea is quite right. But the knowledge needed to master the phenomena is not to be found here, for it has to become spiritual knowledge.

Hence this psycho-analysis, which has to do with the quite natural, historical decrease in man's upper astral body, is in the hands of people who are not only amateurs at investigating soul and spirit, but also amateurs in the investigation of the physical body, not knowing how to follow the working of spirit there. So we have two forms of dilettantism coming together; they are really alike, for these people know just as little of the real life of man's soul and spirit as they do of his physical and etheric life. The two extents to which they are dilettante coincide; and when two similar quantities work on each other, they multiply: axa=a2, or dxd=d2; thus dilettantismxdilettantism=dilettantismsquared. So it really comes about that something right, based on true foundations, appears amateurish because of the weakness of present-day research. In all this, however, we can see a striving in the right direction. Anything like psycho-analysis should not, therefore, be treated as an invention of the devil, but as an indication that this age of ours wants something it is unable to achieve, and that anything like psychoanalysis will prosper only when founded on spiritual research. Otherwise psycho-analysis will come to us in the strange form to which Jung's logic has driven it.

Jung is indeed capable of writing, for example, a sentence such as this: One can say that through the “hidden provinces” of the soul, man was at one time disposed to assume the existence of a Divine Being. Jung then adds (he is, of course, inclined to atheism): It is obvious that such a Being cannot exist. Psycho-analysis, however, argues that man, having this disposition to believe, must assume the existence of a Divine Being in order to preserve the balance of his soul. For a conscientious person—and I would never fail to recognise that a man such as Jung is both conscientious and precise—this really means: You are obliged to live with an untruth because you are unable to live with the truth. There is no truth in theism, but you have to live with it. In our state of development to-day such things are not taken in earnest; they must, however, be taken with all possible earnestness.

So on all sides, without it being realised, these subconscious yearnings arise. Those of you who have heard or read other lecture-cycles of mine will know that I have often pointed out, from spiritual perception, how it is not right to say: Light streaming from the Sun, for example, goes out endlessly into the infinity of cosmic space, always decreasing in intensity with the square of the distance.

I have repeatedly said that spiritual perception gives a different picture. The idea that light from a centre streams out into endless distance is not correct. Just as a bow-string when drawn can be stretched only to a certain point, and will then spring back, so light goes only to a certain point and always returns. It does not only expand; it is also elastic, rhythmical. Hence the Sun not only radiates light but is all the while receiving it back; for at the end of their outward course the intensity of the rays is different and their course can be changed. I want merely to indicate this as revealing itself in connection with higher cognition, with cosmic knowledge of the world—the true knowledge of Spiritual Science.

Please do not take these remarks as indicating any lack of respect for science on my part. I appreciate science fully; it cannot be sufficiently praised, and one must recognise the high level of intelligence it brings into life to-day. But its statements about light, for example, are amateurish compared with the truth. It is important that the truth should be reached, if only to bring into all these prevailing ideas, which men do not know how to deal with, the impulse that could raise present-day research into the spiritual realm.

In certain occult circles there is a wrong practice: the student is given various occult teachings, but is never brought to the point of being shown whence they derive. The teachings are given in pictures, and the student is not led on to the realities which are imaged in the pictures. Hence his soul is surrounded by a world of pictures, and he never comes to see that through the pictures he ought to be learning about the whole Cosmos.

For this reason, after my Theosophy had appeared, it had to be followed by Occult Science. Here the pictures given in Theosophy are led on into the reality of the starry world, into the evolution of the Earth through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The two books are complementary to each other.

When in any sphere men are given nothing but pictures, they are hemmed in by them. Persons who practise a wrong kind of occultism do this with a student they are not sure of, and by this means they lead him into what is called “occult imprisonment”. He is then encircled by confusing pictures from which there is no escape—a veritable prison of pictures. That is how much occult harm has been practised, and is still practised to-day. There are even spiritual beings who drive certain people into this occult captivity; but for the soul the phenomenon is just the same. These spiritual beings are let loose in nature when nature is not understood spiritually, but viewed as though atomic processes were part of nature. The spirit in nature is thus denied. Those spirits who are always striving to work against man—the Ahrimanic spirits—then become active in nature, encompassing man with pictures of every kind, so that in this case, too, human beings are occultly imprisoned.

A great part of what to-day is called the scientific outlook—not the facts of science, for they can be relied on—consists of nothing else than pictures of the general occult captivity threatening to overtake mankind. The danger lies in the surrounding of people everywhere with atomistic and molecular pictures. It is impossible, when surrounded by such pictures, to look at those of the free spirit and the stars; for the atomistic picture of the world is like a wall around man's soul—the spiritual wall of a prison house.

This prospect can show us, in the light of Spiritual Science, what should be rightly striven for to-day. The facts of natural science are always fruitful and lead out into the wide realms of the spirit, if they are not approached with the prejudices of the occult prison in which, fundamentally, science is at present confined. These things must be a deep inward experience for us, if we wish to take our right place in the evolution of the Earth and mankind, in accordance with its past and its future. It is all this that speaks to us when in some region we have before our eyes the evidence of human aspiration in the past and are now able to see it in the full light of spirit and of soul.

When here we climb the hills and come upon the Druid stones, which are monuments to the spiritual aspirations of those ancient times, it can be a warning to us that the longings of those people of old who strove after the spirit, and looked in their own way for the coming Christ, will meet with fulfilment only when we, once again, have knowledge of the spirit, through the spiritual vision that is our way of looking for His coming. Christ must come again. Only thus can mankind learn to know Him in His spiritual form, as once, in bodily form, He went through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is something that here, where such noble monuments of the past have been preserved, can be felt in a particularly living way.

Das Einziehen des Menschen in die Epoche der Freiheit

Aus der gestrigen Darstellung über die Evolution der Welt im Zusammenhang mit der Evolution des Menschen werden Sie gesehen haben, wie in den gegenwärtigen Zeitabschnitten der ganzen Welt- und Menschheitsentwickelung das liegt, daß die Menschheit allmählich zur Freiheit kommen muß. Wenn wir in die Vergangenheit der Weltentwickelung zurückschauen, finden wir, wie der Mensch in bezug auf seine wichtigsten Tätigkeiten — Aufrechtgehen, Sprechen, Denken — vorbereitet worden ist durch über ihm stehende göttlich-geistige Wesenheiten. Wir sehen, wie der Mensch zwischen dem Tod und einer neuen Geburt immer wiederum in die Gemeinschaft dieser Wesenheiten übergeführt wird, damit dasjenige wirkt - wenn auch während des Erdendaseins noch unbewußt was diese göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten in ihm gewirkt haben.

Ich möchte nur erwähnen, daß ich gerade dargestellt habe, wie der Mensch durch die Kräfte von Sonne, Mond und dann im Sonnenbereiche durch Mars, Jupiter, Saturn in die Welt der Sterne, das heißt aber in dasjenige, was geistig der Welt der Sterne entspricht, eingeführt wird. Und ergänzend dazu möchte ich sagen, daß der Mensch, wenn er nun in diesem Leben zwischen Tod und neuer Geburt gewissermaßen wiederum die Rückreise antreten muß, nachdem er vorgerückt ist in der Planetoidenregion, gegenwärtig bis zur Wahrnehmung der Saturnimpulse, bei diesem Rückweg in die Gemeinschaft kommt mit den zunächst höchsten göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten der oberen Hierarchien, mit Thronen, Cherubimen und Seraphimen. Es sind das geistige Wesenheiten, die zugleich das Geistige und das Naturdasein in ihren Impulsen haben, die zugleich die Naturgesetze durchleben, beleben, durchgeistigen, und die auch das moralische Leben des ganzen Kosmos in einen fortwährenden Einklang bringen wollen mit den Naturgesetzen. Es sind Wesenheiten, die zwar niemals in irgendeiner physischen Offenbarungsform erscheinen, die aber in der geistigen Welt eine auf Erden kaum vorstellbare, ungeheure Macht haben, durch welche die moralischen Gesetze fortwährend mit den Naturgesetzen in Harmonie und Einklang versetzt werden können. So kommt also der Mensch dadurch, daß er die Impulse der Vergangenheit fortwährend im außerirdischen Dasein beleben kann, in seiner Evolution dazu, im Sinne dieser außerirdischen Impulse zu wirken.

Aber wir leben nun einmal in der gegenwärtigen Epoche der Welt- und Menschheitsevolution in der Aufgabe darinnen, dies alles, was in der Vergangenheit mehr oder weniger unfrei war, was durch eine höhere Bestimmung in dem Menschen bewirkt wurde, in die Freiheit des Menschen aufzunehmen.

Wenn wir die Welt- und Menschheitsevolution überblicken, so liegt in einem ganz bestimmten Zeitpunkte gewissermaßen der Knoten, den die Menschheit passieren mußte von der früheren Determination ihres Wesens, von der früheren ausschließlichen Führung durch göttlich-geistige Wesenheiten zu dem bewußten Sich-Hinaufarbeiten in der Erkenntnis dieser geistigen Wesenheiten und dadurch zu dem Erringen der Freiheit.

Dieser Zeitpunkt, der gewissermaßen die große Krisis bedeutet für die ganze Menschheitsevolution auf Erden, liegt ungefähr 333 Jahre nach dem Mysterium von Golgatha. Alle diese Dinge sind ja approximativ, weil die Zeitrechnungen ja auch nicht genau stimmen. Wenn wir also die heutige Zeitrechnung anwenden, so liegt dieser Zeitpunkt etwa 333 nach dem Mysterium von Golgatha. Das ist also der große kritische Zeitpunkt.

Wenn wir auf diesen kritischen Zeitpunkt in der Welt- und Menschheitsevolution zurückblicken, so können wir ihn ungefähr in der folgenden Weise charakterisieren. Wir können sagen: Wäre die Entwickelung der Menschheit und der Erde selbst so fortgegangen, wie sie war, wären die Menschen nur unter dem Einfluß derjenigen göttlich-geistigen Mächte geblieben, die bis dahin die Menschheit geführt haben, so wäre die Menschheit, weil das in der Absicht dieser göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten lag, zur Freiheit fortgerückt. Was würde das aber heißen? Die Menschheit wäre zur Freiheit fortgerückt, würde heißen: ein Gleichgewicht zwischen zwei Teilen des astralischen Menschenleibes wäre gerade in diesem Zeitpunkte gestört worden.

Denken Sie sich einmal den Zusammenhang von physischem und ätherischem Leib; die beiden will ich zunächst nicht zeichnen. Ich will nur den astralischen Leib zeichnen. Dieser astralische Leib war vor dem Jahre 333 im wesentlichen immer so, daß ich ihn diagrammatisch so zeichnen müßte:

Das heißt: Der größere Teil dieses astralischen Leibes, der wirksamere Teil dieses astralischen Leibes war im oberen Menschen, der weniger wirksame war im unteren Menschen. Der mittlere Mensch liegt zwischen beiden drinnen. Dadurch, daß der obere Teil des astralischen Leibes mächtiger war in diesen alten Zeiten, hatten durch diesen astralischen Leib die höheren göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten ihren großen Einfluß auf den Menschen. Aber es lag im Plan der ganzen Menschheitsevolution, daß die Evolution so fortschritt:

Wenn das zum Beispiel der Zustand des menschlichen astralischen Leibes, sagen wir für das Jahr 3000 vor Christus war, so war etwa dieses der Zustand 1000 vor Christus, das heißt, es wurde der untere Teil des astralischen Leibes immer größer, der obere im Verhältnis dazu immer kleiner. Und in diesem Jahre 333, da war das so, daß der obere Teil des astralischen Leibes gleich wurde dem unteren. Das war die Krisis im Jahre 333 nach Christus. Und seither nimmt der obere Teil des astralischen Leibes immer mehr ab beim Menschen. Darin besteht seine Entwickelung.

Wir können also die Menschheitsevolution nicht verfolgen in ihrer Wirklichkeit, wenn wir nicht auf das eingehen können, was mit dem astralischen Leib des Menschen im Verlauf der Erdenevolution geschieht. Wenn der Mensch dieses Kleinerwerden seines astralischen Leibes im oberen Teil nicht erfahren hätte, so würde das Ich nicht einen genügend großen Einfluß bekommen können. Der Mensch würde nie frei werden können. Es geschieht also dieses Kleinerwerden des astralischen Leibes zum Hervorrufen der Freiheit. Ich habe schon gesagt, die Dinge gehen nicht so, daß man fragen kann: Warum haben die Götter nicht alles so eingerichtet, daß es den Menschen gefällt? Die Götter mußten das Weltall so einrichten, daß es in sich möglich wurde, und da ruht manches gerade von dem, was den Menschen am allerwohlgefälligsten ist, auf anderem, das der Mensch, wenn er sich nicht aufklärt, nicht wohlgefällig findet. Dieses Kleinerwerden des astralischen Leibes ist mit etwas anderem verbunden. Denn von der Größe des astralischen Leibes im oberen Menschen, nicht von der Größe des ganzen, sondern von der des astralischen Leibes im oberen Menschen hängt die Stärke ab, mit der der Mensch vom Ich und vom astralischen Leib aus seinen physischen und Ätherleib beherrschen kann. So daß wirklich der Menschheit bevorstand, daß durch das Kleinerwerden des astralischen Leibes die Gesundheit der ganzen Menschheit nach und nach geschwächt worden wäre. Wir stellen uns die Menschheitsevolution nur richtig vor, wenn wir wissen, daß die Freiheit erkauft werden mußte mit einer allgemein auftretenden Krankheit, natürlich nicht in Form von Cholera oder Typhus zum Beispiel, aber in Form von allgemeiner Menschenerkrankung über die ganze Erde hin. Es ist die Freiheit nicht anders zu erkaufen, als mit einer — wenn ich den Ausdruck gebrauchen darf - in gewissem Sinne Krankwerdung der ganzen Menschheit.

Wenn alle Kräfte nur so fortgegangen wären, auch nach dem Jahre 333, wie sie früher waren, so würden die Menschen auf Erden immer schwächer und schwächer geworden sein. Sie würden immer ohnmächtiger und ohnmächtiger geworden sein. Und das Erdenende würde so herankommen, daß die Menschheit vollständig verfallen wäre.

Da ist eben das eingetreten, was ich so charakterisieren möchte: Jene Versammlung göttlich-geistiger Wesenheiten, die ich Ihnen als in der Sonne befindlich beschrieben habe, die beschloß, ihren Abgesandten, den Christus, nun auf die Erde hinunterzusenden und ihn etwas durchmachen zu lassen, was in solcher Art nun jene göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten, die mit der Menschheit zusammenhängen, zum allerersten Male durchmachten. Denn, sehen Sie, der Mensch geht im Erdenleben durch Geburt und Tod. Geburt und Tod sind ja allerdings nicht so, wie es sich der Materialist vorstellt, aber sie treten in das Erdenleben des Menschen herein. Alle über dem Menschen stehenden göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten, Angeloi, Archangeloi und so weiter bis hinauf zu den höchsten, die kannten den Tod nicht; sie gingen nur Metamorphosen durch. Sie verwandelten sich von einer Form in die andere. Sie wurden nicht geboren, sondern verwandelten sich von einer Gestalt in die andere. Sie starben nicht, sondern verwandelten sich wiederum von einer Gestalt in die andere. Das tut der Mensch auch, aber er legt dabei seinen physischen und Ätherleib ab, und daher ist die Tatsache der Geburt und des Todes für ihn etwas Radikaleres als für alle anderen Wesenheiten der höheren Hierarchien. Da beschlossen denn die Führer der Sonnenharmonien und Sonnenimpulse, den Christus auf die Erde zu senden, damit er als eines derjenigen Wesen, die sonst nicht Geburt und Tod erleben, durch diese rein mensch lichen Schicksale der Geburt und des Todes durchgehe. Es ist also das Mysterium von Golgatha nicht bloß eine Menschheitsangelegenheit, es ist eine Götterangelegenheit. Es ist die Götterangelegenheit, die man etwa so in Worte fassen kann: Die Götter der Sonne kamen zusammen und beratschlagten, was sie tun sollten, um abzuwenden von .der Menschheit die Gefahr des immer Schwächer- und Schwächerwerdens durch die Verkleinerung des Astralleibes.

Und so wurde der Christus abgesandt auf die Erde, ging durch Geburt und Tod durch, natürlich nicht wie ein menschliches, sondern wie ein göttliches Wesen. Und die Folge davon war, daß durch dieses Ereignis von Golgatha, durch die Tatsache des Todes Christi, in die Erdenentwickelung die gesundenden Kräfte für dasjenige, was krankmachende Kräfte im vorher beschriebenen Sinne sind, hereinkamen. So wurde der Christus im wahren Sinne des Wortes kosmisch-tellurisch der große Heiler der Menschheit. Das heißt, seine Kräfte traten ein in all dasjenige, was bei dem Menschen geheilt werden mußte, so daß er mit dem, was nun auf der einen Seite die Tendenz hat, zu zerfallen, aber auf der anderen Seite durch den Christus geheilt wird, nun seinen Weg in die Freiheit hinein nehmen kann. Daher wurde in der Weltenentwickelung so vorgesorgt, daß 333 Jahre vor der großen Krisis das Mysterium von Golgatha eintrat.

Die Erdenevolution der Menschheit ging also so vor sich und konnte nur so vor sich gehen, daß im Jahre 333 der Menschheit der Beginn des Zerfalls drohte, der Beginn einer generellen Erkrankung über die Erde hin.

Durch das Mysterium von Golgatha trat die große umfassende Heilung ein. So daß also alles dasjenige, was der Mensch nicht durch sein Selbstbewußtsein macht, sondern was in den tieferen Kräften der Menschheit in der Zukunft nach Zerstörung hingeht, durch den Christus geheilt werden kann, durch die Verbindung mit dem Christus geheilt werden kann. So stellt sich das Mysterium von Golgatha in die Erden- und Menschheitsevolution hinein.


Bis ins 4. Jahrhundert nach Christus hinein wußten einige Menschen, welche das Geistesleben der damaligen Zeit in sich aufgenommen hatten, durchaus noch etwas von diesen Tatbeständen, die ich eben auseinandergesetzt habe. Es gab ja in aller früheren Zeit vor dem Mysterium von Golgatha jene alten Mysterien, in denen zu den Schülern sowohl von der Vergangenheit der Menschheitsevolution auf Erden gesprochen worden ist, wie auch von dem kommenden Christus, von dem, was in der Zukunft der Menschheitsevolution sich vollziehen sollte.

In mächtigen, gewaltigen Bildern wurde den Schülern der Mysterien der Zusammenhang des Menschen auf Erden mit dem Geistwesen der höheren Welten enthüllt. Und zur Zeit des Mysteriums von Golgatha waren immerhin noch, wenn auch weniger vorgeschrittene, als es die alten Mysterienschüler waren, aber es waren immerhin noch über die Gegenden Vorderasiens, Afrikas, des Südens von Europa einzelne Menschen, einzelne Persönlichkeiten verstreut, welche unter dem Namen der Gnosis — so ist er später bekanntgeworden — etwas bewahrten in ihrem Wissen, in ihrer Weisheit von den Dingen, die da eigentlich in der Erdenevolution, in der Menschheitsevolution vorgehen, und in die das Mysterium von Golgatha für die Erdbewohner in einer so mächtigen Weise hineingespielt hat. Aber diese Menschen, die noch die Geheimnisse der alten Mysterien kannten, waren von einer großen Sorge erfüllt. Sie wußten, daß eine Krisis für die Menschheit eintreten werde. Sie wußten, daß das menschliche Verständnis in der Zukunft nicht mehr zu dem hinaufreichen wird, wodurch man die eigentlichen tieferen Grundlagen der Evolution auf Erden und in der Menschheit versteht.

Und so kann man bei gewissen Persönlichkeiten der ersten vier christlichen Jahrhunderte das Erfülltsein mit einer gewissen Sorge wahrnehmen, mit einer Sorge, die nicht über Angelegenheiten der Erde sich erstreckte, sondern mit einer Sorge, die über die Angelegenheiten der ganzen Weltevolution ging: Wird die Menschheit auch wirklich sich reif machen und reif erscheinen, um dasjenige in sich aufzunehmen, was durch das Mysterium von Golgatha gekommen ist? Das war die große Frage der - ich möchte sagen - Nachfolger der alten Initiierten zur Zeit des Mysteriums von Golgatha in den ersten vier Jahrhunderten nach dem Mysterium von Golgatha.

Und aus dem Kreise solcher in den ersten christlichen Jahrhunderten noch in das Christentum Eingeweihten ging zum Beispiel eine wunderbare Dichtung der ersten vier Jahrhunderte der christlichen Zeit hervor, eine wunderbare Dichtung, in der für die Menschheit zunächst hingestellt wurde das Eintreten des Christus auf der Erde, dann aber in ergreifenden Gestalten, ganz dramatisch - aber die Dichtung war eigentlich episch gehalten - in mächtigen Bildern die Menschen der Zukunft, der nächsten Zukunft hingestellt wurden, die mit ihrem Verständnisse nicht mehr hinaufreichen werden zu demjenigen, was sie verstehen sollten gerade zum Heil der Menschheitsevolution. Und nachdem in mächtigen Bildern gerade etwas von dem Sonnen-Ratschluß der Götter dargestellt war, den ich vorhin erwähnte, indem in ergreifender Weise geschildert wurde in diesem Epos das Heruntersteigen des Christus in den Menschen Jesus von Nazareth, war in einem dritten Teile geschildert, wie in einer neuen Metamorphose hereintreten sollte in die Menschheitsentwickelung ein Wiederaufleben des alten Demeter- und Isiswesens. Es ward geschildert, wie das Demeter- und Isiswesen geheiligt werden sollte in einer besonderen, gewaltig dargestellten Menschengestalt. Es wurde dargestellt wie etwas, das aus der Zukunft hereinspielen sollte, eine Art Gelöbnis der Menschheit.

Diese, ich möchte sagen, Dichterpriester der ersten vier christlichen Jahrhunderte stellten dar, wenigstens der Hervorragendste von ihnen, wie hereinspielen sollte in die weitere Erdenevolution ein gewisser Dienst, von all denjenigen geübt, welche zur Gelehrsamkeit, zum Geistesleben kommen sollten. Eine Art Sacrificium wurde hingestellt für denjenigen, der überhaupt in die Gelehrsamkeit, in das Geistesleben eintreten sollte.

In diesem Epos ist dann ein jüngerer Mensch geschildert, der sich hineinfinden soll in das ganze Erfassen dieser Menschheitsevolution dieser Zeit: geschildert, wie er aber in seinen jungen Jahren eine Art Marienkultus entfalten sollte als Übergang von seinen jüngeren Jahren zu seinen späteren Jahren. Diese kultische Haltung, die über jeden Gelehrten, gelehrt werdenden, weise werdenden Menschen eigentlich kommen müsse, wenn die Menschheit die Verbindung finden sollte mit dem, was durch das Mysterium von Golgatha in die Menschheit gekommen ist, dieses Sacrificium, das wurde in lebendigen Farben dargestellt. Eine mächtige, farbenreiche Dichtung entstand in den ersten vier christlichen Jahrhunderten. Und zu denjenigen, die mehr oder weniger in der Atmosphäre dieser Dichtung lebten, gehörten auch Malerpriester, welche allerdings in der einfachen, popularisierenden Weise des Malens, aber doch in mächtigen, zu Herzen gehenden Bildern auch malerisch diese Szenen darstellten.

Diese Dichtung hat es gegeben. Diese Dichtung ist mit.alledem, was positiv von der Gnosis hergerührt hat, von der späteren Kirche ausgerottet worden. Man braucht sich ja nur daran zu erinnern, daß auch nur durch das, was man einen Zufall nennt, selbst aus der späteren Zeit die Schriften des Scotus Eriugena gerettet worden sind, und man wird es nicht mehr als etwas absolut Absurdes empfinden, wenn aus der Geistesforschung heraus davon gesprochen werden muß, daß die größte Dichtung, die das Neue Testament hervorgebracht hat, von der späteren Kirche einfach ausgerottet worden ist mit Stumpf und Stiel, so daß nichts mehr in den folgenden Jahrhunderten davon da war. Aber diese Dichtung hat es gegeben. Sie wurde ausgerottet mit all den allerdings einfachen, aber ergreifenden Malereien, die sich an jene Dichtung geschlossen haben. In diese Dichtung war auch hineingeheimnißt all die ungeheure Sorge, welche diese Nachfolger der alten Initiierten in den ersten christlichen Jahrhunderten gehabt haben. Ein ernst-elegischer Ton ging durch diese Dichtung.

Und wir können sagen: Die Möglichkeit, diese Dinge zu verstehen, lag noch bei einer Anzahl von Menschen vor bis ins 4. Jahrhundert, selbst bis in den Beginn des 5. Jahrhunderts hinein bei denjenigen Menschen, die dann nicht herübergegangen sind zu der Augustinischen Richtung, die in einer ganz anderen Strömung war; es lag das Verständnis für diese Dinge noch bei diesen Menschen, aber es konnte eben in unmittelbarer Weise, wie es damals war, nicht erhalten bleiben.

Es waren die Geisteskräfte der Menschen in dem südlichen Teil der europäischen Welt schon zu gering, sie konnten nicht mehr dieses Verständnis fassen. Und so kristallisierte sich, erstarrte dasjenige, was da als Verständnis zugrunde lag, dann in den Dogmen, die geblieben sind, die eigentlich auch nur dadurch haben gehalten werden können, daß eine immer toter und toter werdende Sprache, die lateinische Sprache, bewahrte dasjenige, was da war. Aber dieses Fortpflanzen der lateinischen Sprache im Mittelalter bei denjenigen, die nun zur Weisheit kamen, war eben nur dazu da, um das, was einstmals lebendiges Verständnis war, in der Sprache erstarren zu lassen, so daß schließlich all dasjenige, was man über die Trinität kannte, über die Menschwerdung Christi kannte, was man über die Sendung des Geistes kannte, über den großen Heilungsprozeß, von dem ich Ihnen gesprochen habe, erstarrt wurde in Dogmen, die sich fortpflanzten in der lateinischen Sprache; und die Worte selber wurden nicht mehr auf das, was der richtige Inhalt war, bezogen. So versiegte allmählich in der sich fortpflanzenden abendländischen Gelehrsamkeit, die ihr Medium in der lateinischen Sprache hatte, das, was zum Beispiel wirklich - ich möchte sagen - in einer phosphorigen Gestaltung durchzog jene ausgerottete Dichtung.

Und dann kamen ja alle jene jungen, mehr aus dem Osten herüber angeregten Völker des Nordens, die empfingen dasjenige, was der Christus-Impuls war, schon in einer Gestalt, wo es, man könnte sagen, durchaus latinisiert war, wo es im Erstarren war.

Wir müssen uns vorstellen den vom Süden heraufziehenden erstarrenden Christus-Impuls, die im Norden sich ausbreitenden Völkerschaften, die schon ein erstarrtes Christentum bekamen, die in ihren jungen Geisteskräften noch nicht die Macht hatten, wiederum, ich möchte sagen, aus den erstarrten Dogmen heraus zu verlebendigen dasjenige, was Ungeheures in ihnen enthalten war. Die Nachwirkungen all dieser Dinge sind heute noch da. Heute noch sehen Sie über diesen nordischen Gegenden Kräfte, die scheinbar - es ist das ja alles scheinbar - zu spät dasjenige erlangt haben, was als Christus-Impuls unten versiegt ist, was aufgenommen hat den Christus-Impuls in den erstarrten Dogmen, was aber berufen ist, aus unmittelbarer Geist-Erkenntnis heraus wiederum die ganzen Geheimnisse der Tatsache von Golgatha, des Eintretens des Christus in das Erdenleben zu finden; aber zu finden in der völligen Freiheit. Denn auch diese Tatsache, daß nach dem Jahre 333 das erstarrte Christentum aus Italien heraufgezogen ist, junge Völker herübergekommen sind, deren Nachzügler überall sind, in Rußland, Schweden, Norwegen, Mitteleuropa, in England - da überall leben heute doch die Völker noch unter diesem Impuls -, auch all dieses, daß das sich so vollzogen hat, war letzten Endes dennoch dazu da, daß die Menschen in Freiheit den ChristusImpuls ergreifen können.

Das ist also die Aufgabe derjenigen Völker, zu denen heute vorzugsweise als zu ihrer Zivilisation von Anthroposophie gesprochen werden muß, daß sie den ganzen Zusammenhang des Christus Jesus aufnehmen, daß sie verstehen lernen, wie gewissermaßen ohne den Christus-Impuls die Menschheit im Salzprozesse hätte erstarren müssen. Wir können mit diesen physischen Worten reden, denn bis ins Physische, bis in die physische Heilung der Menschheit geht der Christus-Impuls hinein. Und der Christus ist geworden der große Phosphorus, der geistige Phosphorus, der diesem Versalzungsprozesse der Menschheit entgegenzuwirken hat als solcher großer Phosphorus. «Christus verus phosphorus» — das war eines der Worte, welche in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten des Christentums überall gesprochen wurden. Dieser große Phosphorus zieht eben auch als ein Leitmotiv durch die erwähnte zugrunde gegangene Dichtung.

So müssen wir uns zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft hineinstellen in die Gegenwart. So müssen wir zurückschauen können. Selbstverständlich werde ich Ihnen nicht dasjenige, was ich in diesem Augenblicke gesagt habe über eine verlorengegangene Dichtung und verlorengegangene Gelehrsamkeit, als Dogma aufdrängen. Es liegt mir das ganz ferne. Aber diejenige Methode, die zu der Erforschung des wirklichen Geistesganges der Menschheit führt, die führt zu der Erkenntnis solcher Tatsachen mit derselben Sicherheit, mit der heute naturwissenschaftliche Tatsachen gefunden werden, und mit einer viel größeren Sicherheit als naturwissenschaftliche Hypothesen heute aufgestellt werden. Ebensowenig wie derjenige, der von vornherein aus der materialistischen Gesinnung der Gegenwart diese Dinge ablehnt, irgendwie in aufdringlicher Weise veranlaßt werden sollte, sich mit diesen Dingen auseinanderzusetzen, ebensowenig aber kann es demjenigen, der von diesen Dingen so weiß wie von seinem eigenen Leben, verwehrt sein, von diesen Dingen zu denjenigen Menschen zu sprechen, die vielleicht doch aus dem ganzen Gange der Menschheit heraus, aus einem gesunden Empfinden dieser Menschheitsevolution die Wahrheit eines solchen Impulses innerhalb der Evolution einsehen können.


Die Dichtung selber, von der ich gesprochen habe, war nach jenem 4. nachchristlichen Jahrhundert nicht mehr vorhanden, aber allerlei Nachrichten von ihr, nicht urkundlich, aber mündlich, in einzelnen Kreisen, von Person zu Person erzählt, waren noch vorhanden, und in einzelnen Kreisen lebte das Andenken an jene Dichtung fort. Nur waren jene Kreise gehindert durch die herrschenden aufkommenden Kirchenkreise, öffentlich irgend etwas von dem, was da in den ersten drei bis vier Jahrhunderten gespielt hat, auch nur auszusprechen. Aber einer derjenigen, die noch etwas ahnten obwohl in vielfach verwandelter Gestalt, nicht mehr in der Größe der Gestalt der ersten Jahrhunderte - von der Dichtung und der Stimmung der Menschheit, aus der diese Dichtung hervorgegangen ist, war der Lehrer des Dante. Und man kann sagen, auf diesem Wege ist auch noch in Dantes «Commedia» in einer gewissen Weise, allerdings schon nach der Dogmenseite hinüber orientiert, in einer gewissen Weise eine Inspiration hineingekommen von dem, was in den ersten christlichen Jahrhunderten gewesen ist. Ich weiß selbstverständlich, was gegen eine solche Geschichtsdarstellung heute vorgebracht werden kann, und ich könnte die Einwände, die von dieser oder jener Seite gemacht werden, selbstverständlich mir auch selber machen. Aber so sehr man die Exaktheit anerkennen muß, mit der konstruiert wird unsere Geschichte, jene Geschichte, die die Menschheit heute lernt in den untersten und in den höchsten Schulen, so sehr man auch Respekt haben kann vor dieser Exaktheit, die auf Dokumenten, auf gewissenhafter historischer Kritik beruht — was nützt es? Das wird sich die Menschheit doch gestehen müssen: Die wahre Geschichte, die wirkliche Geschichte ist das nicht, denn in dieser Geschichte sind diejenigen Dokumente nicht enthalten, die eben im Laufe der Zeit von der Menschheit beseitigt worden sind. Daher mag die Geschichte noch so kritisch, noch so gewissenhaft in bezug auf das Dokumentarische sein, die wirkliche Geschichte können wir auch nur, ebenso wie die wirkliche Natur- und Himmelskunde, aus der geistigen Forschung selbst heraus gewinnen. Daher muß die Menschheit auch den Mut gewinnen, nicht nur über die Sternenwelt so zu reden, wie in den letzten Tagen hier gesprochen worden ist, sondern auch den anderen Mut gewinnen, dasjenige zur gewöhnlichen Geschichtsdarstellung hinzuzufügen, was in dieser Geschichtsdarstellung fehlen muß, weil gewisse Kreise eben Interesse daran hatten, die entsprechenden Dokumente vor der Nachwelt völlig verschwinden zu lassen. Aber in dem, was in den Menschenseelen lebt, da leben die Impulse auch der ausgerotteten Impulse fort; in dem, was die Menschen der späteren Zeit ersehnen können, da leben sie darinnen, jene heute nicht mehr geschriebenen — weil sie ausgerottet worden sind -, aber einstmals in der Menschheit lebendigen Impulse. Es wird daher nicht nur notwendig sein, daß in einer gewissen Beziehung die Menschheit, will sie in ihrer Evolution in die ihr vorgezeichnete Zukunft hinüberkommen, umlernt in bezug auf manche Begriffe, sondern daß die Menschheit umlernt auch in bezug auf die Gesinnung gegenüber der Wahrheit.

Denn im Grunde genommen: Den Christus müssen wir wieder finden. Er muß wiederkommen. Und sein Wiederkommen setzt voraus, daß eine Menschheit da sei in diesem Jahrhundert, die versteht, auf welche Weise er sich zeigen wird, in welchen Erscheinungen er sich zeigen wird. Sonst werden unter Umständen die furchtbarsten rumorvollen Bewegungen entstehen, ausgehend von Menschen, die in den tief unterbewußten Regionen ihres Wesens etwas ahnen von dem Wiederkommen des Christus, das heißt des Geistes Christi, und die diese Tatsache in einer äußerlichen, trivialen und schreckenhaften Weise in der Menschheit vertreten werden. Allein, Klarheit in die Menschenevolution gegen die nächste Zukunft kann nur kommen, wenn sich der Kreis derer immer mehr und mehr vergrößert, die mit einer guten Gesinnung hineinsehen wollen in die Art und Weise, wie in der geistigen Forschung wirklich vorgegangen werden und in der übersinnlichen Welt durch die geistige Forschung dasjenige gefunden werden kann, was gerade die Menschheit braucht, um ihre nächste Zukunft in der richtigen Weise zu gestalten. Sonst kommen wir immer tiefer und tiefer in das hinein, was niemals wirklich dem Geistigen sich wird nähern können, nicht so sehr aus den Ideen und Begriffen als aus der Gesinnung heraus.

Wir haben nämlich den Begriffen, den Ideen nach in der gegenwärtigen Zeit vieles, was sich ausnimmt wie ein Hinkraften, Hintendieren nach dem, was eigentlich das rechte Erkenntnisziel der Gegenwart sein müßte. Aber es hindert etwas die Menschen, die Dinge, die auch aus den Naturwissenschaften heraus gefunden werden, in der richtigen Weise anzuschauen. Sie tappen sozusagen wie im Finstern gegenüber diesen Tatsachen. Sehen Sie, da finden Sie heute, indem die naturwissenschaftlich-medizinischen Anschauungen über den Menschen erweitert werden, daß es Menschen gibt, die im späteren Leben irgendwie in nervöse Zustände bekommen, die sich bis in die physische Konstitution des Menschen hineinerstrecken können, die zu wirklichen Krankheitsbildern führen. Da sieht dann die gegenwärtige Medizin, wie sie ohnmächtig ist, diese Krankheitsbilder in irgendeiner Weise anschaulich zu beherrschen, eine Pathologie bis zur Therapie zu treiben. Ich war selber ein unmittelbarer Zeitgenosse, als der ausgezeichnete Wiener Arzt, der Internist Breuer, einmal vor einem solchen Fall stand, wo etwas auftrat an einer Persönlichkeit, das aus physischer Forschungsmethode nicht mehr pathologisch zu fassen war. Da wurde zu der damals ja immer beliebter werdenden Hypnose Zuflucht genommen. Da versetzte man die Persönlichkeit in eine Hypnose. Man kam tatsächlich durch das Erforschen des hypnotischen Zustandes darauf, wie ein furchtbar schockierendes, ein furchtbar schreckmachendes Lebensereignis in einer früheren Lebensepoche da war. Dieses Lebensereignis war gewissermaßen, so konnte man sich es dazumal nur erklären, hinuntergezogen in die untere Region des menschlichen Lebens, wo das Unterbewußte, das Unbewufßte lagert. Da bildete es gewissermaßen eine «verborgene Seelenprovinz». Aber wenn der Mensch auch von so etwas nichts weiß, so ist es doch da in seinem Leben. Und es kann sogar krankheitserzeugend da sein. Dann hat man etwas in dem Menschen drinnen, was nur ein seelisches Erlebnis war, was nachwirkt, nachrumort, was gewissermaßen eine isolierte Provinz im Seelenleben ist, deren sich der Mensch nicht bewußt ist.

Man kam darauf: Wenn man den Menschen daran erinnert, wenn man so etwas heraufbringt ins Bewußtsein, so daß er es bewußt ergreift, so kann es zur Heilung führen.

Solche Tatsachen wird man aber im gegenwärtigen Erdenleben immer mehr und mehr finden. Aber man wird wissen müssen, wenn man verstehen will, warum die Menschheit befallen wird von solchen Zuständen -— und immer mehr und mehr wird sie davon befallen werden -, man wird wissen müssen aus einer geistigen Erkenntnis heraus, wie es mit dem Immer-Kleinerwerden des oberen Teiles des astralischen Leibes wird, und wie in dem immer größerwerdenden unteren Teil des astralischen Leibes eine Tendenz besteht zur Ansammlung von solchen unterbewußten Seelenprovinzen. Man wird aufsteigen müssen von der seelenhaften Erkenntnis des Menschen zu der historischen Geist-Erkenntnis, zu der kosmischen Geist-Erkenntnis, um überhaupt solche Erscheinungen erklären zu können. Breuer war eine tiefere Natur - ich kannte ihn sehr gut - und ließ, weil er empfand, daß man in dieser Weise nicht weitergehen kann mit dem bloßen Wissen der Gegenwart, sozusagen den Faden der Forschung fallen. Dann nahmen ihn andere auf, Freud vor allen Dingen und seine Nachfolger, und es wurde dasjenige daraus, was gegenwärtig als Psychoanalyse überall funktioniert. Die beruht auf etwas durchaus Wahrem, denn die Erscheinungen sind da. Man ist genötigt, dasjenige, was sich physisch ausdrückt, im Seelenhaften zu suchen. Der Gedanke ist richtig; aber man hat nicht die Wissenschaft, um das zu beherrschen, denn diese Wissenschaft würde erst die Geisteswissenschaft sein.

Und so tritt diese Psychoanalyse, die auf der ganz natürlichen, historisch vor sich gehenden Defektheit des oberen astralischen Leibes des Menschen beruht, mit diesen Tatsachen auf bei Leuten, die erstens Dilettanten sind in der Seelenforschung, in der Geistesforschung, aber die auch Dilettanten sind in der Leibesforschung, in der Körperforschung, denn sie wissen nicht dem Geist in den Leib hinein zu folgen. So kommen zwei Dilettantismen zusammen, die wirklich einander gleich sind, denn diese Leute wissen wirklich so wenig vom wirklichen Seelen- und Geistesleben des Menschen wie vom physischen und ätherischen Leben. Diese zwei Größen kommen zusammen, und wenn zwei gleiche Größen aufeinander wirken, so multiplizieren sie sich: ax a = a® oder Dx D= D’, Dilettantismus multipliziert mit Dilettantismus ist Dilettantismus zum Quadrat. Es ist tatsächlich so, daß ein Richtiges, etwas, was auf ganz richtigen Unterlagen beruht, durch die Ohnmacht der Forschung in der Gegenwart eben als Dilettantismus sich darstellt. Aber man sieht in so etwas das Streben nach dem Richtigen. Man darf so etwas wie Psychoanalyse nicht wiederum hinstellen als etwas, was des Teufels ist, sondern als etwas, worin sich zeigt, daß unsere Zeit das will, was sie eben nicht kann, daher so etwas, wie das, was in der Psychoanalyse auftritt, erst in sein richtiges Fahrwasser eintreten wird, wenn es in die Geistesforschung mündet. Sonst mündet es dorthin, wozu Jung es gebracht hat, der Schweizer, der die Psychoanalyse in eine merkwürdige, kuriose Logik hineingetrieben hat.

Sie können bei solch einem Mann zum Beispiel den Satz lesen: Der Mensch ist einmal, man möchte sagen, durch die historisch verborgenen Seelenprovinzen dazu veranlagt, ein Gotteswesen anzunehmen. — Nun formt der betreffende Psychiater den Satz dazu: Aber ein Gotteswesen kann es ja selbstverständlich nicht geben. Er [Jung] ist ja natürlich atheistisch gesinnt. Da fordert aber die Psychoanalyse: Der Mensch, so wie er eben veranlagt ist, muß, um sein seelisches Gleichgewicht zu erhalten, ein Gotteswesen annehmen. Das heißt aber nichts Geringeres als, wenn man ganz gewissenhaft ist - und die Gewissenhaftigkeit und Exaktheit eines solchen Mannes wie Jung werde ich immer anerkennen -: Du mußt mit der Unwahrheit leben, denn mit der Wahrheit kannst du nicht leben. Der Theismus ist die Unwahrheit. Du mußt mit der Unwahrheit, mit dem Theismus leben. — Diese Dinge nimmt nur die heutige Entwickelung nicht völlig ernst. Man muß sie aber mit völligem Ernst nehmen.

Und so treten überall die Sehnsuchten auf, ohne daß die Menschen es wissen, die unterbewußten Sehnsuchten. Einzelne, die andere Vortragsreihen von mir mitgemacht haben oder die Vortragszyklen gelesen haben, werden wissen, daß ich oftmals aus der geistigen Anschauung heraus darauf aufmerksam machte, wie es nicht richtig ist, wenn immer gesagt wird, Licht, das zum Beispiel von der Sonne ausstrahlt, gehe in den unendlichen Weltenraum hinaus, endlos. Man gibt dann höchstens das Unendlichkeitszeichen an und sagt, das geht endlos in den Weltenraum hinaus, nimmt ab in der Intensität mit dem Quadrat der Entfernung, dann wird die Intensität immer geringer und geringer; so geht das Licht hinaus.

Ich sagte noch: die geistige Anschauung gibt ein anderes; es ist der Gedanke nicht richtig, daß Licht, das von einem Zentrum ausstrahlt, immer weiter und weiter hinausgeht. Sondern gerade so, wie eine gespannte Saite, wenn sie angezogen wird, nur bis zu einem gewissen Punkte nach der einen Seite geht und dann wieder zurückschlägt, so geht Licht nur bis zu einem gewissen Punkte, geht immer wieder zurück. Es ist in sich in seiner Verbreitung nicht nur expandierend, sondern elastisch, rhythmisch. Die Sonne strahlt nicht nur Licht aus, sondern nimmt immer wieder Licht zurück, dadurch aber, daß am Ende der Lichtbahnen die Intensitäten verschieden sind, kann sie die Lichtbahnen gestalten. Das will ich nur andeuten, denn es ergibt sich im Zusammenhange mit einer höheren Erkenntnis, mit der kosmischen Erkenntnis der Welt, mit einer wirklichen Erkenntnis der Geisteswissenschaft.

Jetzt melden die Zeitungen, daß Oliver Lodge einen bedeutsamen Vortrag gehalten hat, in dem er aus dem Verhalten der Lichtstrahlen darlegen wollte, daß ein Lichtstrahl, der sich ausbreitet, in einer gewissen Entfernung, wenn er ankommt an der Materienlosigkeit — die braucht er ja, so nimmt Oliver Lodge an, als etwas, an das er stößt -, daß er da mit Hilfe der Metamorphose des Elektrons wieder in sich zurückfällt - ein Gedanke, der sich gegenüber der Wahrheit dilettantisch ausnimmit.

Bitte, nehmen Sie solche Dinge nicht so, als ob ich respektlos über die Wissenschaft reden möchte. Ich erkenne die Wissenschaft völlig an. Gegenüber der Wahrheit jedoch sind selbst diese Dinge — man kann sie gar nicht genug loben und als geistvoll anerkennen innerhalb der Gegenwart — auch durchaus dilettantisch. Aber sie zeigen auf der anderen Seite, wie das Denken der Menschen selber dazu treibt, mit seinen abstrakten Begriffen der Lichtstrahlenausbreitung und des Elektrons irgendwie in eine Region hineinzukommen, wo das Richtige liegt. Es handelt sich ja dabei nur darum, daß man in das Richtige hineinkommt, um in die Ideen, die überall auftreten, mit denen man gar nichts anfangen kann, jenen Impuls hineinzubringen, der auch die Forschung der Gegenwart hinaufträgt in die geistigen Gebiete. Es gibt in gewissen okkulten Kreisen einen Unfug; da wird der Mensch belehrt mit allerlei okkulten Lehren, aber man führt ihn nicht zu dem Endpunkt desjenigen, aus dem eigentlich diese Lehren stammen. Man gibt ihm nur Bilder, und man führt ihn nicht zu dem, wovon diese Bilder eigentlich das Abbild sind, gemalt sind. Dadurch wird der Mensch in seiner Seele von einer Bilderwelt umgeben, statt daß er die Empfindung bekommt, er muß durch diese Bilder erst das Weltenall kennenlernen.

Sehen Sie, aus diesem. Grunde mußte ich, nachdem meine «Theosophie» erschienen war, die «Geheimwissenschaft» der «Theosophie» folgen lassen. Da ist dasjenige, was in der «Theosophie» in Bildern dargestellt ist, hinausgeführt in die Wirklichkeit der Sternenwelt, in die Evolution durch Saturn, Sonne, Mond und so weiter. Diese beiden Bücher ergänzen sich.

Gibt man aber auf irgendeinem Gebiete dem Menschen nur Bilder, so ist er von den Bildern umgeben. Leute, die okkulten Unfug treiben, machen das so mit ihren Schülern, die sie nicht so recht besitzen; dadurch bringen sie sie in das, was man okkulte Gefangenschaft nennt. Der Mensch wird in dieser okkulten Gefangenschaft von Bildern umgeben, die ihm als Bilder nicht klar werden, aus denen er nicht herauskommt. Er ist in einem Bildergefängnis. Es ist dies dasjenige, womit viel okkulter Unfug von Leuten getrieben worden ist und auch heute noch getrieben wird. Aber es gibt auch geistige Wesenheiten, die den Menschen, oder sogar Teile der Menschen, in eine solche okkulte Gefangenschaft bringen. Es ist die ganz gleiche seelische Erscheinung. Das sind geistige Wesenheiten, die dann los werden in der Natur, wenn man die Natur nicht geistig begreift, wenn man in die Natur nur so hineinsieht, daß man die atomistischen Prozesse als naturalistische begreift. Dann verleugnet man den Geist der Natur. Dann werden gerade die dem Menschen entgegenstrebenden, sogenannten ahrimanischen Geister in der Natur rege, und die umstellen den Menschen mit allen möglichen Bildern, so daß der Mensch in diese okkulte Gefangenschaft auch geführt werden kann durch diese ahrimanischen Geistwesenheiten.

Und ein großer Teil desjenigen, was man heute wissenschaftliche Anschauung nennt — nicht die Tatsachen der Wissenschaft, die sind gut, aber dasjenige, was man wissenschaftliche Anschauung nennt -, das ist nichts anderes als Bilder einer universellen, über die Menschheit als Gefahr hereinbrechenden okkulten Gefangenschaft. Solch eine Gefahr einer hereinbrechenden okkulten Gefangenschaft ist vorhanden in dem Umstelltwerden des Menschen überall mit den atomistischen und molekularistischen Bildern. Solch eine okkulte Gefangenschaft stellt diese Bilder um einen her, man kann nicht hinausschauen in die freien Geistes- und Sternenbilder, weil sich eben das Weltenbild des Atoms wie die seelischen Wände, die geistigen Wände eines Gefängnishauses, in dem man sich dabei geistig befindet, hinstellt.

Das ist es, was als Bild uns auch zeigen kann in geisteswissenschaftlichem Lichte ein richtiges Streben der Gegenwart, denn die Tatsachen der Naturwissenschaft sind überall fruchtbar und führen in die Geistesweiten hinaus, wenn man ihnen nicht kommt mit dem Vorurteile der okkulten Gefangenschaft, in der heute im Grunde genommen die Wissenschaft ist. Das sind die Dinge, die wir innerlich durchleben müssen, wenn wir uns richtig in die Gegenwart der Erden- und Menschheitsevolution hineinstellen wollen, in Gemäßheit der Erden- und Menschheitsvergangenheit und der Erden- und Menschheitszukunft. Und das ist es, was uns, ich möchte sagen, immer entgegengerufen wird, wenn wir irgendwo altes Streben, aber jetzt wirklich mit dem Geiste und der Seele angesehen, vor uns haben.

Wenn wir hinaufgehen auf die Berge und die Druidensteine finden, die Denkmäler jenes Geiststrebens der alten Zeit, dann kann es uns eine Mahnung sein, wie die Sehnsuchten jener Alten, nach dem Geiste Strebenden, die in ihrer Weise auf den kommenden Christus hinschauten, erst dann ihre Erfüllung finden werden, wenn wir wiederum eine Geisteserkenntnis haben durch eine Geistesschau, durch die wir in unserer Art den kommenden Christus schauen werden, der wiederkommen muß, weil er erst wiederum von der Menschheit erkannt werden muß in Geistgestalt, wie er einmal in Leibesgestalt durch das Mysterium von Golgatha durchgegangen ist.

Das ist etwas, was man besonders hier an dieser Stätte, wo so herrliche alte Denkmäler erhalten sind, lebhaft empfindet.

The entry of man into the epoch of freedom

You will have seen from yesterday's account of the evolution of the world in connection with the evolution of man how in the present periods of the whole development of the world and of mankind it lies that mankind must gradually come to freedom. If we look back into the past of world evolution, we find how man has been prepared for his most important activities - walking upright, speaking, thinking - by divine-spiritual beings standing above him. We see how man between death and a new birth is again and again transferred into the community of these entities, so that what these divine-spiritual entities have worked in him is effective - even if still unconsciously during his earthly existence.

I would just like to mention that I have just described how man is introduced into the world of the stars through the powers of the sun, moon and then in the solar realm through Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, but that means into that which spiritually corresponds to the world of the stars. And in addition to this I would like to say that the human being, when he now in this life between death and new birth has to start the return journey again, so to speak, after he has advanced in the planetoid region, presently up to the perception of the Saturn impulses, on this return journey comes into communion with the initially highest divine-spiritual entities of the upper hierarchies, with thrones, cherubs and seraphim. These are spiritual beings who have both the spiritual and the natural existence in their impulses, who at the same time live through, enliven and spiritualize the laws of nature, and who also want to bring the moral life of the whole cosmos into constant harmony with the laws of nature. They are beings who never appear in any physical form of manifestation, but who have a tremendous power in the spiritual world, hardly imaginable on earth, through which the moral laws can be continually brought into harmony and accord with the laws of nature. Thus, by being able to continually revive the impulses of the past in his extraterrestrial existence, man in his evolution comes to act in the sense of these extraterrestrial impulses.

But we now live in the present epoch of world and human evolution in the task of incorporating all that which was more or less unfree in the past, which was brought about in man by a higher destiny, into the freedom of man.

If we look at the evolution of the world and humanity, then at a very specific point in time lies the knot, so to speak, which humanity had to pass from the earlier determination of its being, from the earlier exclusive guidance by divine-spiritual entities to the conscious working up in the knowledge of these spiritual entities and thereby to the attainment of freedom.

This point in time, which in a way means the great crisis for the whole evolution of mankind on earth, lies about 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. All these things are approximate, because the time calculations are not exactly correct. So if we use today's chronology, this point in time is about 333 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. This is therefore the great critical point in time.

If we look back at this critical point in the evolution of the world and humanity, we can characterize it roughly as follows. We can say: If the development of mankind and of the earth itself had continued as it was, if men had only remained under the influence of those divine-spiritual powers which had led mankind up to that time, mankind would have moved on to freedom, because that was the intention of these divine-spiritual entities. But what would that mean? Humanity would have moved away to freedom, would mean: a balance between two parts of the astral human body would have been disturbed at this very time.

Think of the connection between the physical and etheric body; I will not draw either of them at first. I only want to draw the astral body. Before the year 333, this astral body was essentially always such that I would have to draw it diagrammatically as follows:

That is, the larger part of this astral body, the more effective part of this astral body was in the upper man, the less effective part was in the lower man. The middle man lies between the two. Because the upper part of the astral body was more powerful in those ancient times, the higher divine-spiritual entities had their great influence on man through this astral body. But it was in the plan of the whole evolution of mankind that evolution progressed in this way:

For example, if this was the state of the human astral body, let us say for the year 3000 before Christ, then approximately this was the state 1000 before Christ, that is, the lower part of the astral body became larger and larger, the upper part smaller and smaller in relation to it. And in the year 333, the upper part of the astral body became equal to the lower. That was the crisis in 333 AD. And since then the upper part of the astral body has been decreasing more and more in man. This is its development.

We cannot therefore follow the evolution of mankind in its reality if we cannot go into what happens to the astral body of man in the course of earth evolution. If man had not experienced this diminution of his astral body in the upper part, the ego would not be able to gain sufficient influence. Man would never be able to become free. So this diminution of the astral body takes place to bring about freedom. I have already said that things do not happen in such a way that one can ask: Why have the gods not arranged everything in such a way that it pleases man? The gods had to arrange the universe in such a way that it became possible in itself, and some of the very things that are most pleasing to man rest on other things that man, if he does not enlighten himself, will not find pleasing. This diminution of the astral body is connected with something else. For the strength with which man can control his physical and etheric body from the ego and the astral body depends on the size of the astral body in the upper man, not on the size of the whole, but on that of the astral body in the upper man. So that the health of mankind as a whole would have been gradually weakened by the diminution of the astral body. We can only imagine the evolution of mankind correctly if we know that freedom had to be bought with a generally occurring disease, of course not in the form of cholera or typhus, for example, but in the form of general human disease over the whole earth. Freedom cannot be bought in any other way than by - if I may use the expression - making the whole of humanity ill in a certain sense.

If all powers had continued in the same way as they were before, even after the year 333, people on earth would have become weaker and weaker. They would have become more and more powerless and impotent. And the end of the earth would approach in such a way that humanity would have completely decayed.

That is exactly what happened, what I would like to characterize like this: That assembly of divine-spiritual beings, which I have described to you as being in the sun, which decided to send their emissary, the Christ, now down to earth and to let him go through something, what those divine-spiritual beings, which are connected with mankind, went through for the very first time in such a way. For, you see, the human being goes through birth and death in earthly life. However, birth and death are not as the materialist imagines, but they enter man's life on earth. All divine-spiritual beings above man, Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on up to the highest, did not know death; they only went through metamorphoses. They transformed themselves from one form into another. They were not born, but transformed from one form to another. They did not die, but changed again from one form to another. Man also does this, but in doing so he sheds his physical and etheric body, and therefore the fact of birth and death is something more radical for him than for all other beings of the higher hierarchies. So the leaders of the solar harmonies and solar impulses decided to send the Christ to earth so that he, as one of those beings who otherwise do not experience birth and death, might pass through these purely human destinies of birth and death. So the Mystery of Golgotha is not just a human affair, it is a divine affair. It is the affair of the gods, which can be put into words like this: The gods of the sun came together and consulted as to what they should do to avert from .mankind the danger of becoming ever weaker and weaker through the diminution of the astral body.

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And so the Christ was sent to earth, went through birth and death, of course not like a human being but like a divine being. And the consequence of this was that through this event of Golgotha, through the fact of Christ's death, the healing forces for what are pathogenic forces in the sense described above came into earthly development. Thus the Christ became the great cosmic-telluric healer of humanity in the true sense of the word. That is to say, his powers entered into all that which had to be healed in man, so that he can now take his path to freedom with that which on the one hand has the tendency to disintegrate, but on the other hand is healed by the Christ. For this reason, the development of the world was prepared in such a way that the Mystery of Golgotha occurred 333 years before the great crisis.

The earth evolution of mankind therefore proceeded and could only proceed in such a way that in the year 333 mankind was threatened with the beginning of disintegration, the beginning of a general illness over the earth.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha the great comprehensive healing occurred. So that all that which man does not do through his self-consciousness, but which in the deeper forces of mankind is heading towards destruction in the future, can be healed through the Christ, can be healed through the connection with the Christ. This is how the Mystery of Golgotha places itself in the evolution of earth and humanity.


Until the 4th century after Christ, some people who had absorbed the spiritual life of that time still knew something of these facts that I have just discussed. In all earlier times, before the Mystery of Golgotha, there were those ancient mysteries in which the disciples were spoken to about the past of human evolution on earth, as well as about the coming Christ, about what was to take place in the future of human evolution.

In mighty, powerful images the connection of man on earth with the spiritual being of the higher worlds was revealed to the students of the Mysteries. And at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were still, albeit less advanced than the old students of the Mysteries, but there were still individual people, individual personalities scattered over the regions of the Near East, Africa and the south of Europe, who, under the name of Gnosis - as it later became known - preserved something in their knowledge, in their wisdom of the things that were actually going on in the evolution of the earth, in the evolution of humanity, and into which the Mystery of Golgotha played such a powerful role for the inhabitants of the earth. But these people, who still knew the secrets of the ancient mysteries, were filled with great concern. They knew that a crisis was coming for mankind. They knew that in the future human understanding would no longer reach up to that by which the actual deeper foundations of evolution on earth and in humanity could be understood.

And so one can perceive in certain personalities of the first four Christian centuries that they were filled with a certain concern, a concern that did not extend to the affairs of the earth, but a concern that extended to the affairs of the whole world evolution: Will humanity also really make itself ripe and appear ripe to receive into itself that which has come through the Mystery of Golgotha? That was the great question of the - I would like to say - successors of the old initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha in the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

And from the circle of those who were still initiated into Christianity in the first Christian centuries emerged, for example, a wonderful poetry of the first four centuries of the Christian era, a wonderful poetry in which the entry of Christ on earth was first presented to humanity, then, however, in moving figures, quite dramatically - but the poetry was actually epic - the people of the future, of the near future, were portrayed in powerful images, whose understanding will no longer reach up to that which they should understand precisely for the salvation of the evolution of mankind. And after something of the sun-council of the gods, which I mentioned earlier, was depicted in powerful images, in that the descent of the Christ into the man Jesus of Nazareth was described in a moving way in this epic, a third part described how a revival of the old Demeter and Isis being was to enter into the development of mankind in a new metamorphosis. It was described how the Demeter and Isis being was to be sanctified in a special, powerfully depicted human form. It was depicted as something that was to play in from the future, a kind of vow of humanity.

These, I would say, poet-priests of the first four Christian centuries represented, at least the most outstanding of them, how a certain service was to play into the further earthly evolution, practiced by all those who were to come to scholarship, to spiritual life. A kind of sacrificium was set up for those who were to enter scholarship and the spiritual life.

This epic then depicts a younger man who is to find his way into the entire grasp of this evolution of humanity at this time: it describes how he was to develop a kind of Marian cult in his younger years as a transition from his younger years to his later years. This cultic attitude, which must actually come over every learned, scholarly and wise person if humanity is to find the connection with what has come into humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, this sacrificium, was depicted in vivid colors. A powerful, colorful poetry emerged in the first four Christian centuries. And among those who lived more or less in the atmosphere of this poetry were also painter-priests, who depicted these scenes in the simple, popularizing manner of painting, but nevertheless in powerful, heart-warming pictures.

This poetry did exist. This poetry has been eradicated by the later church along with everything that was positively derived from Gnosticism. One need only remember that it was only by what is called a coincidence that the writings of Scotus Eriugena were saved even from later times, and one will no longer find it absolutely absurd to speak of the fact that the greatest poetry produced by the New Testament was simply stamped out by the later Church, so that there was nothing left of it in the following centuries. But this poetry did exist. It was eradicated with all the simple but moving paintings that were attached to that poetry. All the immense anxiety that these followers of the old initiates had in the first Christian centuries was also hidden in this poetry. A serious and elegiac tone ran through this poetry.

And we can say: The possibility of understanding these things was still present in a number of people up to the 4th century, even up to the beginning of the 5th century in those people who did not then go over to the Augustinian direction, which was in a completely different current; the understanding of these things was still present in these people, but it could not be preserved in the immediate way as it was then.

The intellectual powers of the people in the southern part of the European world were already too weak, they could no longer grasp this understanding. And so what lay there as the basis of understanding crystallized and solidified in the dogmas that remained, which could actually only be maintained by the fact that a language that was becoming more and more dead, the Latin language, preserved what was there. But this propagation of the Latin language in the Middle Ages among those who now came to wisdom was only there to allow what was once a living understanding to congeal in the language, so that finally everything that was known about the Trinity, about the incarnation of Christ, about the mission of the Spirit, about the great healing process of which I have spoken to you, congealed into dogmas that were propagated in the Latin language; and the words themselves were no longer related to what was the right content. Thus, gradually, in the propagating Western scholarship, which had its medium in the Latin language, that which, for example, really - I would like to say - permeated that extinct poetry in a phosphorous form, dried up.

And then came all those young peoples of the North, who were more stimulated from the East, who received that which was the Christ-impulse in a form where it was, one could say, thoroughly Latinized, where it was solidifying.

We must imagine the solidifying Christ-impulse coming up from the south, the peoples spreading in the north, who had already received a solidified Christianity, who in their young spiritual powers did not yet have the power, I would like to say, to revive out of the solidified dogmas that which was immense in them. The after-effects of all these things are still there today. Today you still see above these northern regions forces which seem to have - it is all seemingly - attained too late that which has dried up below as Christ-impulse, which has absorbed the Christ-impulse in the solidified dogmas, but which is called to find again out of direct spirit-knowledge the whole mysteries of the fact of Golgotha, of the entry of the Christ into earth-life; but to find them in complete freedom. For this fact, too, that after the year 333 the ossified Christianity came up from Italy, that young peoples came over, whose stragglers are everywhere, in Russia, Sweden, Norway, Central Europe, in England - everywhere peoples are still living under this impulse today - all this, too, that it took place in this way, was nevertheless ultimately there so that people could seize the Christ impulse in freedom.

This, then, is the task of those peoples to whom anthroposophy must be spoken today, preferably as their civilization, that they absorb the whole context of Christ Jesus, that they learn to understand how, to a certain extent, without the Christ impulse, humanity would have had to freeze in the salt process. We can speak with these physical words, for the Christ impulse reaches into the physical, into the physical healing of humanity. And the Christ has become the great phosphorus, the spiritual phosphorus, who has to counteract this salting process of humanity as such a great phosphorus. “Christus verus phosphorus” - that was one of the words spoken everywhere in the first three centuries of Christianity. This great phosphorus also runs as a leitmotif through the aforementioned perished poetry.

So we must place ourselves between the past and the future in the present. We must be able to look back. Of course, I will not impose on you as dogma what I have just said about lost poetry and lost scholarship. That is quite far from my mind. But the method that leads to the investigation of the real spiritual course of mankind leads to the recognition of such facts with the same certainty with which scientific facts are found today, and with a much greater certainty than scientific hypotheses are put forward today. Just as no one who rejects these things from the outset out of the materialistic attitude of the present should be induced in any intrusive way to deal with these things, so no one who knows about these things as he knows about his own life can be denied the right to speak of these things to those people who perhaps can see the truth of such an impulse within evolution from the whole course of humanity, from a healthy feeling of this human evolution.


The poetry itself, of which I have spoken, no longer existed after the 4th century AD, but all kinds of news of it, not documentary, but oral, in individual circles, told from person to person, still existed, and in individual circles the memory of that poetry lived on. Only those circles were prevented by the ruling emerging church circles from even speaking publicly about anything that had taken place in the first three to four centuries. But one of those who still had an inkling, albeit in a much changed form, no longer in the greatness of the form of the first centuries, of the poetry and the mood of humanity from which this poetry emerged, was the teacher of Dante. And one can say that in a certain way, even in Dante's “Commedia”, although already oriented towards the dogmatic side, a certain kind of inspiration from what had been in the first Christian centuries has come into it. Of course I know what can be said against such a presentation of history today, and I could of course make the objections that are made from this or that side myself. But as much as one must recognize the exactness with which our history is constructed, the history that humanity learns today in the lowest and highest schools, as much as one can have respect for this exactness, which is based on documents, on conscientious historical criticism - what use is it? Humanity will have to admit this to itself: This is not the true history, the real history, because this history does not include those documents that have just been eliminated by mankind in the course of time. Therefore, however critical history may be, however conscientious it may be with regard to the documentary, we can only gain the real history, just like the real natural and celestial history, from spiritual research itself. Therefore, mankind must also gain the courage not only to talk about the starry world in the way that has been spoken here in the last few days, but also to gain the courage to add to the usual historical account that which must be missing in this historical account, because certain circles were interested in making the relevant documents completely disappear from posterity. But in that which lives in the souls of men, the impulses of the eradicated impulses also live on; in that which men of later times can long for, there they live in it, those impulses which are no longer written today - because they have been eradicated - but which were once alive in mankind. It will therefore not only be necessary that in a certain respect mankind, if it wants to come over in its evolution into the future marked out for it, relearns with regard to some concepts, but that mankind also relearns with regard to the attitude towards the truth.

Because basically: We must find the Christ again. He must come again. And his return presupposes that there is a humanity in this century that understands in what way he will show himself, in what manifestations he will show himself. Otherwise, under certain circumstances, the most terrible rumorous movements will arise, starting from people who, in the deep subconscious regions of their being, suspect something of the return of the Christ, that is, of the spirit of Christ, and who will represent this fact to humanity in an outward, trivial and frightening way. However, clarity in the evolution of mankind towards the near future can only come if the circle of those who want to look with a good attitude into the way in which spiritual research can really be carried out and that which mankind needs in order to shape its near future in the right way can be found in the supersensible world through spiritual research. Otherwise we will get deeper and deeper into that which will never really be able to approach the spiritual, not so much out of ideas and concepts as out of attitude.

For in the present time we have, according to the concepts, the ideas, much that appears to be a striving towards, a pushing back towards what should actually be the right goal of knowledge of the present. But there is something that prevents people from looking at the things that are found in the natural sciences in the right way. They are, so to speak, groping in the dark about these facts. You see, today, as the scientific-medical view of the human being is expanded, you find that there are people who in later life somehow get into nervous states that can extend into the physical constitution of the human being and lead to real clinical pictures. This is where contemporary medicine sees how powerless it is to control these clinical pictures in any way, to drive pathology to the point of therapy. I myself was a direct contemporary when the excellent Viennese doctor, the internist Breuer, was once faced with such a case where something occurred in a personality that could no longer be understood pathologically using physical research methods. He resorted to hypnosis, which was becoming increasingly popular at the time. The personality was put into hypnosis. By exploring the hypnotic state, one actually discovered how a terribly shocking, terribly frightening life event had occurred in an earlier epoch of life. This life event was, as it were, drawn down into the lower region of human life, where the subconscious, the unconscious lies. There it formed, so to speak, a “hidden province of the soul”. But even if a person knows nothing of such a thing, it is still there in his life. And it can even be there to cause illness. Then you have something inside the person that was just a mental experience, which continues to have an effect, which lingers, which is, so to speak, an isolated province in the soul of which the person is not aware.

The idea was that if you remind people of this, if you bring something like this up into consciousness so that they consciously grasp it, it can lead to healing.

Such facts will be found more and more in the present life on earth. But one will have to know, if one wants to understand why mankind is afflicted by such conditions - and more and more it will be afflicted by them - one will have to know from a spiritual insight how the upper part of the astral body is becoming smaller and smaller, and how in the ever-increasing lower part of the astral body there is a tendency towards the accumulation of such subconscious soul provinces. One will have to ascend from the soul-like knowledge of man to the historical knowledge of the spirit, to the cosmic knowledge of the spirit, in order to be able to explain such phenomena at all. Breuer was of a deeper nature - I knew him very well - and because he felt that one could not go further in this way with the mere knowledge of the present, he dropped the thread of research, so to speak. Then others picked it up, Freud above all and his successors, and it became what currently functions everywhere as psychoanalysis. It is based on something quite true, because the phenomena are there. One is compelled to look for that which expresses itself physically in the soul. The idea is correct; but one does not have the science to master this, because this science would first be spiritual science.

And so this psychoanalysis, which is based on the quite natural, historically proceeding defectiveness of the upper astral body of man, appears with these facts with people who are firstly dilettantes in soul research, in spiritual research, but who are also dilettantes in body research, in physical research, because they do not know how to follow the spirit into the body. Thus two dilettantisms come together which are really equal to each other, for these people really know as little of the real soul and spiritual life of man as of the physical and etheric life. These two quantities come together, and when two equal quantities act upon each other, they multiply: ax a = a² or D x D= D', dilettantism multiplied by dilettantism is dilettantism squared. It is indeed the case that something that is correct, something that is based on completely correct documents, presents itself as dilettantism due to the impotence of research in the present. But in something like this one sees the striving for the right thing. Something like psychoanalysis must not be presented as something that is of the devil, but as something that shows that our time wants what it cannot do, which is why something like what appears in psychoanalysis will only enter its proper waters when it leads to spiritual research. Otherwise it will end up where Jung did, the Swiss man who drove psychoanalysis into a strange, curious logic.

For example, you can read the following sentence by such a man: Man is once, one might say, predisposed by the historically hidden provinces of the soul to assume the nature of God. - Now the psychiatrist in question adds the sentence: But of course there cannot be a God-being. He [Jung] is naturally atheistic. But then psychoanalysis demands that the human being, as he or she is predisposed, must accept a divine being in order to maintain his or her mental balance. But that means nothing less than, if you are very conscientious - and I will always recognize the conscientiousness and exactness of a man like Jung - that you must live with untruth, because you cannot live with truth. Theism is untruth. You have to live with untruth, with theism. - Only today's development does not take these things completely seriously. But they must be taken with complete seriousness.

And so the longings arise everywhere without people knowing it, the subconscious longings. Individuals who have attended other lecture series of mine or have read the lecture cycles will know that I have often pointed out from a spiritual point of view how it is not correct when it is always said that light radiating from the sun, for example, goes out into the infinite world space, endlessly. At most, one then gives the infinity sign and says that it goes out endlessly into the universe, decreasing in intensity with the square of the distance, then the intensity becomes lower and lower; this is how the light goes out.

I also said: the spiritual view gives a different one; it is not correct to think that light radiating from a center goes out further and further. Rather, just as a stretched string, when it is pulled, only goes to a certain point to one side and then strikes back again, so light only goes to a certain point and always goes back again. It is not only expanding in its propagation, but elastic, rhythmic. The sun not only radiates light, but also takes light back again and again, but by the fact that at the end of the light paths the intensities are different, it can shape the light paths. I will only hint at this, for it arises in connection with a higher knowledge, with the cosmic knowledge of the world, with a real knowledge of spiritual science.

Now the newspapers report that Oliver Lodge has given an important lecture in which he wanted to demonstrate from the behavior of light rays that a ray of light that spreads out, at a certain distance, when it arrives at the absence of matter - which it needs, Oliver Lodge assumes, as something it bumps into - that it falls back into itself with the help of the metamorphosis of the electron - a thought that looks dilettantish compared to the truth.

Please don't take things like this as if I'm talking disrespectfully about science. I fully recognize science. But in relation to the truth, even these things - which cannot be praised enough and recognized as spiritual within the present - are also quite amateurish. But on the other hand, they show how people's thinking itself drives them, with its abstract concepts of the propagation of light rays and the electron, to somehow reach a region where the right thing is. It is only a matter of getting into the right place in order to bring into the ideas that appear everywhere, with which one can do nothing at all, that impulse which also carries the research of the present up into the spiritual realms. There is a nonsense in certain occult circles; people are taught all kinds of occult doctrines, but they are not led to the end point of that from which these doctrines actually originate. He is only given pictures, and he is not led to that of which these pictures are actually the image, are painted. As a result, man is surrounded in his soul by a world of images, instead of getting the impression that he must first get to know the universe through these images.

You see, for this reason. For this reason, after my “Theosophy” had appeared, I had to follow it up with the “Secret Science” of “Theosophy”. There, what is presented in pictures in “Theosophy” is led out into the reality of the starry world, into evolution through Saturn, the sun, the moon and so on. These two books complement each other.

But if man is given only pictures in any field, he is surrounded by pictures. People who engage in occult mischief do this with their disciples, whom they do not really possess; thus they bring them into what is called occult captivity. In this occult imprisonment, people are surrounded by images that are not clear to them as images, from which they cannot escape. He is in a prison of images. This is the kind of occult mischief people have been up to and are still up to today. But there are also spiritual entities that bring people, or even parts of people, into such occult imprisonment. It is the very same spiritual phenomenon. These are spiritual entities that get loose in nature when one does not understand nature spiritually, when one only looks into nature in such a way that one understands the atomistic processes as naturalistic ones. Then one denies the spirit of nature. Then the so-called ahrimanic spirits, which strive against man, become active in nature, and they surround man with all kinds of images, so that man can also be led into this occult captivity by these ahrimanic spiritual beings.

And a large part of that what is called scientific view today - not the facts of science, they are good, but that what is called scientific view -, that is nothing else than pictures of a universal occult captivity breaking in over mankind as danger. Such a danger of an occult captivity is present in the conversion of man everywhere with atomistic and molecularistic images. Such an occult imprisonment creates these images around you, you cannot look out into the free spiritual and star images because the world image of the atom stands like the spiritual walls, the spiritual walls of a prison house in which you find yourself spiritually.

This is what can also show us as a picture in the light of spiritual science a correct striving of the present, because the facts of natural science are fruitful everywhere and lead out into the spiritual realms, if one does not approach them with the prejudice of occult imprisonment, in which science is basically today. These are the things that we must live through inwardly if we want to place ourselves correctly in the present of the evolution of earth and humanity, in accordance with the past of earth and humanity and the future of earth and humanity. And that is what, I would like to say, is always called out to us when we have old aspirations somewhere before us, but now really viewed with the spirit and the soul.

When we go up to the mountains and find the Druid stones, the monuments of that spiritual striving of ancient times, then it can be a reminder to us how the longings of those ancients, those striving for the spirit, who in their way looked towards the coming Christ, will only then find their fulfillment, when we again have a knowledge of the spirit through a vision of the spirit, through which we will see in our own way the coming Christ, who must come again, because he must first be recognized again by mankind in spirit form, as he once passed through the mystery of Golgotha in body form.

This is something that is particularly vividly felt here in this place, where such magnificent ancient monuments have been preserved.