The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism XIII

[ 1 ] Today and tomorrow it will be my task to show you the path to the higher worlds that is particularly suitable for the present time. This path has been cultivated within the so-called secret schooling, especially since the 14th and 15th centuries, and is most suitable for the present human being. We shall understand better what is involved if we first take a look at the future development of the human being.

[ 2 ] We have spoken about the development of the human being through the states of Saturn, the sun, the moon and the earth. Now it is difficult for someone who only thinks in terms of the present to imagine how one can know something about the future. But you must realize that certain great laws work in the future just as they work in the present. Those who are familiar with these laws can glimpse into the future. In the field of material reality, no one will doubt that something can be predicted prophetically, for example, that solar and lunar eclipses and other star constellations can be calculated far into the future. In the field of material reality, no one will doubt it anymore. Everyone also knows, when they are told that these and those substances are mixed in the retort, that the scientist can say what will happen when they are mixed. This is a prophecy that refers to external sensory facts; prophecy can be practiced because one knows the laws according to which the substances work. Likewise, in spiritual science one gets to know the laws according to which human life unfolds, and one can therefore know something in advance that will happen in the future.

[ 3 ] Of course, an objection arises that has arisen among philosophers of all times: Yes, if one can foresee what will happen in the future, then there could be no question of human freedom. But here people confuse looking into the future with being predetermined. That is why you find the strangest assertions about this in all philosophies; because all philosophers have been unable to make this distinction. Actually, only Jakob Böhme! I would like to use an example to make this clear to you.

[ 4 ] I would like to compare time with space. Imagine you are standing here and there are two people standing on the street outside. You see what they are doing in the distance. Does that mean you are the one who determines what they do? No, you see it, but the other two act in complete freedom. Nothing they do is determined by your looking at it. Now imagine that the clairvoyant sees what will happen in the future. But he only sees it; the events are not determined by that. If these events were determined by the future, that is, already determined in the present, then it would not be seeing into the future. You only realize this difference when you think long and hard about the difference between being predetermined and foreseeing.

[ 5 ] Today I do not want to describe to you what the earth will look like when the Jupiter and Venus periods are reached. I would like to tell you something else that will give you a picture of the development of the human being into the future; I would like to present to you something that comes from the oldest Christian mysteries, from the same Christian school of the genuine Dionysius, as a teaching that has always been presented in the Christian esoteric schools. The starting point for this is the following comparison: I am speaking to you here. You hear my words, you hear my thoughts, which are initially in my soul and which I could also hide from you if I did not put them into words. I transform them into sounds; if it were not for the air between you and me, you would not be able to hear the words. When I utter a word here, the air in the room is moved at that moment; each time I put the whole air space into a certain state of vibration with my words; the whole body of air vibrates in the way my words are pronounced. Now let's go a little further. Imagine you could make the air fluid and then solid. It is already possible to solidify the air; you know that water can exist in vapor form, that it can cool down and then become liquid, and that it can become solid in ice. Now imagine that I am speaking the word “God” through the airspace. If you could make the air solid at the moment the sound waves were here, then a shape – such as a shell shape, for example – would fall down. Another wave would fall down at the word 'world'. You could catch my words, and a crystallized air form would correspond to each word.

[ 6 ] This example actually occurred in the Christian schools. First there is a spoken word, then it becomes fixed, takes on a definite form; earlier, before it had become fixed, it was a thought hidden within. Now the Christian imagined: The work here in space is the same as the work in the big world. The work started from the thought of things; then the deity spoke the thought out into space. What you see outside in plants, minerals, are such solidified words of God. You could think of everything as dissolved into the sound vibrations of the divine world word. “Everything I see, I see as a word of God that has become solid,” the Christian said to himself. And in a certain respect he distinguished between the ‘Father in secret,’ who has not yet expressed Himself, the ‘Word’ or the ‘Son,’ that resounds through space, and then the word that has become solid, the ”Revelation.” This is how you understand the beginning of the Gospel of John in a deeper sense: “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 it, and without it not one thing came into being.” Everything that has come into being has come into being through the Word. We must take things as literally as possible, then we can easily recognize the creative power of the Word or Logos. In the Christian sense, what is in the second place is the word, or the Logos. The word “Logos” must not be translated differently, because it is meant that everything that exists outside in creation is based on the unspoken creative word, that it resounded as a word, and that the origin of all being lies in it. If we were to go back far enough in the turn of time, we would hear all the objects that we know as animals, plants, minerals and human beings resounding through space as a “word”, just as you hear my words today. This is because the air had not yet cooled down enough at that time for them to fall down as forms.

[ 7 ] If you bear this in mind, you can say to yourself: the word was once creative. Today, man is a beginner in what his ancestors once did, the gods who stood above him. Once the gods spoke the world into existence, and then this creative activity transformed into what we have around us. What we can bring forth today in the plant, animal and human in the sexual sphere is only a transformed form of the former divine creative word. Human beings also carry a higher and a lower nature within them. What is most fully developed is found in the sexual sphere, and in the larynx man has the beginning of a new kind of production. When he sends forth the word, it marks the beginning of what he will one day achieve. In what the gods once accomplished, man today is in the beginning stages. In place of the old production another will come. And as man today produces words with his larynx, so later his larynx will be a productive organ; it will produce ever higher and higher, denser and denser creations. What is only air today will be essence in the future. When the Earth has transformed into Jupiter, the word will be creative in the mineral kingdom; in the state of Venus, the larynx will produce plants; and so it will continue until it is able to produce its own kind. It only came into being in the form it is today when it was able to send air outwards through the lungs in the form of sound. What we can only say to ourselves today, we will be able to produce in future stages of the earth's development in such a way that it remains. And finally, the larynx will be the organ through which man will produce his own kind in purity, without sexuality. It will have transformed its larynx into a reproductive organ.

[8] This gives us an insight into what the human being of the future will be like, what his larynx is predisposed to. An enigmatic phenomenon can point out how the life of the larynx is actually connected with certain developmental states: in the male, voice change is brought about with sexual maturity, the young man “mutates”. The larynx is at its beginning, sexuality at its end. Such is the delicate interconnection of things in nature. What we have in sexual life is a dying element; what we have in the larynx, in the word, will in the future be a productive organ of ourselves.

[ 9 ] We could cite many other examples of how the human being will gradually develop the organs that are only present in the rudiment today, which he has appropriated to his respiratory system on earth, but which belongs to the system of the heart.

[ 10 ] Now we shall see how, through the schooling that has been introduced in Europe since the 14th century, one can actually anticipate future states of humanity, and how one can also shape one's inner development more quickly than if one simply leaves oneself to the course of the world. The training known as the Rosicrucian training is the most suitable for the present-day human being. Rosicrucianism has a bad reputation for those who have only heard something about it. And if what the books write about it and the scholars know were true, then Rosicrucianism would be nothing more than the fraud for which it is considered. But the truth is that those who judge Rosicrucianism in this way only know the fraud. Today, however, we want to look at the true Rosicrucianism, which originated with the individuality who hides under the name Christian Rosenkreuz, and who in 1459 gave the impetus to the Rosicrucian movement.

[ 11 ] I would like to emphasize that what I am saying has been singled out as an example, just like what I told you yesterday at Christian schooling. I will therefore give you the seven main points of the Rosicrucian training, which not everyone goes through in the same order, but we will first mention these stages, which are relevant for everyone in the sense of Rosicrucianism.

[ 12 ] The first is what is called “study”. “Acquiring imaginative knowledge” is the second. The third is “acquiring occult or secret writing”. The fourth is “preparing the philosopher's stone”. The fifth is what is called “correspondence of the small world – the microcosm – and the great world – the macrocosm”. The sixth is “living in the macrocosm”, and the seventh is what is called “bliss”.

[ 13 ] The Rosicrucian path is the one that leads most surely and most deeply to the realization of Christianity; only the Christian path is more suitable for those who can persevere in faith and stir up the feelings within that I described to you yesterday. But the Rosicrucian path is for the person who can combine Christian truths with the truths of the external world. Only then will it be possible to defend Christianity against any external attack. Christianity is such a worldview that one can never be wise enough to understand it sufficiently. There is no degree that would be high enough to fully understand how Christianity is for the wisest of the wise. But the Rosicrucian path is the most suitable path for the man of the present.

[ 14 ] We pursue the study in the sense of Rosicrucianism when we have such thoughts that have nothing at all to do with our sensory world. Actually, the Western world only knows what is called “thinking in free thoughts” in geometry; that is why the Christian-Gnostic schools also had the name “mathesis” for what referred to the higher truths, to God and the higher worlds, because one must understand this independently of all sensuality, just as one must understand mathematics independently of all sensuality. A circle drawn with chalk is highly imperfect; you can only imagine the only real circle, and you can only have everything you can learn about the circle in your mind. It is precisely in mathematics that you learn to think independently of the senses, about the circle that you construct in your mind, about the triangle that you construct in your mind, whose angles together add up to a hundred and eighty degrees. It is somewhat uncomfortable to learn to think without the external sensual things, and for most people there is no other field of study for this than theosophy. I told you in the very first lesson: logically, their knowledge is absolutely comprehensible. But if someone wants to discover the truths for themselves, then they need clairvoyance. Logic is sufficient for understanding.

[ 15 ] Only our materialistic time could invent calculating machines where one learns not to think in a way that is free of sensuality. A child must learn to grasp things free of sensuality. It will be of immense value for the art of education to know how education is influenced by spiritual knowledge. Spiritual science is also a good training in sensuality-free thinking. For everything I have said about Saturn, the sun, and the human being's elements of being, you cannot see; you have to grasp it in sensuality-free thinking, and no one should believe that they can train themselves well without first grasping things theoretically. It is fortunate that these things do not exist for the senses; this is precisely how one acquires a thinking that transcends the senses. Therefore, it is enough for some people to simply engage with what Theosophy has to say about things that cannot be grasped by the senses. These were always the thoughts that were presented to people in the Rosicrucian schools, and they were allowed to imprint these thoughts on their minds.

[ 16 ] If you want to go further, you will find a good means of training in pure thinking in my books “Truth and Science” and “The Philosophy of Freedom”. These books are merely a workout for thinking that is free of sensuality. With other books, you usually can't change much by moving a thought to a different place. With these books, the thoughts cannot be moved to a different place. These books came about in such a way that my personality only provided the opportunity for these thought-structures to enter the sensual realm. One simply had to surrender to these thoughts generating themselves and developing themselves. Those who want to delve deeper and spend half a year on it – it is not easy, but this effort is the very best one can achieve – and who can read it to the end, have summoned a power from within themselves that was hidden in them.

[ 17 ] The second is imagination, pictorial knowledge, which is entirely under the impression of the beautiful Goethe saying: “All that is transitory is only a parable.” Actually, only those who have gained certainty in their thinking should engage with it. Those who have not yet attained this state could easily fall into fantasy. The prerequisite, therefore, is that one has first become clear-headed; nothing hinders one more from going astray than clear thinking. And nothing tempts one more to unclear thinking than illogic.

[ 18 ] Imagination could be described in the broadest sense as looking at everything around you as you look at a person. Look at a person's face: you see wrinkles forming and disappearing; you don't just describe them, you call them smiles or sadness. A person's smile reveals to you a cheerful mood of his soul. You don't just draw conclusions about the inside from the outside, but it is a direct sign of the inside. Or you see the tear welling up: you are not just a physicist who judges a tear only by the law of gravity, but you know that the tear is an expression of the inner sadness of the soul. And so, for you, everything on the outside is an expression of the inner mood of the soul. And the Rosicrucian disciple attains the mood that everything he sees outside becomes an expression for him, let us say, of the earth spirit: a certain plant, the autumn crocus, will in reality become the expression of the grieving earthly existence, other plants the expression of the cheerful earthly existence. Just as the smiling countenance is the expression of the cheerful mood of the soul, the flowers will be an expression for the cheerful or sad mood of the earth. And Goethe did not mean it merely as an external image when he speaks of the earth spirit in Faust:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
an eternal sea,
a changing weaving,
a glowing life:
So I create at the whirring loom of time
weaving the living garment of the Godhead.

[ 19 ] The earth spirit gradually becomes something for him that lives in the earth, and he develops a spiritual and soul relationship with all of nature around him. There is one mood within this nature that I would like to make particularly clear to you.

[ 20 ] The Rosicrucian disciple walks across the fields and sees how the little dew pearls hang over all the plants. He must remember the old Misty Home, where the air was filled with dew mist and where people were connected to nature in a completely different way. When the Rosicrucian disciple walks through the fields and sees the dew pearls, he says to himself: this is what was dissolved in the old Nebula Home in the atmospheric air. — And a deep memory arises in him from the Atlantic time.

[ 21 ] The imagination was particularly highly developed in the pupils of the medieval Rosicrucian schools; also in those who were disciples of the Holy Grail. I will try to express something that was taught – because I can't formulate it any differently – in a dialogue.

[ 22 ] The teacher said to the student: Look at the plant, how it sprouts from the ground, how it opens the calyx with the fertilization organs upwards, and how the sun's rays come down, causing the blossom to burst open and the fruit to ripen. This was the picture that the Rosicrucian disciple and also the disciple of the Holy Grail had to call up before his soul. Even in materialistic science there is something that is deeply significant: the plant is compared with the human being. But then you would have to compare the root with the head and the flower with what in man are the organs of fertilization, and what he shamefully hides; the root is the head in the plant. Man is the reversed plant, the animal is only the half-reversed plant. Hence the Rosicrucians said: Look at the plant, the root in the ground, the organs of fertilization chaste, stretched out towards the sunbeam. Look at the animal: the backbone horizontal, and then at man: completely transformed. Plant, animal and man in their development symbolized by the cross! The cross is plant, animal and man. And now we shall understand the words of Plato: The World Soul is stretched to the World Cross. The World Soul, which permeates everything, is stretched to plant, animal and man.

[ 23 ] Now the Rosicrucian student was instructed: Look at the plant. In its kind it is lower than you, it has not yet consciousness and thinking; but its matter is pure and chaste; it stretches its chalice towards the sun, without desire and lust it stretches the organ of reproduction towards the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. But now matter is penetrated by what desire is. And you form the ideal for the future that matter will be purified again, that it will produce in pure chastity. And he was pointed to the larynx, where man will have reacquired in purity the chastity of the plant calyx. Imagine the plant calyx, which is still without desire. It develops through desire, but it will become pure again and produce chastity again by allowing itself to be fertilized by the sunbeam that has been transformed into the spiritual, by the holy love lance. — And a premonition of this holy love lance is the lance with which the heart of Christ Jesus was pierced on the cross.

[ 24 ] Yesterday we saw how this blood from the wound of the Redeemer banished selfishness from the earth. Thus, this lance is a premonition of the higher lance, which is the sunbeam translated into the spiritual. And the Holy Grail points to the chalice of humanity, which develops out of the larynx, which will be precisely the purified reproductive organ of the future, as it is today in plants.

[ 25 ] That is the deeper concept of the Holy Grail, and that is how it was made clear at the imaginative level to the Rosicrucian disciple and to the disciple of the Holy Grail. Compare what you now see in these images: the chalice of the plant, the generative organ bathed in desire, the Holy Grail, the chalice free of desire. Compare this with the dry, sober intellectual concept that modern science gives you, and you have the difference between imagination and mere intellectual thinking, the whole of world events in a picture! This is important because mere intellectual concepts, as humans have them today, are not creative; but for the person who combines these concepts into images, these images are truly creative. This was felt in ancient times, and it is even taken into account in the education of children. I would like to discuss a current question.

[ 26 ] It is all too easy to say today: “What nonsense did our ancestors teach us children with their fairy tales about storks!” We have to tell the children the truth today. If our descendants treat us as we treated our ancestors, then they will also laugh at us and say: Our ancestors thought that man comes into being through material interaction! – And they will look back to the time when people explained this process to children in the spirit. In the days when the stork tale originated, the ancients themselves believed in it because they knew full well that when a human being is born, the soul comes down from the spiritual world; they always associated this with something winged. And you can still find this in children's songs, for example in the ditty:

Fly, beetle, fly!
Your father is at war!
Your mother is in Pomerania.
Pomerania has burnt down!
Fly, beetle, fly!

[ 27 ] This “fly” is meant as an image for the human soul, because people had an idea of the astral space, of the bodies flying there, which come from there into the physical world. And what is “Pommerland”? “Pommer”, or what is the same: “Pummerle”, is nothing more than the name for a small child; and Pommerland, Pummerleland is the children's land from which the mother fetches the small child. One must explain this only completely out of the spiritual world. If you then remember that the picture of the stork bringing the children is actually a picture of a spiritual process, reincarnation, then you will understand how infinitely important it is that the person first because his state of mind is quite different if the child is first taught the image of the spiritual process, so that he can also hear the physical process with holy reverence.

[ 28 ] Now you will be able to believe in the stork yourself when you know this: the stork is the image for the descending soul! Your instruction will inspire the child's imagination, and when you understand the truth, a mysterious aura will emanate from it, and that will be transferred to the child. It is the same with all imaginations. You can teach children anything.

[ 29 ] If you are faced with the question of life after death, take the child to a butterfly chrysalis: just as the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, so the soul flies out of the body, even if it cannot be seen. But only he who believes in it himself, and for whom the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis at a lower level is the same as what happens to the soul at a higher level, will teach it to the child with conviction. When spiritual science immerses people in an understanding of the spiritual world, so that images live in people's hearts, then people will also be able to educate in a completely different way and not give the child dry intellectual truths that make the mind raw. You just don't have to draw them into the grotesque and comical, but you have to realize what important things of life are behind them.

[ 30 ] The third thing that man must acquire for himself, and by which he paves his path, is the “mastery of occult writing”. This does not consist in learning a writing as in ordinary life. Although our written characters are often based on occult images, they are not at all the same as occult writing. Here we are dealing with a way of finding our way into the real great cosmic forces at work in the world. And everything we record must be such that one developmental process leads to another. Take a plant: it bears seeds; in the seed you have the starting point for a new plant. But if you could really examine the process, you would see that nothing of the old plant passes into the new. In truth, the whole old plant perishes in terms of matter; the new plant builds itself up completely anew, only a kind of process of movement passes into the new plant. Here you have sealing wax and there an imprint of a seal; you impress the seal on the sealing wax, and yet nothing of the seal has passed over into the sealing wax; only the form passes over. — It is the same with every process of development. The old matter, in dying away, only affords the opportunity for the new form to arise again in the sense of the old one. This is indicated by two intertwining spirals that never actually come together. Such a transition took place after the Atlantean civilization. It faded as a cultural stage, and a new one arose in India. I have told you that in the year 800 the sun rose in the constellation Aries, before that in Taurus, still before that in Gemini, and even further back in Cancer. The Greco-Latin culture, which contained ours at its beginning, coincides with the time when the sun rose in Aries; the preceding culture, the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian, coincides with the time when the sun was in the constellation of Taurus; before that, you have the Persian culture, which coincides with the time when the sun rose in Gemini, and the ancient Indian culture developed when the sun was in Cancer: and there it is! ; before that, you had the Persian culture, which coincides with the time when the sun rose in Gemini, and the ancient Indian culture developed when the sun was in Cancer: and that is also where the sign of Cancer, the two intertwined spirals, was first written.

[ 31 ] In this way I could explain to you each sign of the zodiac from its true meaning. The characters are created out of nature, which are an expression of the forces and laws prevailing in nature outside. When one becomes acquainted with the occult characters, one begins to go forth out of oneself; one then penetrates into the secret foundations of nature.

[ 32 ] So you can see a little of the first three stages of the Rosicrucian path: “study”, “imaginative knowledge”, and the third: “appropriation of the occult writing”.

[ 33 ] Tomorrow we will discuss the other steps, starting with the “preparation of the philosopher's stone”.