The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism XII

[ 1 ] Yesterday we attempted to trace the development of humanity both on a cosmic scale and here on Earth. Today I will simply add a few supplementary remarks on this history of humanity—in order to then make the transition to what theosophy has to say about the significance of Christianity as well as about Christian initiation. First, I ask you to turn your mind’s eye once more to the starting point of human evolution.

[ 2 ] We have said that, at the time of its separation from the present-day Moon, the Earth was surrounded by a kind of primordial ocean, and we have described how, in those days, the physical human being united with the spiritual-soul human being. And then we traced this development right up to our own day, which we have recognized as the period of humanity’s deepest decline, with the spirit sinking into matter. We have recognized that an ascent must now take place once again—a spiritualization—and we have also spoken of the mission that Theosophy, or Spiritual Science, believes it has in relation to this development.

[ 3 ] We have already pointed out that the separation of the two sexes took place among the Lemurians at that time. Two sexes had already existed among the lower beings on the Moon; but the human being who dwells within each of you was only divided into two sexes at that time, upon being incorporated into the physical form. We must conceive of humanity’s prehistory—before its division into two sexes, male and female—in such a way that what we call sexuality did not yet exist at all, or at least took a completely different form. Now, much depends precisely on our understanding the significance for the entire course of human development of what I have just mentioned.

[ 4 ] For if the division into two sexes had not occurred, if modern humanity had not completed its development through the world through the interaction of the masculine and the feminine, human beings would be shaped quite differently. It is precisely from the influence of the masculine that the individuality in human beings arises. Yesterday I explained to you the difference between a group soul and an individual soul. With animals, it is quite different. The animal already possesses the sexes on the astral plane. Human beings, on the other hand, before they were instilled into individual human bodies, certainly did not yet possess the two sexes on the astral plane—or, as one might say, had not yet fallen into the sexes. — If, in the physical world, the sexless aspect of humanity had reproduced itself—that is, if a kind of asexuality had taken the place of the two sexes—it would not have been possible to make human beings into individual beings. This is precisely the point of human evolution: that individual human beings become more and more individual.

[ 5 ] If we were to go back to the era I described yesterday, we would see how people were very similar in their outward appearances. Individual diversity arose through the interaction of the two sexes; and individual diversity grows ever greater the further humanity advances toward the future. Without the division into the sexes, generations would always look alike. We must state plainly: the fact that human beings are becoming increasingly independent beings depends on the two sexes.

[ 6 ] In those primeval times and well into the Atlantean era, indeed even into the post-Atlantean era, what we call “close marriage” was the norm among humanity, and only gradually was close marriage replaced by “distant marriage.” In ancient times, people married within small blood-related groups and small clans. Among all peoples, you will find that the marriage of any relative into another tribe is regarded as something unusual, and everywhere it is viewed as an important event. |

[ 7 ] The further back we go, the more we find it to be a moral principle that people within related tribes marry one another, that related blood mixes only with related blood. We can best illustrate this process by starting with a comparison that, while all other comparisons fall short, has something extraordinarily apt about it. I would like to share a short story with you.

[ 8 ] You are familiar with Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger is a poet who depicts his village characters with great devotion. Anzengruber also knows his stuff; in the drama *Der Meineidbauer*, he is able to bring the peasants—that is, similar characters—to life on stage in a magnificent way, so that they stand out clearly. We know how vividly they come across in *Der Meineidbauer*, *The Priest of Kirchfeld*, and others. Once, Rosegger and Anzengruber were taking a walk together, and Rosegger said: “I know that you never really look at the farmers; you might portray them even better if you went down to the village to see them.” — To which Anzengruber replied: “If I did that, I might go completely mad.” I have actually never gotten to know farmers closely; the fact that I can portray them this way stems from the fact that my father, my grandfather, and all my ancestors were farmers, and I still have this peasant blood in me. From this peasant blood I create my characters and pay no heed to the others; it still rumbles, so to speak, in my blood!

[ 9 ] This is an interesting fact that leads us to what we are about to examine. Where the blood remains unmixed, as was the case in the old tribal communities or among Anzengruber’s peasants, a phenomenon as powerful as that which was still present in the poet Anzengruber in his final incarnation persists. He had inherited the creative power and knew exactly how to value it: the creative power flowed through the blood of generations. This is indeed the case where kindred blood mixes only with kindred blood. And the mixing of foreign blood with foreign blood has an extinguishing effect on the soul’s creative power. Had Anzengruber married anyone belonging to a completely different class, his children would no longer have possessed this creative power.

[ 10 ] In almost all peoples still in existence today, we can observe this phenomenon in its early stages: everywhere, marriage within small blood-related groups is associated with an extraordinary memory. It is linked to that dim, twilight-like clairvoyance. They remember what they have experienced since birth and regard it as integral to their personality. Before close-kin marriage was replaced by marriage to distant relatives, people literally remembered what their grandfather and ancestors had experienced far into the past; they said “I” and possessed the experiences of what their grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on had experienced in the past. The further back we go, the more we find this memory reaching up through the generations.

[ 11 ] And the interesting thing is that these peoples did not perceive themselves as individual “I”s; they addressed their grandfather as “I” by attributing the same name to themselves, a name that encompassed everyone. Just as you give yourselves names today and relate them to individual personalities, these peoples gave themselves a name that reached far back through the centuries, because birth did not sever the memory. The individual human being had no name, for birth was not a special event. As long as the thread of memory held, there was only one name for everyone. You have a record of this naming in the Bible; all the debate over the meaning of the patriarchs’ names is merely a scholarly dispute. Adam was therefore Adam, and so ancient, because memory had been preserved for centuries, because the one who descended from a personality felt himself to be one with it as a single self. All of that was called “Adam,” where the blood flowing through the centuries produced such a memory. As long as the memory was preserved through the generations and people remembered the events of their ancestors as their own, they said: Adam is still here. — They did not perceive themselves as individual physical personalities at all, but rather as that which existed spiritually and held the individuals together.

[ 12 ] Then long-distance marriage became increasingly common, and the mixing of blood will increasingly erase the memory that transcends the individual human form. The narrowing of memory has come about as a consequence of long-distance marriage. Such is the course of humanity that the individual increasingly outgrows the tribe. In the common blood that flowed through the tribes, the common expression of that blood also flowed: love. Those who share related blood love one another. Over time, however, that love—which we might call primal love, bound to the blood and leading to the formation of an entire family—will fade away. The love of the past is quite different from the love that shines before us as the love of the future. In the post-Atlantean epochs, we still find love through blood to be predominant: those who share common blood in their veins love one another. But this will increasingly disappear; people are moving further and further away from narrow blood kinships and becoming individuals.

[ 13 ] This primal love, which arose when souls descended into physical bodies, is thus gradually diminishing before us as time goes on; it flowed into human beings at the moment described in the Bible with the words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” But something else also came into being at that time. Man had become a living soul and thus a lung-breather. The air he thus inhaled produced his red blood, and the ego-nature is expressed in the red blood. As long as the blood is communal, the ego is communal, as we see in Judaism, where an entire people is governed by a group soul. But human beings are increasingly maturing to the point of becoming independent of kinship blood. When the breath entered into human beings, this was the first predisposition toward blood formation. But only over long periods of time has humanity matured to the point of permeating this blood in such a way that universal love for humanity can take the place of primal love. Imagine the progress of humanity as I have just described it: Primordial love would gradually die out, kinship love—from mother to child and so on—would have to diminish; blood does not extend far enough for a bond of love to encompass all of humanity, and the power of the ego, the power of selfishness, will grow ever greater. An event had to occur that would call into being, in place of primal love, a different kind of love, a spiritual love: this event is Christianity. With the advent of Christianity, what would otherwise have occurred was held back: the disintegration of all humanity into individual human atoms. Human beings must become ever more independent; this is inherent in the development of their blood; but now what has been driven apart by natural forces must be reunited in a spiritual way, through the new power that can now act without blood love: this is Christianity. The Mystery of Golgotha thus takes on a fundamental significance for the entire development of humanity. When we understand this, we understand the meaning of the phrase: the blood of Christ. It is not something that can be experienced and explored merely externally, but something that must itself be regarded as a mystical fact. It is therefore with full awareness that my book is titled—not “The Mysticism of Christianity,” but: “Christianity as a Mystical Fact.”

[ 14 ] To grasp what Christ Jesus himself was on earth, to understand that Christianity has such fundamental significance, we must examine the events leading up to Christianity. These were already present in all ancient times. You can truly grasp how the early Christian viewed this if you consider a passage from Augustine: What is called the Christian religion today has always been the true religion; it is only that what was once the true religion is now called the Christian religion. — In his time, Augustine still knew that Christianity has a prerequisite: what was practiced in the ancient mysteries. And it is precisely this that the theosophical movement is meant to reveal to humanity. I would like to characterize this in a few words.

[ 15 ] There were schools that served simultaneously as churches and centers of the arts; at the head of these schools stood the leaders of humanity, those who were most advanced in their development. Those people who were considered spiritually suited to gain a perception of what surrounds us as the spiritual world were admitted there. They were carefully prepared by first having to learn the facts of the spiritual world theoretically, much as we study Spiritual Science today. Then came ever higher stages. Learning was transformed into life, the exoteric into the esoteric. In everything, they were taught in a living way. There were strict rules regarding how the student was to organize his life so that he could gradually ascend to the vision of the spiritual world. The student had first learned the facts and laws of the spiritual world, and had then, through prescribed exercises, developed the faculties necessary to look into this spiritual world.

[ 16 ] And now I will tell you about the final act of this process. You must remember that human sleep consists of the astral body leaving the etheric and physical bodies, and that death consists of the physical body remaining alone while the etheric and astral bodies are united. Now it was the case that the leader of the mysteries, the Hierophant, using the appropriate methods available, treated the person in such a way that the physical body lay as if dead for three and a half days, while the etheric body, along with the rest of the person’s members, was outside. This was neither sleep nor death, but a third state. Everything was arranged so that during these three and a half days the person could make the journey through the higher worlds; under the guidance of the Hierophant-initiator, they now came to know the things we have also described in the previous lectures. They came to know all this through their own direct experience. After three and a half days, they were a twice-born person. When he now returned, he remembered everything he had experienced in the worlds beyond; he was now a living witness to the fact that such worlds exist. His words were now different from what they had been before. He had become “blessed,” and the saying applied to him: “Blessed are those who see.”

[ 17 ] When he returned, he was given a completely new name; he laid aside his old name and, as an initiate, went on to use his new name. And a peculiar phenomenon occurred when he descended and re-entered his physical body, when he could live in the physical world again. Then a single utterance escaped from everyone—that was the law—which in German would sound like this: “My God, my God, how have you glorified me!” This is what such a person, who had come so far, felt; he said of himself: Everything that remained of the primal love, everything that had to be implanted in the human being through the blood, must be replaced in me by a love that knows no distinction between mother, brother, sister, and other human beings. — He had spiritually left behind parents, wife and child, brother and sister, and had become a follower of the Spirit. In him, it was said, Christ had come to life.

[ 18 ] All of this had taken place in the secrecy of the mysteries. Such people were witnesses to the spiritual world. Such people were also prophets, for they pointed to a coming event, and this is none other than the Mystery of Golgotha. What happened to the individual in the mystery schools once took place for the whole world in the physical world in Palestine. If you could take the regulations for the ancient initiates today, you would see that those regulations came to a conclusion with these three and a half days: never before had this taken place on the physical plane. A new epoch began with this. So that you can say: All the initiations were prophetic foreshadowings of what took place in the Mystery of Golgotha; and it could only happen because such a comprehensive individuality as the Ruler of the Solar Spirits was incarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. No human ego such as we have within us could ever have accomplished what took place there on Golgotha. It required an ego that had already advanced so far on the Sun at that time.

[ 19 ] In this way we come to understand the divine-human nature of Christ Jesus, which is so easily denied in modern times because people are no longer able to attune themselves to the depths of the spiritual world. And so, when we view the matter in the proper light, we see something taking place on Golgotha that has a significance far surpassing all other events.

[ 20 ] Among the more recent thinkers, Richard Wagner alone had once again sensed something of the significance of the blood. I have explained to you how the glandular life of the human being is the expression of the etheric body, the nervous life the expression of the astral body, and how the expression of the ego is the blood life. I have shown you how, in the development of the blood, if Christ had not come, a regression toward greater selfishness would have occurred; the ego would have continually increased selfishness and self-obsession. The blood that was in excess within humanity had to flow out, had to be sacrificed, so that humanity would not be entirely consumed by selfishness. The true mystic sees in the blood flowing from the Saviour’s wounds the excess blood that had to flow away so that humanity might not fall into selfishness, so that a spiritual-soulful brotherly love might embrace all of humanity. Thus the person of Spiritual Science regards the blood flowing from the cross, which had to be taken from humanity so that it might rise above the material. In this way, a love of the future, passing from person to person, is established in place of the love that was held together by the blood. And only in this way can the words of Christ Jesus be understood: “Whoever does not leave father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, cannot be my disciple.” This can only be understood to mean that through the deed of Golgotha, everything is overcome that previously had to be strengthened by kinship blood and kinship love. The one who replaced this with the new, spiritual-soul love was justified in saying that the old love must be forsaken. Such is the connection.

[ 21 ] The appearance of Christ Jesus himself is a profound mystical reality and can only be understood if one does not apply the standards of natural science to it. Anyone who did so would be like someone who looks at a tear and judges it solely by the law of gravity, refusing to see it as an expression of the soul.

[ 22 ] Such things can only be grasped through Spiritual Science. That is why the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth differs from that of all other religious founders. What the others gave was a doctrine. In the case of Christ Jesus, one can truly say: Almost every word he spoke has already been said in some context. With Hermes and Buddha, what matters is what they said; with Christ Jesus, what matters is that he was there, that he lived, and that the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

[ 23 ] Whoever, therefore, wishes to be a Christian in the true sense of Spiritual Science is so by virtue of believing in the divinity of Christ Jesus himself. The first disciples did not merely say, “We have been sent out to proclaim the words”—rather, they were to bear witness to his existence: “We have heard the words ourselves and have laid our hands in his wounds.” It is his existence that matters. Imagine removing the founders from the other religions; you would lose nothing in the process. Take away Christ Jesus—and Christianity would not exist! That is the difference. Therefore, no matter how much people like Darwin, Strauss, Drews, and so on may proclaim that all other religious teachings can be found within Christianity, that is not what matters; what matters is that He was there, and that He presented what had been foretold by the prophets as a fact. Thus, Christianity is not a doctrine, but a power. If you could rise up to another planet from here, you would see not only the Earth, but also the Earth’s etheric and astral bodies—the spiritual Earth beyond the physical one; and if you could dwell on this star for millennia, even from the time before the appearance of Christ Jesus, then you would have seen how, in the very spirit of the Earth, the color of the astral body has changed because Christ Jesus was there. The Earth has truly been transformed; and the people who live after the appearance of Christ Jesus live on a transformed Earth and have therefore become capable of overcoming the deepest descent of the Spirit. In the past, one had to be raised into the spiritual world if one wanted to know anything about it; in Christianity, the Mystery itself has descended. It was there as a historical event for physical eyes. The Deity had to descend in order to lead humanity back up from the physical world into the spiritual one.

[ 24 ] This is how Christianity is portrayed in the purest Gospel, the Gospel of John. It is not merely a work of fiction, but a book of life. Only those who have experienced the Gospel of John know what it is; and when one experiences it, one can proclaim everything that has been said today as one’s own truth.

[ 25 ] I would now like to briefly show how people can come to understand the teachings of Christianity.

[ 26 ] Among many books, the Gospel of John is the one that outlines the methods by which one can fathom the depths of Christianity. Even before Christianity existed in its present form, it was already being taught in schools; this was the case with Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of the Apostle Paul. In ancient times, it was customary throughout the centuries to give the actual bearer of the mysteries the same name, so that the one who received the secrets and wrote them down was also called by that name.

[ 27 ] Anyone who, from an esoteric perspective, immerses themselves in the opening words of the Gospel of John will find that they possess an awakening power within. However, one must then apply the Gospel of John as it was originally intended, and one must have the patience to repeatedly take the opening sentences of the Gospel of John as material for meditation and let them pass through one’s soul each morning. Then this becomes a force that draws out powers hidden deep within our soul. However, one must have an accurate translation for this. It must express, through the characteristics of the German words, what was actually written in the original text. In a translation as accurate as possible, I would like to point out to you that the true spiritual life of the Gospel of John is revealed in the very character of the words:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.

In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

He came as a witness to testify about the light, so that through him everyone might believe.

He was not the light, but a witness to the light. For the true light, which enlightens every person, was to come into the world. It was in the world, and the world was made through it, but the world did not recognize it.

It came to individual people, it came to the “I”-people, but the individual people, the “I”-people, did not receive it.

But those who received it were able to reveal themselves as children of God through it.

Those who trusted in his name were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have heard his teaching, the teaching of the only Son of the Father, filled with devotion and truth.»

[ 28 ] I could now tell you a great deal about how you should immerse yourself in the individual chapters of the Gospel of John. I will give you just one example of how you would need to approach the chapters starting with the thirteenth if you were a true disciple of Christian initiation. What I am telling you in words actually took place. To help you understand, I will present it in the form of a dialogue that might give you a mental image of what transpired between teacher and student.

[ 29 ] Then the teacher said to the student: You must develop a feeling within yourself, thinking the following: You must put yourself in the plant’s place. If it could have consciousness like you, and if it could look down at the stones through that consciousness, it would say: You dead stone, you are a lower being than I am in the hierarchy of beings; I am higher. But could I be here today as a plant if you were not here now as a stone? I draw my nourishing juices from you. I could not exist without that which is lower than I am. —- And if the plant could feel, it would say: Although I am higher than the stone, I bow down to it in humility, for the stone has made my existence possible. — Likewise, the animal would have to bow down to the plant and say: Without you, plant, I could not exist, even though I am higher than you. I owe my existence to you, a lower being. In humility, I bow before you.

[ 30 ] Now go up to humanity, to all its diverse members, the lowly and the exalted—what should each person say who stands a little higher on the ladder of evolution than the others? Just as the plant relates to the mineral, and the animal to the plant, so every human being who stands higher must bend down toward the lower one and say: “Though you are lower, it is thanks to you that I can be here!”

[ 31 ] Now imagine this carried through to the highest level, to Christ Jesus, and you have the relationship of Christ Jesus to the apostles with whom he was and to whom he stooped down, as a plant does to a mineral, and washed their feet: “From you I have come forth; I stoop down to you.”

[ 32 ] The student had to go through such feelings at every stage over long periods of time. And this feeling had to become ever more vivid; then he awoke to the first stage of Christian initiation. This can be sensed through an external and an internal symptom: the external one is that, for a time, the student truly feels as if his feet were surrounded by the watery element. And the internal symptom is that he himself experiences the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John as an inner vision on the astral plane.

[ 33 ] Then they continued on their way. The teacher said to the student: You must experience even more; you must now create a mental image in which you imagine that physical and mental suffering and pain are rushing at you from all sides. You must steel yourself against everything, so that you can say: Whatever pain and suffering rush at me, I will stand upright and not let myself be thrown to the ground. This is called the “scourging.” The outward sign of this is that one feels something like pain in one’s skin, which is a sign that the soul is ready. And the inner sign is that one sees oneself on the astral plane as being scourged. But what is essential is what the soul has attained in inner experience.

[ 34 ] The third thing the student hears from the teacher is this: Now you must develop a sense that you not only endure all the pain that comes crashing down upon you, but you must remain steadfast even if the most sacred part of you were dragged through the dust. You must remain so strong that everyone could tell you: This is worthless. — Even if people trample it underfoot, you must know what it is worth, and you must be able to stand firm against the whole world. — Once the student had attained this, it was said: he had experienced the “Crowning with Thorns.” The external symptom is a sensation akin to a certain pain in the head, and the internal symptom is that one sees oneself in the situation of the Saviour crowned with thorns.

[ 35 ] The fourth is this: The teacher tells the student: You must develop an entirely new relationship with your body. You dwell within your body; but now you must regard it as something entirely foreign, just as the table outside is a foreign object to you, and you must even learn to say: I carry my body through the world. - It must be something as distant from you as other external objects. — Then one said that one had experienced the “crucifixion.” Just as the Savior carried the cross, so one carried one’s own body as if it were a piece of wood. The external symptom of the crucifixion itself is the stigmata. The student is able, in meditation, to voluntarily bring forth the bloodstains upon themselves, on the hands, on the feet, and on the right side of the chest; there the red spots appear, reminiscent of the wounds of the cross. This “blood test” is an external symptom that one has come to know the inner essence of Christianity. And the inner experience is: one sees oneself hanging on the cross in an astral vision.

[ 36 ] The fifth stage is what is called the “mystical death.” This can only be described in approximate terms. Mystical “death” consists in the fact that it actually appears to the person as if the whole world were plunged into the deepest darkness and stood before them like a black wall. The entire sensory world is as if extinguished and submerged; this can be experienced. At this moment one comes to know—what one can actually only come to know through this event—everything that is evil, bad, and wicked that can exist in the world. To come to know life, one must also go through this. It is called the “descent into hell.” Then a peculiar event follows: you see it spread out before your eyes. That wall parts: it is the “tearing of the temple curtain,” and then one looks up into the spiritual world. This is called the “mystical death and the tearing of the curtain.”

[ 37 ] The sixth stage is “Burial and Resurrection,” in which human beings, in addition to their earlier feelings, come to regard other external objects as something that belongs to them, just as their own body does, and in which the entire earth still belongs to them. Just as a finger might say, “I am only a finger because I am part of the hand’s organism”—so too is the human being only on the earth because he belongs to the earth. Human beings can walk about on the earth, and therefore they consider themselves independent. When one is permeated by this feeling that everything belongs to us, then what is called the “burial” takes place: one rests spiritually and soulfully within the earth, and only then has one, as it were, risen again in a spiritual sense. Only then does one understand the deed of Christ Jesus, who united himself with the earth through death and, just as he was once the ruler of the sun, has now become the spirit of the earth. And the words in the Gospel of John are to be taken literally: “Whoever eats my bread tramples me underfoot”! If you understand Christ Jesus as the highest planetary Spirit of the Earth and the Earth as his body, then you will also realize that you are literally trampling the body of Christ Jesus underfoot. And you will be united with him when you experience the burial of this sixth stage.

[ 38 ] Then comes the seventh stage, the “Ascension,” which, quite rightly, cannot be described, because only someone capable of thinking without using their brain could understand it.

[ 39 ] I have described to you how the Christian initiation was performed. Through this, the initiate acquired what is called the “Eye of Christ.” If you had no eye, everything around you would be dark; just as you could not see the sun without an eye, so too could you not perceive Christ without the Christ organ. The eye is born of light for light. Light is the cause of sight. The sun must exist externally as the real sun, and you experience this real sun itself in your eye. It is exactly the same with the spiritual eye. It is mere empty talk to speak only of the “inner” Christ; that would be the same as speaking of the eye without the sun existing. Human beings can acquire the ability to behold the Christ through the exercises now described; but the power to do so comes, in turn, from the historical Christ himself. Just as the sun relates to the eye, so does the Christ relate to the development of the Christ organ within the human being.

[ 40 ] The aim here is not to provide instructions, but to present facts. However, one should become acquainted with what exists in the world. And these lectures are intended to help one recognize from what depths the true Christian spirit draws, and how the Gospel of John itself contains the methods of Christian initiation through which a person receives the eye that can behold Christ himself. But those who wish to proclaim him must, in a certain sense, have lived with him—truly, not merely in faith.

[ 41 ] To describe what exists in the world, consider today’s lecture; that the spiritual world is just as Goethe so wonderfully characterized it. He spoke those beautiful words that apply to all natural science and all Spiritual Science:

If the eye were not like the sun,
How could we see the light?
If God’s own power did not dwell within us,
How could the divine delight us?

[ 42 ] Things and beings must exist out there in the world; it is the world that creates the organs and abilities. - Without the sun, there would be no eye, but also no ability to see the sun. Without Christ Jesus, there would be no organ to see Christ, but also no possibility of developing that organ!