The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture Two

[ 1 ] Before and after the establishment of Christianity, there were occult brotherhoods. Even now, there are still brotherhoods in which occult life is cultivated. The difference between pre-Christian and post-Christian occult brotherhoods is that the pre-Christian ones essentially had the task of preserving sacred traditions, while the Christian ones were primarily set the goal of preparing for the future. Occult science is not an abstract, dead science, but an active and living one. The occult brotherhoods are capable of intervening in life, and their task is to participate in the development of humanity.

[ 2 ] Christian occultism can be traced back to a large extent to the Manichaeans, whose tradition has remained alive. Their founder, Manes, lived three centuries after Christ. Augustine, the Church Father, also originally belonged to the Manichaean community. A central point of Manichaean teaching is the doctrine of good and evil. According to popular belief, good and evil are two absolute, incompatible opposites, one of which excludes the other. In contrast, according to the Manicheans, evil is an integral part of the cosmos, contributing to its evolution, and must ultimately be absorbed and transformed by good. Studying the meaning of good and evil, pleasure and pain in the world is the great and unique mission of the Manicheans.

[ 3 ] In order to understand the development of humanity, it is necessary to view it from a distance and from above and to place it in a comprehensive whole. Only under this condition can we form a lofty, ideal conception of it. And it would be a great mistake to believe that one can abandon the ideal in this undertaking. A person without an ideal is a person without energy. The ideal plays the same role in life as steam in a machine. Steam, in a sense, encloses an infinite abundance of condensed space in a small space, hence its intense expansive power. But the magical power of thought in life is of the same kind. So let us rise to the intellectual ideal of humanity as a whole, let us feel the thread that guides its evolution through the ages.

[ 4 ] In the same way, worldviews such as Darwin's seek this common thread. There is no need to deny the greatness of Darwinism. But it does not explain the inner development of human beings; it only sees what relates to the external. It is the same with any purely physical explanation that disregards the spiritual essence of man. Thus, the evolutionary hypothesis, based purely on physical facts, attributes an animal origin to man because it has found a low, retarded forehead in fossil man. In contrast, occultism, for which the physical human being is only the expression of the etheric human being, sees things quite differently. In fact, the etheric body of the human being has approximately the same shape as his physical body, which it only slightly exceeds. But the further back one goes in history, the greater the disproportion between the etheric head and the physical head, the larger the etheric head. This is how it actually appears in a period of Earth's development that preceded our own. The people who lived at that time were called Atlanteans. In fact, geologists are beginning to discover traces of the ancient Atlanteans: minerals and plants from this ancient continent that sank into the ocean that bears its name. No traces of humans have been found yet, but it won't be long. Even in the magazine “Kosmos,” which advocates Haeckel's ideas, an essay by Theodor Arldt has appeared in which the traces of fauna and flora are used to hypothesize the existence of a sunken continent called Atlantis. Occult research is prophetic, and natural science follows in its footsteps.

[ 5 ] In the European races that followed the Atlanteans, the forehead area of the head began to develop further. But in the Atlanteans, the point where consciousness was concentrated was outside the forehead, in the etheric head. Today we find it inside the physical head, slightly above the nose.

[ 6 ] What Germanic mythology refers to as Niflheim or Nebelheim – Cloudheim – is the land of the Atlanteans. At that time, the earth was indeed warmer and still enveloped in a constant cloud of steam. The Atlantic continent was destroyed by a series of torrential cloudbursts, during which the Earth's atmosphere cleared. Only then did blue skies, thunderstorms, rain, and rainbows come into being. For this reason, the Bible says that after Noah's ark landed, the rainbow became the new sign of the covenant between God and man.

[ 7 ] The ego of the Aryan race could only become self-aware through the centralization of the etheric body in the physical brain. Only then did man begin to say “I” to himself. The Atlanteans spoke of themselves in the third person. Darwinism has made great errors regarding the differentiation it established between the races actually found on Earth. The higher races do not descend from the lower ones; on the contrary, the lower races are degenerate manifestations of the higher races that preceded them. Let us suppose we saw two brothers, one of whom is intelligent and handsome, the other ugly and limited. What would one say about a person who believed that the intelligent brother descended from the idiotic one? This is where Darwinism errs in relation to the races. Humans and animals have a common origin. Animals are a degenerate manifestation of a common ancestor, of which humans represent the higher stage of development.

[ 8 ] This need not make us arrogant, for it is only thanks to the lower realms that the higher ones were able to develop.

[ 9 ] Christ washing the feet of the apostles (John 13) is the symbol of the humility of the initiate before those below him. The initiate owes his existence solely to the uninitiated. Hence the deep humility of those who truly know before those who do not know. It is the profound tragedy of cosmic development that one class of human beings must be lowered so that another can rise. In this sense, we can appreciate the beautiful words of Paracelsus: “I have considered all beings: stones, plants, animals, and they have appeared to me like scattered letters, in relation to which man forms the living and complete word.”

[ 10 ] In the course of human and animal evolution, the lower derives from the higher; that which falls and dies falls away from the living. It is claimed that the living arises from the dead. In reality, however, the dead arises from the living. Coal, limestone shells, and other things are secretions of the living. We also see in humans that cartilage comes first and then bones. Our bones are hardened from a softer cartilage structure. In the same way, stones are hardened from a living earth organism. Today, humans still have something within them that they will leave behind. And this brings us back to Manichaeism.

[ 11 ] Just as animal nature used to be in humans, so now the two opposites of good and evil, truth and untruth, are in them. These contradictions, the way these elements mix in them, form their karma, their destiny. One day, they will leave evil behind as an objective construct. We find this in all apocalyptic depictions. And today, Manichaeism already educates its more highly developed disciples to become saviors of those who have fallen. Who could deny that even today there is a development that drives people toward egoism and another that leads to selflessness? Just as man has freed himself from animalism, he will free himself from evil. But never before has he gone through a more violent crisis than at the present hour.

[ 12 ] He who is lord of all must become the servant of all. This must come as a great necessity. True morality springs from the knowledge of the great laws of the world. Great ideas should generate the elasticity that drives our ideals forward in small ways. In quiet moments of our lives, we must rise to the great ideas of evolution.