The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture XXIX

[ 1 ] Now let us shed light on even more mysterious areas of karmic activity and take a look at karmic activity within the context of peoples and human beings. Anyone who takes seriously the principle of explaining the world not from material principles but from the spirit will understand this.

[ 2 ] History has taught us that diseases have appeared in the course of human development that did not exist before. There are diseases of the times and diseases of the people. Today we will hear something about the origin of such diseases of the times and diseases of the people. We want to understand this from the spirit. The doctor explains them by saying that these or those diseases are caused by germs. But we must ask: Where do the germs themselves come from? — They are incarnated beings just like human beings. Even with such beings, which act as destroyers of human life, we must ask: Where do they come from? What brought them into their present material existence? What were they before they incarnated?

[ 3 ] Let us suppose, for example, that a certain people or race is perishing, heading toward its downfall. It resists this downfall. This resistance to downfall is a spiritual expression, something that lives in the astral body of the people in question. If such a dying people were to die out on its own, the feelings that are lived out there would have no particular effect on others in the world. But let us assume that it comes into conflict with another people and strikes fear and terror into them, then this has an effect on the other people. Then we have two things: the dying people and something that arises from the confluence between the people defending themselves against destruction and what arises from fear and terror in the other people. This is something lasting.

[ 4 ] Let us take a specific case as an example: the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages, when the Mongols clashed with the European peoples and spread fear and terror among them. Such fear and terror then existed among the peoples. If one looks at these masses of people who stormed in, of which the Mongol invasions were the last, and puts oneself in the mood of the entire medieval peoples, one can see how spiritual entities were formed from the dying, self-defending last tribes of the fourth root race and the Europeans who were filled with fear and terror. Suppose such an onslaught were met with boldness and love, then the decaying substances would be dissolved. But fear, hatred, and terror preserve such decaying formations, and beings such as bacilli therefore find a breeding ground. They later incarnate in those material formations that are suitable for their incarnation. Thus, the decaying substances have embedded themselves in the fear and terror of the European peoples as seeds of decay. And these are small living beings. This is how medieval leprosy, “misery” disease, came into being. These were the decaying substances of the declining Mongol peoples.

[ 5 ] Where do these destroyers of human physical nature come from? They come from earlier spiritual ingredients, from sins. This is karma as it works in the bodies of peoples. From this you can gauge how the moral life of a people determines its future external life. It is in the hands of a people to provide for its physical future by living a corresponding moral life in the present.

[ 6 ] In all the secret schools of Europe, it is said that all the bacterial diseases of modern times have a similar origin. Bacterial diseases are traced back to their spiritual origin. This is an esoteric tradition among the Rosicrucians and in other secret schools where these things are taught. There is a basic teaching in small circles of secret schools that in the 1970s, very specific battles took place within the astral world, and that something has changed for the better, even if... (gap in the text). These events are called the battle between the hosts of the Archangel Michael, taken from Christian esotericism, and the hosts of the god Mammon. Mammon is the god of obstacles, who places destructive, hindering things in the way of progressive movement. On the other hand, this god Mammon is seen as the creator of very specific entities, entities that have a destructive effect on human life in the form of infectious diseases. Infectious diseases unknown in earlier times originate from the god Mammon.

[ 7 ] You will be able to appreciate that esoteric schools must generate a progressive mindset in the deepest innermost part of human beings, for the actual source of these modern diseases is seen to be nothing other than the backwardness, the primal conservatism of the so-called upper classes towards the impoverished lower classes, the oppressed masses of people who are striving for a new... (Gap in the text.) They are inhibited, held back by the effects of the god Mammon. We find two opposing forces: the emotional world of the declining upper classes, who want to preserve ancient times, and the feeling of hatred among the lower classes, an astral life that is hurled at others by the great masses. Esotericism sees in this contrast a source of decay and the cause of modern infectious diseases. Those who understand these things will of course not turn against the attempts of modern medicine with its external remedies. But real improvement will never come through these external means.

[ 8 ] What happens later is always revealed in advance through esoteric knowledge. It consists in the correct understanding that the morality of the present can bring about better health in the future. From this, we can again gauge how deeply those who introduced the theosophical movement into the world were able to see. It arose from the recognition of such connections. It was foreseen that the urge to fight everyone against everyone else would take on ever more acute forms. The things that must come about are taking place with an inner necessity, just as things in the East develop like a fire where there is particularly flammable material. It would be nonsensical to want to stop such things. The theosophical movement has already sought the appropriate and useful means to eliminate the struggle of all against all by spreading the principle of brotherhood. For brotherhood dissolves what flows into the world in the form of decaying matter and hatred. And as far as races are concerned, we are in a state of decline. If this decline is preserved by the belief that it can be stopped and by hatred, and not dissolved by love, then of course the worst possible outcome will follow. The theosophical movement wants to dissolve it through love. Its founders know that the Theosophical Society is not only a remedy, but also the source for the development of humanity into the future.

[ 9 ] Thus, one can see how the physical is a consequence of the preceding spiritual, and how, under certain circumstances, people have it in their power to connect the physical with its spiritual origin through knowledge of the connections. For example, anyone who knows how a certain illness is connected with certain sensations and feelings knows that by evoking these feelings, they can also evoke the illness. The black magician can use this knowledge to destroy the masses. That is why the deeper occult truths cannot simply be taught to everyone, as they would immediately cause a sharp division between good and evil. That is the danger in spreading occult teachings. For one cannot teach anyone to make healthy without at the same time teaching them to make sick. Where occult teachings have penetrated more deeply into the population, such things have occurred. In certain parts of the Orient, one can hear true reports of sects that have made it their task to cause certain illnesses. — Thus, one penetrates more and more into the explanation of the material from the spiritual.

[ 10 ] Let us now try to look across somewhat longer periods of time. We know that today there is a beautiful complementarity between all animal life and the plant world. Plants use carbon for themselves and exhale oxygen, thereby continuously creating the source for what is to breathe around them. This source springs from the plant world. Everything that breathes today exists through the work of this mysterious workshop of the plant world. From this, we can gain an understanding of how worlds come to an end; how the world that preceded our Earth came to an end. Breathing did not exist on the Moon in the same way that it does today in animals and humans. A completely different process took place on the Moon instead of the breathing process; it gradually transitioned into breathing. We can get an idea of the earlier process when we look at a remnant of that time: cold-blooded animals, which have the same temperature as their surroundings. Fire or heat breathing existed on the Moon. The absorption and release of fire or heat corresponded at that time to the present absorption and release of air. In the middle of the Lemurian epoch, the breathing process began to take on the form it has today.

[ 11 ] Breathing is a material reflection of the spiritual process of embedding the monad in the lower human being. Breathing means drawing in the monad. In Hatha yoga, the student therefore also undergoes a breathing process. The student rhythmically regulates what is a natural process for humans in order to gain control over breathing, which is a natural process today. Just as, before humans transitioned to this breathing process, they absorbed and released heat from the outside in a similar way, and this was transformed into the process of circulating warm blood, so too does the Hatha Yoga student seek to make the breathing process an internal one, to gain control of it internally. The rules of Hatha Yoga mean the transformation of breathing into a process that does not go from the inside to the outside, but into an internally regulated process, just as the blood circulation is now a regulated internal process. In cold-blooded animals, the process of blood circulation relates to that of humans in the same way as the breathing process in ordinary humans relates to the breathing process of the Hatha Yoga student. Behind all these things lie very profound ideas of development, which are supposed to be the basis of real processes.

[ 12 ] What is now usually no longer understood is that there is something in the air that is spiritual. When there was still an awareness of this, the spirit was called: air, wind = pneuma. “Pneuma” means a draft of air and also the soul-spiritual. The term originates from times when people were still aware of the real connections. Let us now consider the fact that on the predecessor of our Earth (the Moon), certain beings had developed beyond the level of humanity at that time. These were the Luciferic beings. When we consider them, however, we must say to ourselves: they did not live in an environment like that of today's Earth. They could not breathe air, so they could not absorb spirit either. For the absorption of spirit corresponds to the breathing of air. So they were compelled to carry out in the warmth principle what today takes place in the air. We distinguish seven states of the physical on Earth: first, life ether; second, chemical ether; third, light ether; fourth, heat ether; fifth, air; sixth, water; seventh, solid. The Luciferic beings therefore had to carry out within heat the same thing that human beings carry out today in air. Now you can imagine that these beings, who gave human beings free consciousness and independence, are in a certain way connected with fire. For this reason, when they appear, they are linked with a certain greed to everything that appears in human beings as warmth, as fire. This greed attaches itself to the human being's own warmth. Thus, the givers of knowledge and freedom are linked to something that tries to incarnate itself in the warmth of human beings in the same way as it did earlier on the Moon. This is the connection between knowledge and birth and death, illness, and so on in the world. With knowledge came birth and death and illness into the world; human beings have paid for knowledge with this. This is why we also see the connection between certain manifestations of warmth and illness, namely fever. This is the origin of fever. Traditions about this still existed into the 19th century.

[ 13 ] On the earlier planet, the predecessor of our Earth, there were not yet humans, animals, plants, and minerals as we know them today. At that time, there were three kingdoms that lay between ours. In the highest realm there were beings who had not yet sunk as low as today's animals, nor risen as high as today's humans. At that time, plants did not yet exhale oxygen. Oxygen, the air of life, did not yet exist. It was only with the emergence of our plant kingdom that oxygen was mixed into the nitrogen. The moon was surrounded by a nitrogen atmosphere. In the second half of the past planet, the beings already strove to become creatures that could breathe, that were endowed with lungs and so on, but it was not until the cycle of our Earth that the current plant kingdom developed. The animal beings then developed the organs for breathing. They pushed the plant kingdom down a level so that it would provide them with oxygen to breathe.

[ 14 ] These events on the predecessor of our Earth were necessarily followed by a state in which life in the same form was no longer possible. The form had developed into something else and needed a new planet. The previous kingdom had to perish. It suffocated the entire world of living beings on the previous planet. This is how planets perish with their life, and in what is being prepared, in the body of the mother planet, a new life develops. This is how the decline and rise of planets is to be understood.

[ 15 ] Today, human beings live in such a way that, just as they once had the other kingdoms within them, they still have evil within them in their karma. They are now working this out of themselves. In the future, good and evil will exist in external forms, a race of good and a realm of evil side by side. In the future, the human face will shine forth in a transfigured form from the separated, cast-down evil of the animal realm. Let us imagine the transfigured human face, which today slumbers like a riddle in animal matter, separated from the animalistic evil and symbolically represented — you cannot imagine it better than in the great intuition of the Egyptian sphinx. It is not something that only points to the past, but also points to the future. The riddle of the Sphinx — translated into Greek legend — is the riddle of man. It is not for nothing that the ancient Egyptians placed the Sphinx in front of the temples of initiation. Initiation is the transplantation of the secret of the future into the soul. At the entrance to the temples, the Sphinx had already created the environment for initiation.

[ 16 ] What has oxygen as its outer body is the monad within. As soon as oxygen appears on earth, the monad has the ability to incarnate. It is the addiction to obtain the monad for oneself when the student seeks to inhale a lot of oxygen and keep it within. Oxygen is not just something material and external. One must examine oxygen in terms of its spirit. Thus, we have oxygen externally and the monad internally. The process of breathing therefore formed the body for the descending Sons of Manas in the Lemurian period.