The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Occult Signs and Symbols IV

in Relation to the Astral and Spiritual Worlds

[ 1 ] The most significant of all symbols and emblems, and the only one recognized as such by occultists throughout the ages, is the human being himself. Man has always been called a microcosm, a small world. And rightly so, because anyone who gets to know man closely and intimately will become more and more aware that in him, in a kind of miniaturization, everything that is spread out in the rest of nature is contained. This is perhaps difficult to understand at first, but if you reflect on it, you will grasp what is meant by it: all substances and forces can be found in man as a kind of extract, excerpt from the rest of nature. If you study any plant in regard to its essential nature, and are able to penetrate deeply enough, you will find that something of this same nature is contained in the human organism, however small a measure. And if you take an animal outside, you will always be able to detect something in the human organism that resembles it, and which has been taken into the human organism in a certain way.

[ 2 ] It is certainly necessary to look at the evolution of the world from the occult point of view in order to understand this correctly. For example, the occultist knows that man would not have a heart like he has today if there were no lions in nature. Let us imagine ourselves in an earlier time, when there were no lions. There were already people in those days, for man is the oldest being, but in those days their hearts were formed quite differently. Now in nature there are connections everywhere, which are not always obvious. When man in the distant past developed his heart into its present form, the lion came into being at the same time: the same forces shaped both. It is as if you were to extract the essence of the lion and, with divine skill, form the human heart out of it. You may think that there is nothing lion-like about the human heart, but for the occultist there is. You must not forget that when a thing is placed in a context, in an organism, it works quite differently than when it is free. You can also say the other way around: if you could extract the essence of the heart and then wanted to form a being that would correspond to this heart if it were not determined by the forces of the organism, then you would have the lion. All the qualities of courage, of boldness, or, as the occultist says, the “regal” qualities of man, arise from the connection with the lion, and Plato, who was an initiate, has placed the royal soul in the heart.

[ 3 ] Paracelsus used a very beautiful comparison for this connection of man with nature. He says: It is as if the individual beings in nature were the letters, but man were the word that is composed of these letters. - Outside the great world: the macrocosm; inside us the small world: the microcosm. Outside, everything exists for itself. In man, it is determined by the harmony in which he is placed with the other organs. And precisely for this reason, we can visualize in man the evolution of our entire universe, insofar as it belongs to us.

[ 4 ] An image of this development of man in connection with the world to which he belongs can be seen in the seals that were hung in the festival hall during the congress days in Munich. Let us see what they represent!

[ 5 ] The first shows a man clothed in white robes, his feet like metal, like a river of ore; a fiery sword protrudes from his mouth; his right hand is surrounded by the signs of our planet: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. Those who are familiar with the Apocalypse of John will remember that a fairly consistent description of this image can be found there, for John was an initiate. This seal represents, one might say, the idea of all humanity. We will understand this if we recall some ideas that are already familiar to the elders here.

[ 6 ] If we go back in human evolution, we arrive at a time when man was still at a very imperfect stage. For example, he did not yet have what you carry on your shoulders today: the head. It would sound quite grotesque if one were to describe the human being of that time. The head, in fact, developed only gradually and will continue to develop. Today there are organs in man that have, so to speak, reached their conclusion; they will no longer be in the human body later. Others there are that will transform, such as our larynx, which has a tremendous future, admittedly in connection with our heart. Today, the human larynx is only at the beginning of its development; in the future, it will be the organ of reproduction transformed into the spiritual. You will get an idea of this mystery when you realize what man achieves with his larynx today. As I speak here, you hear my words. The fact that this hall is filled with air and that certain vibrations are caused in this air transmits my words to your ear, to your soul. When I pronounce a word, for example “world,” waves of air vibrate - these are the embodiment of my words. What man produces in this way today is called production in the mineral kingdom. The movements of the air are mineral movements; through the larynx, man has a mineral effect on his surroundings. But man will ascend and one day have a vegetable effect; then he will evoke not only mineral but also vegetable vibrations. He will speak to plants. The next step will be to speak to sentient beings; and at the highest level of development he will evoke his own kind through his larynx. Just as he can now express the content of his soul through the word, he will then express himself. And just as the human being of the future will speak beings, so the predecessors of humanity, the gods, were endowed with an organ with which they expressed all things that exist today. They expressed all people, all animals and everything else. They are all spoken words in the literal sense.

[ 7 ] “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God!” This is not a philosophical word in the speculative sense – John presents a primary fact that is to be taken quite literally.

[ 8 ] And in the end there will be the Word, and creation is a realization of the Word; and what man will bring forth in the future will be a realization of what the Word is today. But then man will no longer have the same physical form as today; he will have progressed to the point of the form that was on Saturn, to the point of fire-matter. Thus the creative power at the beginning of the evolution of the world is connected with our own creative power at the end of the evolution of the world.

[ 9 ] The Entity that has spoken out into the world all that is in it today is the great model for human beings. It has spoken out into the world Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth (in its two halves Mars-Mercury), Jupiter and Venus. The seven stars indicate this; they are a sign of the extent to which man can develop. In the fire matter, the planet will be at the end again; and man will be able to speak creatively in this fire matter: that is the fiery sword that protrudes from his mouth. Everything will be fiery, hence the feet of liquid ore. The meaning of the development in this sign is wonderfully moving.

[ 10 ] If you compare the human being of today with the animal, the difference presents itself in such a way that one must say: the human being has in himself, as an individual, what the individual animal does not have in itself. Man has an individual soul, the animal a group soul. The individual human being is a whole animal species in itself. All lions, for example, together have only one soul. These group 'I' are just like the human 'I', only they have not descended into the physical world; they are only to be found in the astral world. Here on earth you see physical human beings, each of whom carries his or her own 'I'. In the astral world, you will encounter beings in astral matter just like yourself, only in an astral rather than a physical shell. You can talk to them as you would to your own kind – these are the animal group souls.

[ 11 ] In earlier times, the human being also had a group soul; only gradually did he develop into his present independence. These group souls were originally in the astral world and then descended to dwell in the flesh. If one now examines the original group souls of man in the astral world, one finds four types from which man has emerged. If we compare these four types with the group souls that belong to the animal species of today, we can say that one of them can be compared with the lion, another with the eagle, a third with the ox, and the fourth with the prehistoric man before his ego descended. Thus, in the second picture, in the apocalyptic animals, the lion, the eagle, the cow and man, an earlier state of development of humanity is presented to us. But then there is and will be, as long as the earth will exist, a group soul for the higher revelation of man, which is represented by the lamb, by the mystical lamb, the sign for the redeemer. This grouping of the five group souls: the four of man around the great group soul, which still belongs to all men collectively - this represents the second picture.

[ 12 ] If we trace the evolution of man far, far back, so that we have to call many millions of years to our aid, then yet another aspect presents itself to us. Man is now on earth in the physical body, but there was a time when that which walked here on earth could not yet have received a human soul. In those days the soul was on the astral plane. And going further back in time, we come to a time when it was on the spiritual plane, in Devachan. In the future, it will ascend again to this high level when it has purified itself on earth. From the spiritual through the astral, the physical and back up to the spiritual: that is a long process of human development. And yet it seems like a short period when we compare it to the time of development that a person on Saturn and the other planets has gone through. There the human being not only went through physical transformations, but through spiritual, astral and physical ones. And if one wants to follow these, then one must go up into the spiritual worlds. There one hears the music of the spheres, tones that flood through the space in this spiritual world. And when the human being will again live in this spiritual world, then this harmony of the spheres will resound towards him. In occultism, they are called the trumpet tones of the angels. Hence the trumpets in the third picture. The revelations come from the spiritual world, but they are only revealed to him as he progresses. Then the book with the seven seals will be revealed to him. These seals are precisely what we are looking at here; they will unravel. Hence the book in the middle and below four phases of humanity; for the four horses are nothing other than stages of human development through the ages.

[ 13 ] But there is still a higher development. Man comes from even higher worlds, and he will ascend again to these higher worlds. And his form, as it is with man today, will have disappeared into the world. What is out there in the world today – the individual letters of which man is composed – he will have taken up again: his form will have identified itself with the form of the world. In a certain trivial presentation of Theosophy, one teaches and talks about seeking God within oneself. But anyone who wants to find God must seek him in the works that are spread throughout the universe. Nothing in the world is mere matter – that is only seemingly so – in reality all matter is the expression of spirituality, a manifestation of the activity of God. And man will, as it were, expand his being in the course of time to come; he will identify himself more and more with the world, so that he can be represented by putting the form of the cosmos instead of the human form. You see this in the fourth seal with the rock, the sea and the pillars. That which today permeates the world as clouds will provide the material for shaping the human body. The forces that are today with the spirits of the sun will in the future provide man with that which will develop his spiritual powers in an infinitely higher way. It is this solar power that man is striving towards. In contrast to the plant, which sinks its head, the root, to the center of the earth, he turns his head towards the sun; and he will unite with the sun and receive higher powers. You have depicted this in the face of the sun, which rests on the body of clouds, on the rock, the columns. Man will then have become self-creative; and as the symbol of perfect creation, the colored rainbow surrounds man. You can also find a similar seal in the Apocalypse of John. In the center of the clouds is a book. The Apocalypse says that the initiate must devour this book. This refers to the time when man will not only receive wisdom externally, but when he will imbibe it as he does today with food, when he himself will be an embodiment of wisdom.

[ 14 ] Then the time will approach when great changes are taking place in the cosmos. When man has absorbed the power of the sun, that stage of development will begin in which the sun will be reunited with the earth. Man will be a sun creature. Man will give birth to a sun through the power of the sun. Hence [on the fifth seal] the woman who gives birth to the sun. Then humanity will be so far advanced morally and ethically that all the corrupting forces that lie dormant in the lower nature of man will have been overcome. This is represented by the beast with the seven heads and the ten horns. At the feet of the sun woman is the moon, which contains all those bad substances that the earth could not use and that it had not expelled. All that the moon still exerts on the earth today in the way of magical powers will then be overcome. When man is united with the sun, he has overcome the moon.

[ 15 ] Then [in the sixth seal] we are shown how man, having thus ascended to the high spiritualization, is like the form of Michael; how he keeps that which is evil in the world bound in the symbol of the dragon.

[ 16 ] We have seen in a certain sense that the beginning and the end of the evolution of man are the same states of transformation. We saw these conditions portrayed in The Man with the Fire-Flowing Feet and the sword protruding from his mouth. In a profound symbolism, the entire being of the world is now revealed to us in the symbol of the Holy Grail. With a few sketchy words, I would like to present this seventh seal to your soul.

[ 17 ] The occultist who comes to know our world knows that space is something quite different for the physical world than mere emptiness. Space is the source from which all beings have, as it were, physically crystallized. Imagine a glass vessel, cube-shaped, through which you can see right through, filled with water. And now imagine that certain cooling currents are passed through this water, causing ice to form in the most diverse ways. This is how you can get an idea of the creation of the world: the “space”; spoken into space the divine word of creation; crystallized out of it all things and beings.

[ 18 ] This space into which the divine creative Word is spoken is represented by the occultist by means of the water-clear cube. Various entities develop within this space. Those that are closest to us can best be characterized as follows: the cube has three perpendicular directions, three axes (length, height, width), and the cube represents the three dimensions of space. And now imagine, in addition to these three dimensions as they are in the physical world, the counter-dimensions. You can imagine it something like this: one person walks in one direction and another comes towards him and the two collide. Similarly, there is a counter-dimension to each spatial dimension, so that we have six rays in total. These counter-rays also represent the original seeds of the highest aspects of the human being. The physical body, crystallized out of space, is the lowest. The spiritual, the highest, is the opposite; it is represented by the counter-dimensions. Here, in evolution, these counter-dimensions first form into an entity that can best be represented by allowing them to flow together into the world of passions, desires, instincts. That is what it is at first. Then later it becomes something else. It purifies itself more and more – we have seen to what extent – but it started from the lower instincts, which are symbolized by the snake. This process is symbolized by the convergence of the sub-dimensions in two snakes facing each other.

[ 19 ] As humanity purifies itself, it ascends to what is called the “spiral of the worlds”. The purified body of the snake, this spiral of the worlds, has a deep meaning. You can get an idea of it from the following example: modern astronomy is based on two of Copernicus's theorems; it has ignored a third one. This third one says that the sun also moves. The sun moves forward in a spiral, so that the earth moves with the sun in a complicated curve. The same applies to the moon, which moves around the earth. These movements are far more complicated than assumed in elementary astronomy. You can see here how the spiral is significant for the heavenly bodies; and these heavenly bodies represent a form with which man will one day identify himself. In that time, man's power of creation will be purified and refined; the larynx will then be the organ of reproduction. What man will have developed as a refined serpent body will then no longer work from below upwards, but from above downwards. The transformed larynx within us will become the chalice that is called the Holy Grail. And just as the one will be purified, so will the other that connects to this generating organ: it will be an essence of the power of the world, the great world essence. And this world spirit in its essence is represented by the image of the dove, which stands in contrast to the Holy Grail. Here it is the symbol of spiritualized fertilization, which will work from the cosmos when man has identified himself with the cosmos in the future. The entire creativity of this process is represented by the rainbow: this is the all-encompassing seal of the Holy Grail.

[ 20 ] The whole gives the sense of the connection between the world and man in a wonderful way, like a summary of the meaning of the other seals. Therefore, the world secret is also written here as a transcription on the outer edge of the seal. This world secret represents how man was born in the beginning out of the primal forces of the world. Every human being, when he looks back, went through that process at the beginning of time that he is going through spiritually today, when he is born anew out of the powers of consciousness. This is expressed by Rosicrucianism [with the letters] E.D.N.: Out of God I am born.

[ 21 ] We have seen that within the revelation a second element is added: to life, death. But in order to find life again in this death, man must overcome this sense of death in the Primordial Source of all that lives. And this Primordial Source is the center of all cosmic evolution; for we had to find death in order to gain our consciousness. But we shall overcome it when we find the meaning of this death in the mystery of the Redeemer. Just as we are born of God, so, in the sense of esoteric wisdom, we die in Christ: I.C.M.

[ 22 ] And because everywhere that something reveals itself, a duality appears, with which the third must unite, man, when he has overcome death, will identify himself with the world-pervading spirit (the dove). He will resurrect and live again in the spirit: P.S.S.R.

[ 23 ] This is the theosophical Rose Cross. It shines into those times when religion and science will be reconciled.

[ 24 ] So you see how the whole world is represented in such seals, and because the world is placed in them by the magicians and initiates, that is why they have a tremendous power. You can always return to these seals; you will always find that they can unlock infinite wisdom through meditation. They have a tremendous influence on the soul of man, because they are drawn from the secrets of the world. If you hang them in a room where things are discussed that are like our conversations here today, where people are uplifted to the sacred mysteries of the world, they have a highly invigorating and enlightening effect, without people sometimes being aware of it. But precisely because of their significance, they are not meant to be profaned. And however strange it may seem: when they hang all around a room where nothing spiritual is spoken, where trivial words are spoken, they also have an effect, but in such a way that they make the physical organism ill. No matter how trivial it may sound, they destroy digestion. What is born of the spiritual belongs to the spiritual and must not be profaned; this it indicates itself by its effect. Signs of spiritual things belong where spiritual things take place and come into effect.