The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday, I described how the great initiate chose a group of people from the area of present-day Ireland among the Ursemites, whom he led to the East and settled there. There, the Manu made his chosen ones the progenitors of the new cultures. He taught them and gave them instructions for a moral way of life, which was prescribed down to the smallest details: how to divide their time and how to work from morning to evening. But even more than through his teachings, he educated them through his direct influence and his thoughts. His influence was directly suggestive; when he sent his thoughts into the colony, his ideas and precepts had a suggestive effect. Such influence was necessary for the transformation of the people of that time.

[ 2 ] The following scene, which took place in the middle of the 19th century, is characteristic of the difference in outlook between the Atlantean and the new root race. European colonists had persuaded the Indians, whom we regard as the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans who remained in the Atlantean culture, to cede them tracts of land on condition that they would be assigned new hunting grounds. This promise had not been kept, and the chief could not understand why. This was the reason for the following conversation. The Indian said: You palefaces promised us that your chief would assign other land to our brothers after you took this land from us. Your feet now stand on our land and walk over the graves of our fathers. The white man has not kept his promise to the brown man. You palefaces have black instruments with all kinds of little magic symbols—meaning books—and from these you learn to recognize what your God wants. But that must be a bad God who does not teach people to keep their word. The brown man does not have such a God; the brown man hears the thunder and sees the lightning, and he understands this language; this is how his God speaks to him. He hears the rustling of the leaves and trees in the forest, and there too his God speaks to him. He hears the waves splashing in the stream, and then the brown man understands this language. He senses when a storm is coming. Everywhere he hears his God speaking to him, and this God teaches something completely different from what your black magic symbols tell you.

[ 3 ] It is actually a very significant speech, because it contains a kind of creed. The Atlantean did not elevate himself to his god in rational terms and ideas, but rather he sensed something sacred in all of nature as a fundamental chord of the deity; he breathed his god in and out, as it were. And if one wanted to express what one heard, one summarized it in a sound similar to the Chinese Tao. For the Atlantean, this was the sound that flowed through all of nature. When he touched a leaf, when he saw a flash of lightning, he was aware that he had a part of the deity before him; it was as if he were touching the garment of the deity. Just as one grasps the soul of a person in a handshake, so the Atlanteans grasped the body of the deity when they touched a natural formation. It was a completely different religious sensibility in which they lived. In addition, the Atlanteans were gifted with clairvoyance and thus stood in communication with the spirit world.

[ 4 ] But then mathematical, logical thinking developed, and the more this developed, the more clairvoyance declined. People became much more concerned with what their senses perceived from the outside, and as a result, nature was increasingly stripped of its divinity. Humans gained a new gift at the expense of an old one. As they acquired the gift of precise sensory perception, they ceased to understand that nature is the body of the deity. Gradually, they saw only the body of the world before them, no longer the soul. This gave rise to a longing for the divine in post-Atlantean humans. It was written in their hearts: Behind nature must be the deity – and they realized that they had to seek it with the spirit. The word religion means nothing other than: to seek, to reestablish a connection with the deity; religere means to reconnect. Now there are different ways to find the deity. The first subrace of the post-Atlantean Aryan race, the Indians, took the following path. Some god-filled messengers of Man, called the holy Rishis, became the teachers of the ancient Indian culture, which is not recounted in any poetry or tradition, but is only known in the oral traditions of the secret schools. Wonderful poems, such as the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, were written much later. The ancient Indian said to himself: What remains to us as outer nature is not true nature; behind this nature lies the deity. And what lies behind nature, he called Brahman, the hidden God. The whole outer world was for him only illusion, deception, Maya. And while the Atlanteans still felt the deity in every leaf, the Indians said: Nowhere in the outer world does the deity reveal itself anymore. One must sink into the inner world. One must seek the deity in one's own heart, one must pursue it in a higher, spiritual state. — Everything about approaching the deity had retained something dreamlike. The Indians found no deity in nature; the world of Brahman opened up to him in great and powerful thought images, in visions and imaginations. Yoga was the training he underwent in order to go beyond illusion to the spirit, to the primordial being. The profound Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, this hymn to human perfection, are only echoes of that ancient divine wisdom.

[ 5 ] This was the first stage at which humanity wanted to return to the deity; it is a stage that could not achieve particularly high status in external culture. For the Indian turned away from everything external; he sought the higher life only in a world-renouncing absorption in the spirit.

[ 6 ] The second subrace, the ancient Persians, whose culture also originated from Manu, already had a different mission. Even before the time of Zarathustra, the ancient Persians had an ancient culture that was preserved only through oral tradition. People now began to think that external reality was a reflection of the deity, that one should not turn away from it, but rather transform it. The Persians wanted to transform nature; they wanted to work on it; they became farmers. They stepped out of the silence of their unworldly world of ideas and realized, through the resistance they encountered, that not everything was Maya, that alongside the world of the spirit there was also a very real world of reality. Alongside the world of the spirit, they found a world in which one had to work. Gradually, he became convinced that there were two worlds: one of the good spirit, into which one could immerse oneself, and the other, which one had to work on. And then he said to himself: In the world of the spirit, I will find the ideas and concepts through which I will transform external reality so that it itself becomes an image of the eternal spirit.

[ 7 ] Thus, the Persian saw himself caught in a struggle between two worlds, which later developed more and more into the two powers of Ormuzd, the world of the good spirit, and Ahriman, the world that must be transformed. But one thing was still missing for the Persian: the outer world stood before him as a being he did not understand; he could find no laws in it. They did not realize that the spiritual can be found in nature; they only felt resistance in their work.

[ 8 ] These world laws were learned by the third subrace, the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian peoples, and later by the Semites, who emerged from them like a branch. They looked up at the starry sky, observed the course of the stars and their influence on human life, and then devised a science through which they could understand the movement and influence of the stars. They connected heaven and earth. We can see the character of this third sub-race in an example. The Egyptians said to themselves: The Nile floods the land at a certain time and makes it fertile. This always happens when a certain constellation, Sirius, rises. And so the Egyptians observed the time of the floods. They associated the constellation that was then in the sky with the activity of the Nile. They also observed the position of the sun when certain birds arrived and departed, the rising and setting of the stars and their relationships to each other and to humanity, and thus developed a science. It became clear to them that great wisdom prevailed in all natural processes, that everything happened according to great laws, which they sought to penetrate. Above all, it was the ancient Chaldean priests who were representatives of a profound wisdom. However, the laws of nature were not abstract laws to them. They did not see the stars as physical globes; they saw each planet as animated by a being whose body was the planet. Very concretely, they imagined the animating deity behind each constellation. Thus, the Egyptians and Chaldeans felt that they were enclosed in the womb of the world of spirits as spirits among spirits; they saw matter filled with wisdom.

[ 9 ] You see, humanity had gradually come to recognize wisdom in the external world again through science, renewing what the ancient Atlanteans possessed as natural clairvoyant knowledge.

[ 10 ] The fourth sub-race, the Greco-Roman culture, was not directly influenced by the Manu, but was under the influence of the other cultures. It had a different mission: art. Little by little, humanity had found the way to spiritualize nature. The Greeks went further than the Egyptians; they did not take the finished images of nature, but took unformed matter, marble, and stamped it with their own mark. They shaped Zeus and the other gods themselves. The third sub-race sought the spirit in the outside world; the fourth sub-race imprinted the spirit itself. The art of conjuring spirit into matter was reserved for the Greco-Latin race.

[ 11 ] The Egyptians studied the course of the stars and used this knowledge to establish states that lasted for centuries. The Greeks imprinted what they took from within themselves onto the external human community, the cities of Sparta, Colchis, and so on. The Romans went even further, shaping not only stone and ore, but also the entire great community of human beings according to their spirit.

[ 12 ] The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, the fifth sub-race, go even further in shaping the external world. This sub-race, to which we ourselves belong, not only imprints on matter what lives in human beings, but also imprints the natural laws of matter itself. It discovers the divine laws of the universe, the laws of gravity, light, heat, steam, electricity, and with their help reshapes the entire sensory world. Their mission is to study not only the laws that lie dormant in human beings, but also the laws that permeate the entire world, and to impose them on the external world. As a result, the whole of humanity has become more materialistic, even materialistic; Zeus could not arise, but instead the steam engine, telegraph, telephone, and so on.

[ 13 ] Another race will follow us, which will in turn find its way back. In our race, human beings have reached the peak of the transformation of the physical world. We have descended furthest onto the physical plane; we have gone to the extreme in conquering the physical plane.

[ 14 ] That was the task of post-Atlantean humanity. The Indians had turned away from the physical. The Persians recognized it as a mass that opposed them. The Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Egyptians recognized the wisdom of nature. The Greeks and Romans continued to conquer the physical plane from within, and only our human culture has advanced so far that it incorporates the laws of nature into the physical plane. And now humanity will become more spiritual again.

[ 15 ] The course of human development is tremendous and meaningful. Every group of people has its task. What still lives on in myths and legends in the third and fourth sub-races, the memory of primeval times, of the world of gods, our humanity no longer has any of this, it only has the physical world. With its emergence onto the physical plane, humanity has lost its connection with the world of gods; only the physical world is available to it.

[ 16 ] The theosophist is not a reactionary; he knows that material time was a necessity. Just as animals, after migrating into dark caves, developed other organs powerfully but regressed their organs of sight, so it happens everywhere in the spiritual and sensory world: where one ability develops, another must recede. The gift of clairvoyance and the power of memory had to recede so that physical vision could develop. When humans learned to control the external world through natural laws, they had to lose their spiritual vision.

[ 17 ] How different things were seen in the past! Copernicus, for example, disabused humanity of the old error that the earth stood still. He taught that it was a mistake to assume that the sun revolved around the earth. Kepler and Galileo further developed this teaching. And yet both Copernicus and Ptolemy are right; it just depends on the point of view from which one looks at the sun and the earth. If one views our solar system not from the physical plane but from the astral plane, then the Ptolemaic system is correct. There, the Earth is at the center, and things are as the ancient world described them. One need only remember that on the astral plane, everything appears reversed. The Ptolemaic system therefore applies to the astral plane, and the Copernican system to the physical plane. In the future, a completely different worldview will emerge. Usually, it is only emphasized that Copernicus taught two things: that the Earth moves around its axis and that the Earth moves around the Sun. No attention is paid to the fact that he taught another movement, namely that the entire system moves in a spiral. This will remain unnoticed until humanity returns to it in the future. Copernicus stood at the boundary and still had the old strongly within him.

[ 18 ] There is no absolute truth; every truth has its mission at a certain time. And when we speak of theosophy today, we know that when we are reborn, we will hear something different and relate to each other in a completely different way.

[ 19 ] Let us look back to times when we may have been together before in some part of northern Europe, where people gathered around the Druid priest who told them the truth in the form of myths and legends. If we had not listened and if he had not shaped our souls, we would not understand what theosophy brings us back today in a different form as truth. And when we return, it will be spoken of in a different form, in a higher form. Truth evolves like everything else in the world. It is the form of the divine spirit, but the divine spirit has many forms. If we permeate ourselves with this character of truth, we will gain a completely different relationship to it. We will say to ourselves: Although we live in truth, it can take many different forms. We will then also look at the present humanity in a completely different way. We will not say that we have the absolute truth, but we will say: These fellow human beings now stand at a point where we once stood. We have an obligation to respond to what the other person says; we only need to make it clear to them that we value them at the level of truth where they stand. Everyone has something to learn, and so we become tolerant of every form of truth. In this way we learn to understand everything; we do not fight against people, but seek to live with them. Modern humanity has developed the freedom of personality. Theosophy will develop an inner tolerance of the soul from this basic view of truth.

[ 20 ] Love is higher than opinion. The most diverse opinions are compatible when people love one another. That is why it makes deep sense that in the theosophical worldview, no religion is attacked and no religion is singled out, but all are understood, and a brotherhood can develop because members of the most diverse religions understand one another.

[ 21 ] But this is one of the most important tasks facing humanity today and in the future: living together with others, understanding one another. And as long as this spirit of human community does not develop, there can be no question of occult development.