The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Past and Future Spiritual Knowledge

[ 1 ] On the eve of the day we call “White Lotus Day,” we remember the great personality to whom we owe the impetus for the Theosophical Movement. Fifteen years ago, on May 8, Madame Blavatsky left the physical plane. We do not speak of a day of death, but of a second, different birthday, when we commemorate the day on which the individuality that accomplished so much for humanity in the physical body during the last third of the 19th century was called to other spheres to continue its work from there. This day should stir in us the feelings and sensations that lift us up to feel more and more the kind of work to which human beings are called when they no longer dwell on the physical plane. This effect can be all the more significant the more suitable tools they find on the physical plane. Such tools should become the members of the Theosophical Movement. What enables them to do this are the spiritual scientific truths that you absorb throughout the year.

[ 2 ] The individuality that, in incomparable selflessness, first proclaimed the great messages to which the Theosophical Movement is connected, should come a little closer to us on this day each year. It is true that there are not yet many among us who have any idea of what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky actually meant to the world and will continue to mean. But what does that matter? In the first century AD, Tacitus, a historian of incomparable importance, lived in Rome. A century after its emergence, he knew nothing about the spiritual movement on which our entire Western culture was based, other than that there was an insignificant sect far away on the borders of the Roman Empire, which a certain Jesus, a Nazarene, was said to have founded.

[ 3 ] Can we be surprised, then, if today scholars, professors, and broad circles of educated people know nothing about Madame Blavatsky's mission or have the most misleading ideas and prejudices about it? According to certain laws, anything great that enters the world must provoke opposition, prejudice, and misunderstanding. For it will always and again be repeated that the small and insignificant can only be overcome very gradually and slowly by the great and certain future. What Helena Petrovna Blavatsky brought into the world is not an event that can be measured after a short period of time. It is an event in comparison to which our words today have become too vague. Not only the understanding of the world, not only the perception of things, but the whole feeling and sensibility of humanity will enter a new stage when what was inherent in Mrs. Blavatsky's mission is realized. Let us imagine the transformation of feeling that will take place in some people today and in many more in the future.

[ 4 ] To help us understand, I would like to paint a picture before your soul. Let us go far back to the times of Greek civilization. What remains from that time in terms of wonderful works of art, creations of poetry and science, the divine tones of Homer, the profound thoughts of Plato, the spiritual teachings of Pythagoras, all of this comes together for us when we take a look at what we call the Greek mysteries. Such a mystery site was both a school and a temple. It was hidden from the eyes of those who were not worthy of receiving the truth into their souls, and only allowed in those who had prepared themselves to face the truth with sacred feelings. When such people were admitted to the place from which all art, poetry, and science had emerged, the spectator who was not yet initiated into clairvoyant powers was allowed to see in images — but those whose dormant spiritual powers had already been awakened saw it in reality — how the god descended into matter, embodied himself there, and now rests in the realms of nature until the resurrection. It became clear to such a mystery student that all the realms of nature, the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, basically contain the slumbering God within themselves, and that human beings are called upon to experience the resurrection of this God within themselves, to feel their soul as a part of the deity. Everywhere outside, human beings can perceive something from which they should awaken the slumbering deity. But in their own souls, they themselves feel the spark of God, feel themselves as the deity, and attain the certainty of their immortality, of their working and weaving in the infinite universe. Nothing can be compared to the sublimity that the mystery student felt in such places. Everything was present at once: religion, art, knowledge. In the objects of his pious worship he felt religion, in the works of art his sacred admiration was kindled, and the mysteries of the world themselves were revealed to him in beautiful images that called for piety. Some of the greatest who had experienced this testified: Only by becoming initiated does a person rise above transience and the earthly to the eternal. A science and an art immersed in the sacred fire of religious feelings represent something that could not be described more beautifully than with the word “enthusiasm,” that is, being in God.

[ 5 ] When we have this image before our soul and now let our gaze wander to our own time, we see not only that we experience everything separately — beauty, wisdom, and piety — but also that our culture, which has become abstract and intellectual and has lost the living fire of former times, appears to us as something shadowy.

[ 6 ] That is why certain outstanding representatives of our spiritual life, who felt misunderstood and lonely, looked back to those great times of the infinite past, when human beings still cultivated contact with the spirits and gods themselves. They knew this, and in the silence of the night, many longed to return to the mysteries of Eleusis. They were the last wonderful offshoots of the Greek mysteries. A profound German thinker, one of those who had immersed themselves in the riddles of existence, conveys to us the mood that came over him when his thoughts returned to the ancient sites of Greek wisdom — the mood of a spiritual wanderer. It was Flegel, that mighty master of thought, who sought to grasp in his mind the images that the disciples of the mysteries had once seen. The poem is his.

Eleusis
To Hölderlin

Around me, within me, dwells peace. The busy people's
Never tire of worry. They give me freedom
And leisure. Thank you, my
Liberator, O night! — With white mist
The moon envelops the uncertain boundaries
Of the distant hills. The bright strip of the lake
Flashes over kindly.
Far from the memory of the day's tedious noise,
As if years lay between it and now.

[ 7 ] So speaks the pensive thinker, who looks deeply into the mysteries of the world, who can only grasp all this in his own heart with his thoughts and now looks back on the mysteries of Eleusis. He continues:

Your image, beloved, appears before me,
And the joy of days gone by. But soon it gives way
To sweeter hopes of reunion.
Already I picture the long-awaited, fiery
Scene of embrace; then the questions, the secret,
The scene of mutual spying,
What has changed here in attitude, expression, disposition in the friend
Since that time; — the joy of certainty,
To find the old covenant's loyalty, even stronger, more mature,
The covenant that no oath sealed:
To live only in free truth,
Peace with the statute,

That regulates opinion and feeling, never, never to be broken!
Now the desire negotiates with the sluggish reality,
That carried me easily over mountains and rivers to you.
But their dispute is soon announced by a sigh, and with it
The sweet fantasy dream flees.

My eyes rise to the vault of the eternal sky,
To you, O shining star of the night!
And all desires, all hopes
Forgotten, stream down from your eternity.
The mind loses itself in contemplation,
What I called mine disappears.
I surrender myself to the immeasurable.
I am in it, I am everything, I am only it.
Alien to recurring thoughts,
It dreads the infinite, and in amazement grasps
the depth of this contemplation.
Imagination brings eternity closer to the senses,
marries it with form. - Welcome, you
sublime spirits, lofty shadows,
from whose foreheads perfection shines!
Do not be afraid. I feel that this is also my home,
The splendor, the solemnity that surrounds you.

[ 8 ] Thus this thinker calls upon the spirits who truly appeared to the disciples of Eleusis. Then he calls upon her himself, the goddess Ceres, who worked at the center of the mysteries. For Ceres is not only the goddess of earthly fertility, but also the fertilizer of spiritual life.

Ha! If only the gates of your sanctuary would now spring open,
O Ceres, who sat enthroned in Eleusis!
Drunk with inspiration, I would now feel
The thrill of your presence,
Understand your revelations,
I would interpret the lofty meaning of the images, hear
The hymns at the feast of the gods,
The lofty sayings of their council.

But your halls have fallen silent, O goddess!
The circle of gods has fled to Olympus
Away from the desecrated altars,
Fled from the profaned grave of humanity
The genius of innocence that conjured them here.
The wisdom of your priests is silent.
No sound of sacred consecration
Has reached us, and in vain the researcher seeks
More curiosity than love
For wisdom. They possess the seekers and despise you.
To master them, they dig for words,
In which your lofty spirit would be imprinted.
In vain! They catch only dust and ashes,
In which your life will never return to them.
But among the mold and the lifeless, they also found pleasure
The eternally dead, the frugal! — In vain, there remained
No sign of your feast, no trace of an image.
To the son of consecration, the fullness of the high teachings,
The depth of the inexpressible feeling was far too sacred,
Than that he deemed them worthy of dry signs.
The very thought cannot grasp the soul,
Which, lost in time and space in a premonition of infinity, Forgets itself and now awakens to consciousness again.
Whoever wanted to speak of it to others,
Even if he spoke with angelic tongues, would feel the poverty of words.
He dreads to have thought the sacred so small,
To have belittled it so much that speech seems sinful to him,
And that he trembles and closes his mouth.
What the consecrated man forbade himself, a wise
Law forbade the poorer spirits to reveal
What they saw, heard, and felt on that holy night,
So that the noise of their nonsense would not disturb even the better ones
In their devotion, their hollow verbiage
Made them angry at the sacred itself, so that it would not
Be trampled in the dirt, so that one would not
memory, that it would not
Become the plaything and commodity of the sophist,
Who sold it for a pittance,
To the eloquent hypocrite's cloak, or even
To the rod of the joyful boy, and so empty
In the end, that it would only echo
of foreign tongues would have the roots of his life.
Your sons, goddess, carried it stingily,
they did not carry your honor on the streets and markets, they kept it
in the inner sanctuary of their hearts.
Therefore, you did not live on their lips.
Their lives honored you. You still live in their deeds.

This night, too, I heard you, holy deity.
The lives of your children often reveal you to me,
I often sense you as the soul of their deeds!
You are the high spirit, the faithful belief,
Which, like a deity, does not waver even when all else perishes.

[ 9 ] In recent times, it has been necessary for the power of thought to be expressed in an idealistic way on the one hand and in a more materialistic way on the other. Hegel was no longer understood either, and he belongs to the lost spirits of humanity in general. Everything in the second half of the 19th century was permeated by the spirit of materialism, and even today this spirit prevails in the widest circles. If it were to gain the upper hand, it would lead humanity to complete petrification in its cultural manifestations.

[ 10 ] A strange attitude came to dominate in the second half of the 19th century. As late as the 18th century, Lessing had said that a belief does not have to be nonsensical simply because it arose in the pure, innocent childhood of humanity. However, materialists portray this belief, which is found in all peoples as the foundation of culture, as childish, fantastical ideas, and only in what scientific thinking has created can one still see something that corresponds to the mature, masculine spirit. Practical life has become a rush and scramble for material goods to satisfy purely physical needs, and things that are far worse threaten to follow. Science, with its motto: How wonderfully far we have come, considers itself at the same time tremendously superior to everything that humanity has produced in the past in order to gain a connection with the world: the Chaldean and Babylonian priestly wisdom, the teachings of Pythagoras and others. It is said of the great Plato that no one understands the confused stuff he left behind. The “Timaeus” is called incomprehensible, but no one seeks the reason why it is not understood. Here we may recall Lichtenberg's words: When a head and a book collide and it sounds hollow, it is not necessarily the book's fault. In practice, materialism has also given rise to hypocrisy, which above all refuses to admit that purely material pursuits dominate life. Rarely has there been so much talk of ideals and so little understanding of them as in this day and age.

[ 11 ] It was into this era that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's mission fell. Without in any way diminishing the significance of her personality, it is fair to say that her soul was burdened with a task that was actually too great for it. If one wants to solve the mystery of why this particular woman was called upon to bring the message of theosophy to the world, one comes to the conclusion that she offered the only possibility for the leading spirits to make themselves understood to the people of the West. The personalities who held official positions did not have the slightest understanding of what was necessary for humanity in terms of spiritual facts. Even the concept of spirit had been lost, and when people spoke of spirit, it was nothing more than an empty word. This remarkable woman, with her strange psychic and spiritual abilities from her youth, was called upon to bring the world a message that no scholar was capable of bringing. From the earliest age, she saw the world as something different from what 19th-century education prescribed. She could perceive spiritual beings in everything around us, which were as real to her as anything tangible. And from early youth, she had one characteristic: a great reverence for a sublime spirit. Without this great reverence, no human being can ever attain knowledge. No matter how sharp one's mind or how penetrating one's reason, or even if one has developed dim clairvoyant powers, one cannot attain genuine, true knowledge without what is called great reverence. For true knowledge can only be given to us by those beings who are far ahead of humanity in their development. Everyone admits that individual human beings are at different stages of development. In our materialistic age, people may not be so willing to admit this, but certain differences cannot be denied. However, most people believe that their knowledge is already the highest. They are not so quick to admit that there are even higher beings beyond Goethe and Francis of Assisi. Yet this is the basic condition for true knowledge. No one can attain it who does not have this great reverence, which has been completely lost in the leveling view of our time.

[ 12 ] This great reverence implies an important fact for human beings. We all come from spiritual worlds, from an original life in the spirit. The truly divine part of our soul originates from a divine source. There was a time for each of us when looking out from the spiritual world into the sensory world was first awakened in us. In ancient times, all people had a dull but clairvoyant consciousness. Images arose from their souls that pointed to the reality surrounding them. Only later did sensory consciousness, as we know it today, begin to develop. At a certain moment in our development — as symbolically described for Eve in the story of Paradise — the serpent of knowledge approached each of us and, in a distant incarnation, spoke the words: Your eyes will be opened, you will recognize good and evil in the visible outer world. The serpent has always been the symbol of the great spiritual teachers. Each of us had such an advanced teacher; we were once with such a teacher who spoke these words to us: You will one day recognize the sensory environment.

[ 13 ] A person who has great reverence will encounter such a teacher once again in life when their spiritual senses are opened. In occultism, this is called “rediscovering the guru,” the great teacher whom everyone must seek and whom they can only find if they have great reverence and at the same time know that there is something that transcends the average human being.

[ 14 ] This great reverence and awareness of the existence of the great teachers lived in Madame Blavatsky, and that is why she was called upon to pass on something of these great teachers to humanity. The guru works in secret, and only those who have found their own way to him can recognize him. Thus Helena Petrovna Blavatsky brought with her the right feeling to give something completely new to the humanity of the present.

[ 15 ] Anyone who has looked a little into the places where truth is represented can see that the conquest of such a new thing is associated with many difficulties. Then comes the time when people who themselves understand something of the search for truth learn to stop criticizing great personalities. They no longer look at their everyday activities. Only people who have no idea of the position of great personalities in the world cling to these everyday activities. But those who see through the connections are grateful for what these personalities have brought. This is also the only possible point of view towards a personality such as Madame Blavatsky. “Much admired and much reviled,” this Helena also walked among people, and hardly anything as nonsensical and foolish has been said and written about anyone as about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky — and, of course, about all those who were of equal stature to her. Scholars have made the strange claim that she wrote a great work—The Secret Doctrine, which contains the Dzyan stanzas. They say that these represent ancient traditions. Opponents, however, claim that Madame Blavatsky invented these stanzas and convinced the world that they were ancient traditions. Only scholarship can really go so far as to make such a foolish claim. For let us assume for a moment that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky really did invent these stanzas, and let us delve into them. If we spend just a little time, perhaps two or three years, studying them, we will find that we are still interested in all scholarship and all discoveries; but compared to the great revelations contained in these Dzyan verses, everything that modern science has achieved in the present day appears to be the most trivial thing in the world. Do you not think that our reverence for Helena Petrovna Blavatsky could then grow even more? However, those who take a little time, two or three years, to penetrate the deep meaning of these verses will be indifferent as to whether they were written thousands of years ago or in the last third of the 19th century by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. When you think about it, you have to say that the miracle would be even greater in the second case. This makes the objection of the critics, who only show that they have not understood a single word of the whole thing, seem all the more foolish. Here you have some of the great obstacles that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had to face. Then people talk about her having made this or that mistake. Such people are hardly capable of appreciating her true significance.

[ 16 ] Now, Madame Blavatsky has communicated phenomena of the occult worlds to humanity. Anyone who is familiar with this journey into the occult worlds, as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky undertook it, also knows the dangers associated with it. When one considers how easily the passions can be aroused by the sensory world, and what abysses are experienced by those who had to look into the occult worlds as was necessary to write a book like The Secret Doctrine, one no longer questions the externalities associated with this significant personality and her environment. Even this strong nature was almost shattered by the resistance of the world. Precisely because she was confronted with so much incomprehension and false authority, we can understand, in view of the receptivity and sensitivity of her occult powers, that she reached the twilight of her life as a personality who was in a certain sense broken. But what she brought to the world should live on in humanity and have a future.

[ 17 ] The mood that I wanted to paint before your souls from the words of one of the greatest sons of modern times, this mood of longing, must spread more and more. It will find satisfaction in what Madame Blavatsky was to bring to the world and what is to be developed more and more. It is precisely then that we honor this personality most when we regard her as an inspirer. She wanted to reign only as a faithful disciple of the great spiritual powers that stood behind her, and only those who work in the spirit of these spiritual powers work in the spirit of theosophy. Spiritual life, which has become shadowy, will regain vitality as more and more people understand what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky wanted to bring into the world with such courage, energy, and boldness. And it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of what such a Lotus Day can be if we look beyond all the historical gossip and strive to see the essentials.

[ 18 ] This is the correct understanding of the theosophical movement, when we bring ourselves to the realization that the living spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky should continue to work through us for the salvation and progress of humanity. Then we will not only say in sluggish sentimentality that this spirit is immortal and is celebrating a new birthday, but we ourselves will contribute to its living and working where it should work. For that was probably the founder's only personal wish, that the members of the Theosophical Movement should become a living expression of the spirit which she selflessly placed entirely at the service of this spiritual movement, and the more the members understand this spirit of selflessness and the more they learn to understand that there is a duty to seek knowledge, the more they realize the spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. One always hears people say, “The main thing is love and compassion.” Certainly, love and compassion are the main thing, but only knowledge can make love and compassion fruitful. There is a complacency, and it is not uncommon, even among those who believe they are striving for the spirit. Saying “love” can be learned in a second. Acquiring knowledge for the salvation and blessing of humanity takes an eternity. And absorbing this awareness within ourselves, that knowledge is the basis of all real spiritual work, must increasingly become the meaning of the Theosophical Movement. That is why it is important to strive to emulate the founder of our movement in her tireless pursuit of knowledge — step by step, without being misled by a complacency that does not want to learn, but wants to grasp everything in a single day. This can be studied precisely in the works and activities of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and that is why all talk that arises from idle complacency is vain. But what we should learn by pursuing it as a continuation of what she herself began on the physical plane is the striving for spiritual scientific knowledge.