The Rudolf Steiner Archive

19. On Earlier Conceptions of God

[ 1 ] Today I would like to speak about certain phenomena connected with the state that arises around the middle of the third round, the third epoch of Earth’s development, in which the previously ethereal, more subtle human races become denser and more material. The power of imagination develops. In the first root race, only the power of sensation was developed; people could feel, they could perceive the difference between cold and warm, between light and dark, between wet and dry, but they could not yet imagine things; they did not yet have the ability to repeat the objects outside within themselves, that is, to create within themselves spiritual counter-images of the objects outside. This only occurs in the third root race. On the one hand, we see the emergence of the power of imagination, and on the other hand, the gross material, which expresses itself in the power of procreation and in the emergence of the opposites of the masculine and the feminine.

[ 2 ] This development is linked to something else as well—something that can give us a deeper understanding of the concept of God. At that time, the concept of God did not yet exist; it was only from the third root race onward that the concept of God began to dawn, and only then could a consciousness of God arise. We can only understand this if we view the process [of how the concept of God developed] as a real one. If we try to understand how concepts of God began to take hold in humanity, we find that initially, everywhere, we can identify a form of religion that differs from polytheism and from other forms of religion. That is why a special term was coined for it: henotheism. Henotheism was the original form of religion that we find everywhere during this period. Polytheism came somewhat later. The original form of the concept of God is the worship and veneration of a primordial deity. However, this concept differs from the later concept of a single God—monotheism—because it is not so clearly defined; it is fluctuating and has a blurred form. It is an indefinite conception of God that appears everywhere. To put it plainly, I would have to say: Originally, the peoples did not imagine a single God, but rather a Divine; they imagined that an indefinite force underlies the universe, and that this indefinite force is divine. Where and how did people arrive at this conception that the foundation of the world is divine? Various hypotheses have been put forward, yet the origin of this idea remains elusive. Henotheism, as found today among so-called “primitive peoples,” is not the original form of this conception of God, for these peoples are not direct descendants of those ancient cultures.

[ 3 ] When we turn to the Lemurians, we encounter a point in time when the transition takes place from the general activity of cosmic wisdom to the activity of Kama-Manas within the individual human soul. Before this, wisdom is a universal being, a being that hovers, as it were, over the whole as a spirit. It is not yet very different from the Universal Spirit that was active during the Lunar Epoch. It is precisely during the Lemurian period that the Universal Spirit begins to permeate human souls. Imagine it this way: Before this, the Lemurians saw the unified Spirit—which they could not yet conceive of—outside themselves; it hovered above them. And in their further development, they find within themselves what they had previously perceived outside themselves; they find it reflected in their own souls. Before their development into beings capable of imagination, the Lemurians’ vision was a semi-astral vision; they saw the Unity-Godness hovering above them. Now that they look within themselves, what they once saw outside of themselves is reflected in their own souls. It is the same content that was once outside that now shines within their own souls. The first conception of God is nothing other than a repetition of this process. You can find the remnants of such a religion in the oldest Indian religion.

[ 4 ] Now let us turn to the Atlantean race. The Lemurian was not only able to see, but also to form a mental image of what he saw. It is one thing to form an image and quite another to carry that image with oneself. Memory was first developed in the Atlantean race. In the first root race, the faculty of sensation was developed; in the second, the faculty of perception; in the third, the faculty of imagination; and it was only the fourth root race that was able to retain these images and thereby developed memory. If you bear in mind that memory was the primary faculty developed among the Atlanteans, you can imagine that religion, too, had to take on very specific forms among them.

[ 5 ] The Lemurian race perished and gave way to the Atlantean race, which developed the faculty of memory. With their exceptional memory, the Atlanteans recalled the images that their ancestors, the Lemurians, had formed. This is roughly like [imagining] seeing the sun reflected in a drop of water, for example, but not seeing the sun itself. Therefore, the Atlanteans developed a dual consciousness: the Divine took up residence in our ancestors; they were our forebears, in whose souls the Divine lived. - That was the time when people began to venerate their ancestors; the cult of the ancestors emerged then. The ancestors were venerated because one saw the divine flashing in their souls. A variant of ancestor worship is the later hero worship: Theseus, Jason, and so on; this, too, belongs to the veneration of ancestors. But with this, the multiplicity of gods is also introduced. Here we find the inflow of true spirituality into the human soul—memory, the development of memory—within the fourth human race, during the time of the Atlanteans.

[ 6 ] Now we come to the fifth human race. In this race, the power of thought develops. The Atlanteans did not calculate in the same way we do, for that requires the power of thought—logic. You know that 2 × 2 = 4; you know that because you have acquired it through thought. The Atlantean did not yet possess this. If he had two and then two more, he did not calculate: 2 × 2 = 4, but rather he asked: How many were there in previous instances when things were arranged side by side like this? — The Atlantean’s concepts were thus bound to memory. Before the Atlantean’s memory lay his entire life and also that of his ancestors. This is not to be confused with the Akashic Records, but rather it was human memory. In the past, people perceived with their whole being; it was not as it is with us today, where one must first touch something. Today we have rules of thought, for example 2 x 2 = 4, and we act in accordance with them.

[ 7 ] Religious consciousness in the fifth root race must develop under the influence of thinking. The human being of the fifth race does not merely seek to perceive what is around him; he does not merely seek to arrive at a feeling, but he seeks to grasp it [intellectually]. Thinking becomes an important means for him to attain wisdom. Thus, because memory is overshadowed, he detaches himself more and more from the past. Veneration of the ancient disappears, and only that which lives deep within the soul as Manas and announces itself as Manas becomes the object of veneration. Thus the fifth human race comes to recognize Manas as the Divine.

[ 8 ] The fifth human race therefore no longer practices polytheism, but strives to attain inner mastery and to recognize the divine center within the human being. That is why we have the great masters in the fifth human race: Laozi, Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Zarathustra, and so on. Through this, humanity was detached from the past and from the veneration of its ancestors, [and the veneration begins] of the divine wisdom that is being realized in time.

[ 9 ] If you now grasp the deeper meaning of Greek mythology, you will see how, strangely enough, a full awareness of the sequence of these religious concepts lives on in the hierarchy of the Greek deities. We must imagine that the power that hovers over everything among the Lemurians, which lives in space as a unified wisdom, is called Uranos [by the Greeks]. Uranos is succeeded by Kronos, the god of time, the god who lives in memory; he continually devours his children. He represents the entire ancestral divinity. Then comes Zeus, the humanized god, the god of heroism; he is a variation of the same principle. Then comes the cult of Dionysus. Dionysus is the striver, the sufferer, the feeler, the thinking human being himself. He is depicted as having been originally killed and dismembered, then resurrected, and now striving upward again in the world. He is the representative of mastery, of Mahatmaship, the representative of the concept of God of the fifth race. Thus, these three stages have been preserved in the Greek conception: Uranus—henotheism; Cronus and Zeus—polytheism; Dionysus—Mahatmaship. This will serve to explain to you why the Dionysian religion was a secret religion in Greece.

[ 10 ] The Greeks kept this cult hidden within the Mysteries. Aeschylus was brought to trial for allegedly betraying the secrets of the Mysteries by bringing them to the stage. However, he was able to prove that he had never been initiated into the Mysteries. Socrates had to die because it was believed that his teachings were derived from the Mysteries. The death penalty was always imposed for betraying the Mysteries. Whenever Greek mythology speaks of a descent into the underworld, this always signifies an initiation; it means that the individuals in question were mystes. Dionysus descends into the underworld. This means: he was a mystic; so was Heracles. Every myth signifies something very specific, not something arbitrary. One did not need to believe, but one knew it; one knew it through initiation. Initiation enabled the individual to truly recognize the meaning of the myth. The initiate of the fifth root race is fully imbued with the conviction that within him the fifth human principle is struggling into being, that he is the bearer of the humanity of the fifth root race. Through this, he also comes to recognize the Mahatmatum.

[ 11 ] The deeper one looks into things, the more one comes to understand the inner progress of humanity’s spiritual development. Now it will no longer seem so incomprehensible that I have often spoken of mysteries. You see, theosophy is nothing other than a continuous unveiling of the secret interconnections of the world. The mysteries that Theosophy can reveal today are still quite elementary. Yet they are something that places humanity deeply within a vast context, which makes existence seem small on the one hand—like a tiny pearl in a large shell—but on the other hand vast, when one reflects on the higher Self and imagines one’s incarnations as the totality of pearls. Theosophy does not make us feel small, as modern science seeks to do, which says: In the entire universe there are millions of Earths, all of which are inhabited, and of these, our Earth is a speck of dust. — Theosophy also says that man is such a speck of dust, but the Divine also lives within man. This divine spark, which we find at the center of our consciousness, did not arise within us, but was drawn into us from without; it is the same as that which lives out there in the macrocosm.

[ 12 ] It is no great insight that Feuerbach has arrived at [when he says]: The ancients were wrong when they said that the deity created man in its own image, for man created God in his own image. — Quite right, man creates the deity anew out of himself. But: it is the deity that creates this. So we may say: Feuerbach is right, only that he does not give himself the credit. What I have told you time and again: thought control is what is necessary. And thought control consists not only in a thought being clear, but in every thought having a controlling thought. One should never think or utter a thought without applying the corresponding control thought. Man works wonders when he does not allow himself to entertain only one-sided thoughts.