The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism XII

[ 1 ] Yesterday we tried to follow the development of humanity cosmically and also on our earth. Today I will only add a few more details to this development of humanity - in order to then find the transition to what Theosophy has to say about the significance of Christianity and also about Christian initiation. First, I ask you to turn your mind's eye once more to the starting point of the process of becoming human.

[ 2 ] We have said that at the time of the separation of the present moon the earth was surrounded by a kind of primeval sea, and we have characterized how physical man united with the spiritual-soul man at that time. And then we followed this development until our days, which we recognized as those of the deepest decline of mankind with the spirit into matter. We have recognized that now again an ascent must take place, a spiritualization, and have also spoken about 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 at the time of the Lemurians. Two sexes already existed among the lower beings on the moon; but the human being who dwells in each of you was only divided into two sexes at that time when he was incorporated into the physical form. We must think of man's prehistory – before his division into two sexes, into a male and a female – in such a way that what we call sexuality did not yet exist at all, or at least had a completely different form. Now a great deal depends on our understanding the significance for the whole of human evolution of what I have just mentioned.

[ 4 ] If the division into two sexes had not occurred, if humanity had not completed its development through the interaction of the masculine and feminine, then the human being would have been shaped quite differently. The individual in the human being comes precisely from the influence of the masculine. Yesterday I explained to you the difference between a group soul and an individual soul. With animals it is quite different. The animal already has the sexes on the astral plane. Man, on the other hand, did not have the two sexes on the astral plane before he had not yet descended into the individual human bodies, or rather, man had not yet fallen into the sexes. If the sexless part of the human being had now propagated itself in the physical world, if a kind of asexuality had taken the place of the two sexes, it would not have been possible to make the human being an individual being. This is precisely the meaning of human evolution: that individual human beings become ever more individual and more individual.

[ 5 ] If we were to go back to the time I characterized yesterday, we would see how people look very much the same in their outward appearance. The interaction of the two sexes created individual diversity; and individual diversity will increase as humans move further into the future. Without the division into sexes, generations would always look similar. We must say that the fact that humans are becoming more and more independent depends on the two sexes.

[ 6 ] In primeval times and well into the Atlantean period, and even into the post-Atlantean period, what we call “close marriage” is prevalent among humanity, and only gradually did “distant marriage” replace close marriage. In primeval times, people married within small blood relationships and small clans. Among all peoples, you will find that marrying into a family in another tribe is not considered unusual, and it is seen as an important event everywhere. |

[ 7 ] The further back we go, the more we find that it is considered moral for people in related tribes to marry, for related blood to mix only with related blood. We can best explain this process if we start from a comparison that, while all other comparisons are flawed, is extremely apt. I would like to share a short story with you.

[ 8 ] You know Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger is a poet who describes his village characters with great devotion. Anzengruber also knows his subject; in the drama “Der Meineidbauer” (The Perjurer), he is able to present the farmers – similar figures, that is – on stage in a magnificent way, so that they stand firm. We know how magnificently they are presented in “Der Meineidbauer”, in “Pfarrer von Kirchfeld” and others. Once, Rosegger and Anzengruber were walking together, and Rosegger said: I know that you never actually look at the farmers; you would perhaps describe them even better if you went to them in the village. - Then Anzengruber said: If I did that, I might go completely mad. I have never really got to know farmers; the fact that I can describe them in this way comes from the fact that my father, my grandfather and all my ancestors were farmers, and I still have this farmer blood in me. It is from this farmer blood that I create my characters and I don't care about the others; that still rumbles in my blood, so to speak!

[ 9 ] That is an interesting fact that leads us to what we have to consider. Where the blood remains unmixed, as was the case in the old tribal communities or among the farmers of Anzengruber, there remains a strong phenomenon, as it was still there in the last incarnation of the poet Anzengruber. He had inherited the power of creation and knew exactly how to appreciate it: it ran through the blood of the generations, the power of creation. And so it is when kindred blood is only mixed with kindred blood. The mixing of alien blood with alien blood has a blotting out effect on the creative power of the soul. If Anzengruber had married anyone who belonged to a completely different class, his children would no longer have had this creative power.

[ 10 ] Almost all peoples who still exist today show this phenomenon at the beginning: an extraordinary memory is associated with marriage in small blood relationships. It is associated with that dull, dim clairvoyance. You remember what you have experienced since birth and consider it to be part of your personality. Before close marriage was replaced by distant marriage, people literally remembered what their grandfather and ancestors had experienced well beyond; they said “I” and had the experiences of what their grandfather, great-grandfather and so on had experienced. The further back we go, the more we find the memory reaching up through the generations.

[ 11 ] And the interesting thing is that the peoples did not feel at all as individual selves; they said “I” to the grandfather, thereby applying the same name to themselves, a name that included everyone. With the same right that you give yourself a name today and refer to the individual personality, these peoples gave themselves a name that reached far back into the centuries, because birth did not sever the memory. The individual person had no name, because birth was not a special event. As long as the thread of memory reached, one had only one name for all. You have a document for this naming in the Bible; all the arguments about the meaning of the patriarchal names are only scholarly disputes. Adam was therefore Adam, and so old, because memory has been preserved for centuries, because he who descended from a personality felt with him as an ego, that all was called “Adam,” where the blood flowing through the centuries produced such memory. As long as memory was preserved in the line of generations and people remembered the events of their ancestors as their own, they said: “Adam is still there.” They did not feel at all as individual physical personalities, but rather as what was spiritually present and held the persons together.

[ 12 ] Then came more and more long-distance marriage, and the mixing of blood will increasingly kill the memory that goes beyond the individual human appearance. The narrowing of memory has come as a result of long-distance marriage. It is the way of humanity that the individual increasingly outgrows the tribe. In the common blood that flowed through the tribes, the common expression for this blood also flowed: love. What is related by blood loves each other. In the course of time, however, that love, which we can call primeval love, which is bound to blood and has led to the formation of an entire family, will fade away. The love of the past is quite different from the love that shines for us as the love of the future. In the post-Atlantic era, we still find love through blood prevailing: those in whose veins common blood flows love each other. But this will increasingly disappear; people are increasingly moving out of close blood relationships and becoming individual.

[ 13 ] This primeval love, which arose when the souls descended into the physical bodies, is thus diminishing in the course of time; it flowed into man 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 at that time something else came into being. Man had become a living soul and with that a lung-breather. The air that he inhaled in this way caused his blood to become red, and the red blood expresses the nature of the self. As long as the blood is a common blood, the self is a common self, as we see in Judaism, where an entire people is ruled by a group soul. But more and more, people are maturing to become independent of their relatives' blood. When the breath entered into man, this was the first predisposition to blood formation. But only through long periods of time has humanity matured to such an extent that this blood is so interwoven that universal human love can take the place of primal love. Imagine the development of humanity as I have just described it: Primordial love would gradually die, and love for relatives - from mother to child and so on - would have to decrease; blood does not work to such an extent that a bond of love could embrace all of humanity, and the power of the ego, the power of selfishness, will only increase. An event had to occur that would replace the original love with a different love, a spiritual love: this event is Christianity. With the appearance of Christianity, what would otherwise have happened was averted: the disintegration of all mankind into individual human atoms. Human beings must become ever more independent, that is in the evolution of their blood; but now what has been driven apart in a natural way must be brought together again in a spiritual way, through the new power that can now work without blood-love: this is Christianity. The Mystery of Golgotha thus acquires a fundamental significance for the whole evolution of humanity. When we understand this, we understand the meaning of the words: the blood of Christ. It is not something that can be experienced and investigated only on the outer level, but something that must be regarded as a mystical fact in itself. It is with full consciousness that I have entitled my book, not “The Mysticism of Christianity”, but “Christianity as Mystical Fact”.

[ 14 ] To grasp what the Christ Jesus himself was on earth, to understand that Christianity has such fundamental significance, we must look at the preparations for Christianity. These were already in place in all ancient times. You can really see how the ancient Christian viewed this by taking a passage from Augustine: What is today called the Christian religion has always been the true religion, only that what used to be the true religion is now called the Christian religion. — Augustine still knew in his time that Christianity had a prerequisite: what was practiced in the ancient mysteries. And it is precisely this that is to be revealed to people through the theosophical movement. I would like to characterize this with a few words.

[ 15 ] There were schools that were both churches and places of art at the same time; at the head of these schools were the leaders of humanity, those who were most advanced in development. Those people who were considered spiritually suited to gain a personal insight into the spiritual world around us were accepted there. They were carefully prepared by first having to learn the facts of the spiritual world in theory, much as we learn in spiritual science today. Then came ever higher levels. The learning changed into life, the exoteric into the esoteric. They were taught everything in a lively way. There were strict rules as to how the student had to organize his life so that he could slowly ascend to the contemplation of the spiritual world. First the student had learned the facts and laws of the spiritual world, and then, through prescribed exercises, he had created the organs for him to be able to look into this spiritual world.

[ 16 ] And now I will tell you the final act of it. You must remember that man's sleep consists of the astral body leaving the etheric and physical bodies, and that death consists of the physical body remaining alone and the etheric and astral bodies being united. Now it was the case that the leader of the mysteries, the hierophant, used the appropriate methods to treat the person in such a way that the physical body lay there as if dead for three and a half days, and the etheric body was outside with the person's other limbs. This was neither sleep nor death, but a third. Everything was so arranged that during these three and a half days the human being could make the journey through the higher worlds; under the guidance of the hierophant-initiator he now became acquainted with the things we have also described in the preceding lectures. He learned all this through his own direct observation. After three and a half days he was a twice-born man. When he 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 word applied to him: “Blessed are they that have seen.”

[ 17 ] When he returned, he received a completely new name; he discarded his name and continued to go by his new name as an initiate. And a remarkable phenomenon occurred when he descended and reoccupied his physical body, when he was able to live in the physical world again. Then all would utter a single phrase, which in German would be: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me!” This was felt by such a man who had come so far; he said of himself: “Everything that was left of the primal love, which had to be implanted in man through blood, must be replaced in me by a love that knows no distinction between mother, brother, sister and the other people.” He had spiritually left parents, wife and child, brother and sister, and had become a follower of the spirit. In him, it was said, the Christ had come alive.

[ 18 ] All this had taken place in the secrecy of the mysteries. Such people were the witnesses for 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 for the individual in the mystery schools was fulfilled for the whole world once in the physical world in Palestine. If you could take the instructions for the ancient initiates today, you would see that these instructions were concluded with these three and a half days: never before had this happened on the physical plane. A new epoch began with it. 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 through the embodiment in the body of Jesus of Nazareth of such a comprehensive individuality as the Ruler of the Solar Spirits was. No human ego like the one we have within us could ever have accomplished what took place at Golgotha. It took an ego like that, which was already so advanced on the sun at that time.

[ 19 ] In this way, we understand the God-humanity of Christ Jesus, which is so easily denied in modern times because people are no longer able to immerse themselves in the depths of the spiritual world. And so we see, when we look at the matter in the right light, something taking place at Golgotha that has a significance that extends far beyond all other events.

[ 20 ] Among the more recent spirits, only Richard Wagner sensed something of the significance of blood. I have explained to you how the glandular life of man is the expression of the etheric body, the nervous life the expression of the astral body, and how the expression of the I is the blood life. I have shown you how, in the development of the blood, if Christ had not come, there would have been a development towards greater selfishness; the I would have increased selfishness, the egoism, more and more. The blood that was in excess in humanity had to flow out, had to be sacrificed, so that humanity would not be completely absorbed in selfishness. The true mystic sees in the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer the effluent surplus blood that had to flow so that humanity would not fall into selfishness, so that a spiritual and soul brotherly love could embrace all humanity. This is how the spiritual scientist views the blood flowing from the cross, which had to be taken from humanity so that it could rise from the material. In place of the love held together by blood, a love for the future has been established, a love that passes from person to person. Only in this sense can we understand the words of Christ Jesus: “If anyone does not give up father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, he cannot be my disciple.” This cannot be understood in any other way than as meaning that through the deed of Golgotha everything is overcome that previously had to be strengthened by the related blood, by the love of relatives. The one who in this place substituted the new, spiritual-soul love, was allowed to say that the old love must be abandoned. Such is the context.

[ 21 ] The appearance of Christ Jesus Himself is a profound mystical fact 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 only by the law of gravity, not wanting to see it as an expression of the soul.

[ 22 ] Such things can only be grasped with spiritual science. This is why the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth differs from that of all other founders of religions. What the others have given is a teaching. With Christ Jesus, one can truly say that almost every word He spoke has been said before in some context. With Hermes and Buddha, it depends on what they said. With Christ Jesus, it depends on the fact that He was there, that He lived, and that the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.

[ 23 ] Therefore, anyone who wants to be a Christian in the true spiritual sense is so by believing in the divinity of Christ Jesus himself. The first disciples did not just say, “We have been sent out to proclaim the words,” but 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 existence that matters. Imagine the founders of other religions gone. You would not lose anything. Imagine Christ Jesus gone – and Christianity would not be there! That is the difference. Therefore, no matter how much people like Darwin, Strauß, Drews and so on proclaim that all other religious teachings can be found in Christianity, that is not what matters; what matters is that He was there and that He presented as a fact what was foretold in the prophets. Thus Christianity is not a doctrine, but a power. If you could rise from here to another planet, you would see not only the earth, but also the etheric and astral bodies of the earth, the spiritual earth apart from the physical; and if you could dwell on this star for thousands of years, thousands of years, even from the time before the appearance of Christ Jesus, you would have seen how the color of the astral body has changed in the spirit of the earth itself through the presence of Christ Jesus. The earth has truly changed, and people who live after the appearance of Christ Jesus live on a changed earth and have therefore become able to overcome the deepest descent of the spirit. In the past, one had to be elevated in the spiritual world if one wanted to know something about it; in Christianity, the mystery itself has descended. For physical eyes, it was there as a historical event. The deity had to descend to lead humanity out of the physical world back into the spiritual one.

[ 24 ] This is how you will find Christianity described in the purest gospel, the Gospel of John. It is not just a work of fiction, but a book of life. Only he who has experienced it knows what the Gospel of John 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 a person can come to the knowledge of Christianity.

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

[ 27 ] From the point of view of esotericism, when you delve into the first words of the Gospel of John, you experience them as an awakening power within you. Then, however, one must apply the Gospel of John as it was originally intended to be used, and one must have the patience to take the first sentences of the Gospel of John as one's meditation material again and again, and to let them pass over one's soul every morning. Then it is a power that draws out hidden forces deep within our soul. However, one must have the right translation for it. They must express approximately in German word characters what was really in the original text. In a translation that is as correct as possible, I would like to show you that the actual spiritual life of the Gospel of John is characteristically expressed in the words:

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

This was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through him, and without him nothing came into being.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

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

He came for a witness, to bear witness about the Light, that through him all might believe.

He was not the light, but a witness to the light. For the true light that enlightens all men was coming 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 the individual people, it came to the I-people, but the individual people, the I-people, did not accept it.

But those who accepted it could reveal themselves through it as children of God.

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

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we heard his teaching, the teaching of the only Son of the Father, full of devotion and truth.

[ 28 ] I could now tell you many things about how you would have to immerse yourself in the individual chapters of the Gospel of John. I will give you just one example of how you would have to use the chapter from the thirteenth on if you were a true disciple of Christian initiation. What I am telling you in words has actually happened. To make it clearer, I will present it in the form of a dialog that may give you an idea of what took place between teacher and pupil.

[ 29 ] Then the teacher said to the pupil: You must develop a feeling within you, think the following: You must put yourself in the place of the plant. If it could have consciousness like you, and if it could look down on the stones through this consciousness, it would say: You dead stone, you are a lower being than I am in the series 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 be without that which is lower than I. – And if the plant could feel, then it would say: Although I am higher than the stone, I humbly bow down to it, because 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 be, even though I am higher than you. I owe my existence to you lower creature. In humility I bow down before you.

[ 30 ] Now go up to man, to the most diverse, the lower and higher ones. What should each one say who stands somewhat higher on the ladder of development than the rest? Just as the plant tends towards the mineral, just as the animal towards the plant, so every human being who stands higher should bend down to the lower one and say: You may be lower, but I owe it to you that I can be here!

[ 31 ] Now imagine this carried out to the highest degree, to Christ Jesus, and you have the relationship of Christ Jesus to the apostles, with whom he was together and to whom he bent down, like the plant to the mineral, and washed their feet: “I came forth from you, I bend down to you.”

[ 32 ] The disciple had to go through such feelings through all stages over long periods of time. And this feeling had to become more and more vivid; then he awakened at the first stage of Christian initiation. One can feel this by an outer and by an inner symptom: the outer one is that the disciple really feels for some time as if his feet were surrounded by watery element. And the inner symptom is that he experiences the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John as an inner vision on the astral plane. |

[ 33 ] Then they walked on. The teacher said to the disciple: You must experience something else. You must now imagine that physical and mental suffering and pain are assailing you from all sides. You have to brace yourself against all of it so that you can say: No matter what pains and suffering come at me, I will stand tall and not let myself be brought down. This is called the “flagellation”. The outer symptom of this is that you feel something like pain in your skin, which is a sign that the soul is ready. And the inner symptom is that you see yourself scourged on the astral plane. But the essential thing is what the soul has gained in inner experience.

[ 34 ] The third thing the disciple hears from the teacher is this: Now you must develop a feeling that you not only withstand all the pain that comes your way, but you must remain steadfast even if the most sacred thing in you were dragged into the dust. You have to remain so strong that all people could tell you: this is worth nothing. Even if people trample it underfoot, you have to know what it is worth and have to be able to stand up to a whole world. When the disciple had attained this, it was said that he had experienced the “crown of thorns”. The outer symptom is a feeling of a certain pain in the head, and the inner symptom is that one sees oneself in the situation of the thorn-crowned Redeemer.

[ 35 ] The fourth is this: the teacher tells the disciple, “You must gain a completely new relationship to your body. You live in your body; but now you must regard it as something quite alien, just as the outer table is an alien thing to you, and you must even learn to say: I carry my body through the world. It must be something that is as far from you as other external objects. Then one said one had experienced the “Crucifixion.” Just as the savior carried the cross, so one carried one's own body, like a piece of wood. The external symbol of the crucifixion itself is the stigmata. In meditation, the disciple is able to voluntarily evoke the stigmata on his hands, feet, and right side of the chest; red spots appear that resemble the wounds of the cross. This “blood test” is an external symptom of having 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 “mystical death”. This can only be described approximately. The mystical “death” consists in the fact that it actually occurs to a person as if the whole world were plunged into the darkest darkness and stood before him like a black wall. The whole world of the senses is as if extinguished and submerged; one can experience that. At that moment one gets to know – which one can actually only get to know through this event – all the evil and wickedness that can exist in the world. To get to know life, one must also go through this. It is called the Descent into Hell. Then comes a strange event: they see it spread out before their eyes. That wall parts: it is the Rending of the Temple Veil, and then one looks up into the spiritual world. This is called the Mystical Death and the Rending of the Veil.

[ 37 ] The sixth stage is the “burial and resurrection”, where man still acquires the former feelings that the other external objects still become something to him that belongs to his body, where the whole earth still belongs to him. Just as a finger could say, “I am only a finger because I am part of the hand,” so man is only on earth because he belongs to the earth. People can walk around on the earth, and so they think they are independent. When one becomes imbued with this feeling that everything belongs to us, then what is called the “burial” takes place: one rests spiritually and soulfully in the earth, and only after that is one, so to speak, resurrected spiritually. Only then can we understand the deed of Christ Jesus, who united himself with the earth through death and thus, as he was once the regent of the sun, has now become the spirit of the earth. And the words in the Gospel of John are to be taken literally: “He who 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 also understand that you literally trample the body of Christ Jesus underfoot. And you will be united with him when you experience the entombment of this sixth step.

[ 38 ] Then comes the seventh stage, the «ascension», which rightly cannot be described, because only someone who could think without using the brain could understand it.

[ 39 ] I have described to you how the Christian initiation was undergone. Through this, the disciple 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 you could not perceive the Christ without the Christ organ. The eye is born of light for the light. The light is the cause of seeing. The sun must be present externally as the real sun, and you experience this real sun in your eye. It is exactly the same with the spiritual eye. It is just empty talk to speak only of the “inward” Christ; that would be the same as speaking of the eye without there being a sun. Man can acquire the ability to see the Christ through the exercises that are now given; but that he can have the power to do so comes again from the historical Christ Himself. As the sun to the eye, so the Christ to the development of the Christ-organ in man.

[ 40 ] Not instructions should be given here, but facts should be stated here. But one should get to know what exists in the world. And these lectures are there for that, so that one learns to recognize from what depths the real Christian spirit draws, and how the Gospel of John itself contains the methods of Christian initiation, through which man receives the eye that can see the Christ himself. But those who want to proclaim him must have lived with him in a certain way, really, not in a mere belief.

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

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If not the divine power that dwells in us,
How could we be enraptured by the divine?

[ 42 ] Outside in the world, things and entities must be; it 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 the Christ, but also no possibility of developing the organ!