The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] The last time we were here, I was able to conclude by saying that Christianity is broader and more comprehensive than what is included in the religious element, and in those futures in which humanity will have outgrown what has become customary over time to call religion, in those futures, it was said, the content of Christianity, freed from the religious element in the old sense, will have become a spiritual cultural factor for humanity. Christianity is thus capable of overcoming even that form which we have the right to understand as the form of religious life according to previous cultural developments.

[ 2 ] Since that last lecture, a wide variety of cultural phenomena have passed before me. As you know, a small piece of cultural-scientific work in the three northern countries: Sweden, Norway and Denmark, lies between that and our present consideration. The week before last, I also had to give a lecture in Stockholm, among other Swedish cities. You will understand when I tell you that in those northern countries, where there is so much space for the people because of the small number of inhabitants, and where they live further apart than in our Central European cultural countries — we need just remember that the whole of Sweden has the same population as London alone — that in those regions where there is so much space, there is also the opportunity for the old Nordic gods and spiritual beings to appear. It may well be said that for those who know something of the spiritual, it is in a sense the case that the spiritual faces of those ancient Nordic god-beings, who stood before the spiritual faces of the Nordic initiates in the Nordic mysteries in those times before the Christian idea flooded over the world, look out from every nook and cranny.

[ 3 ] Within these regions, shrouded in legend not only in a poetic but also in a spiritual sense, one could find another symptom right in the middle of it. Between the days of the Stockholm lectures, I also had to give a lecture in Uppsala. In the Uppsala library, in the midst of all the spiritual manifestations from the old pre-Christian times of the gods, lies the first old Germanic Bible translation: the so-called Silver Codex, the four Gospels translated in the 4th century by the Gothic bishop Ulfilas - Wulfila. It is strange that, through a karmic chain, this document of Christianity was captured from Prague, where it had been until then, during the Thirty Years' War and is now kept among those spiritual entities that—at least in their memories—flit through the spiritual atmosphere of those regions. And as if it were meant to be there, that document came to rest in this place, and the curious fact that eleven leaves of this Silver Codex were once stolen by a lover also fits in. After a long time, his heir was so remorseful that he had these eleven leaves sent to Uppsala again, so that they are now back with the others of the first Germanic Bible translation.

[ 4 ]I had to give one of the three public lectures in Stockholm on the guiding idea in Wagner's Nibelungenring, and when we crossed the street, it was written on the columns for the opera: “Wagner: Ragnarök - the Götterdämmerung”, as the last evening of the performance of this Nibelungenring. These are the real symptoms that are interwoven in a strange way: the Nordic world of legends, which at its very core has a deeply tragic trait everywhere, pointing to the fact that someone will come who will replace this Nordic world of gods and spirits. I have often pointed out to you that this trait of the Nordic mythical world still comes through in the medieval form, as if in an echo, in the fact that Siegfried is killed at the only point where he was still vulnerable and how this is prophetically pointed to the place that will later be covered by the cross in another place, as if to suggest: here is a place where something is still missing. This is not just a poetic allusion, but something that is deeply rooted in the inspiration of the world of legends. For this tragic element is found both in Nordic mythology and in the mystery on which it is based, namely that the Nordic world of the gods would later be replaced by the Christian principle. In the Nordic mysteries, attention has been drawn everywhere to what this twilight of the gods actually means. It is significant at the same time – and here I mean something more than a mere poetic image – that in the popular mind up there the memories of the old gods are reconciled with a great peacefulness with what was brought in and immigrated from Christianity. This is felt as a symptom, this dormant Gothic Bible in the midst of the old memories.

[ 5 ] It can be felt as a further symptom, as a pointer to the future, when in the country where the gods of the twilight of the gods were as alive as anywhere, these gods arise again in the form of Richard Wagner, resurrected outside of a religious life that moves within narrow confines. For anyone who is able to interpret the signs of the times, even a little, will see in Richard Wagner's art the first shining star of how Christianity, in its deepest idea, emerges from the narrow framework of religious life into the wide orbit of modern spiritual culture. One would like to eavesdrop on Richard Wagner's soul itself, as it were, as the religious idea of Christianity emerges, breaks free from its religious shackles and becomes something more comprehensive. When he looked out from the Villa Wesendonk on the shores of Lake Zurich at the first spring flowers sprouting on Good Friday of the year 1857, and the first germ of the soul of “Parsifal” arose in this sprouting life, this is such a transformation of what initially lives in Christianity as a religious idea on a larger plan. And after it first arose in his mind in the prophetic prefiguration of Christianity, which appeared so powerfully in his Nibelungen Ring, this Christian idea later emerged in its entirety in Parsifal and gained a broader horizon. Thus it has become the starting point for that future in which Christianity will no longer be a religious life alone, but a life of knowledge, of art, of beauty in the full sense of the word.

[ 6 ] This should be placed before your soul today, in connection with the end of our previous reflection, as something that can stir up a basic feeling for what Christianity can one day become for humanity. Building on this, today we want to take a closer look at the relationship between religion and Christianity, starting from the depths of human development. The time at which we are undertaking this reflection is not unsuitable either, conjuring up just such a reflection before our soul.

[ 7 ] We are on the threshold of that great symbolic festival which could be expressed as the festival that indicates the victory of the spirit over death. We are approaching Easter and perhaps recall that meditation in which we tried to understand Christmas from the depths of the mystery. If we look at Christmas from a higher point of view, on the one hand, and Easter, with its prospect after Pentecost, on the other, then the relationship between religion and Christianity presents itself to our spiritual eyes in a wonderful way, if we look at it correctly.

[ 8 ] We will now have to go back a little way to lay the foundation for this reflection, but from it we will also see what is actually preserved in such festivals and what they can awaken in our soul. We will go back a long way in the development of mankind, although not as far as in our last lectures, neither in time nor in space. But the considerations we have made will help us, because from them we have seen the course of the evolution of the earth and its connection with the evolution of the beings of the celestial space. Today we will only go back to about the middle of the Atlantic age. It is the age in which the ancestors of today's humanity lived in the west of Europe, between Europe and America, on that continent that today forms the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The earth looked different back then. What is now the surface of the water was then the surface of the land, and that is where the ancestors of the people who today make up the Euro-Asian cultural humanity lived. If we now take a spiritual look at the soul life of this antediluvian Atlantean people, it presents itself to us quite differently than the soul life of post-Atlantean humanity. From earlier observations we know how tremendously everything has changed in the course of the evolution of the Earth, including the human soul. Since that time everything in the life of human consciousness has changed to the point of being in a state of change between waking every day and sleeping at night.

[ 9 ] Today it is normal for a person to submerge with his astral body and ego into his physical body and etheric body when he wakes up in the morning. And as he descends, he uses his eyes to see, his ears to hear and his other sense organs to perceive the impressions from the sense world around him. He descends into his brain and nervous system and combines the sensory impressions. That is his daytime life. In the evening, he withdraws his astral body and his ego from the physical and etheric bodies. And when a person goes to sleep and his physical and etheric bodies are in bed, then all the impressions of the sense world and of daytime life sink away. All the feelings of the inner life of the soul sink away, and with them all the darkness and gloom that make up the life of the night around the human being.

[ 10 ] This was not yet the case in the middle of the Atlantic period. Then the consciousness of man presented a very different picture. When man immersed himself in his physical and etheric bodies in the morning, he did not encounter those specific, sharply defined images of the physical world outside, but the images were much more vague, much like how street lamps appear to us today in dense fog, surrounded by rainbow-shaped color formations. There you have a small comparison to get an idea of what the Atlantean saw in the middle of his age. Only these colors, which surrounded the objects and which did not yet allow their sharp boundaries, as man sees them today, and also the sounds that came from the objects, were not yet such sober colors and sounds as they are today. These color fringes, which also surrounded all living beings, expressed something of the inner soul life of the beings, so that when a person immersed themselves in their physical and etheric bodies, they still perceived something, so to speak, of the spiritual of the spiritual essence of the things around him, in contrast to today, when, when he submerges into his physical and etheric body in the morning, he perceives only the physical things in their sharp boundaries and colored surfaces. And when a person left his physical and etheric bodies in the evening, darkness and silence did not spread around him silently. Then the images he perceived were at most a little different, but hardly much weaker than during the day. The only difference was that during the day he perceived the external objects of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. But at night, when the human being emerged from his physical and etheric bodies, space was also filled with such color images and sounds, with all kinds of impressions of smell and taste, of everything that was around him. But the colors and sounds and impressions of warmth and cold that he perceived were the clothes and covers of spiritual beings, who had not descended to a physical embodiment, of entities whose names and ideas are preserved in the legends and myths. For legends and myths are not “folk poetry”, but memories of the visions that people in ancient times had in such states; for these people perceived spiritual things by day and spiritual things by night. Man really lived surrounded by the night of that Nordic world of gods, which is preserved in legends and myths. Odin and Freya and all the other figures of Nordic saga are not inventions. They were experienced in the spiritual world of that prehistoric humanity just as people today experience their fellow human beings in their environment. And the legends and myths are the memories of what people experienced in everything they went through in their twilight, clairvoyant state.

[ 11 ] As this state of consciousness, which had developed from an even older state, grew more and more, the sun was standing in the sky in the sign of Libra at the point in time that we now call spring. And as we now move forward in time, which is called the Atlantean period, we see how the state that we have today is increasingly emerging. The impressions that man had when his astral body and his ego were out of the physical and etheric bodies at night became increasingly dull and inconsequential. The daytime images that he received when he was in his physical and etheric bodies became clearer and clearer. In short, we may say, paradoxically, that night became more and more night for him and day became more and more day.

[ 12 ] Then came the Atlantic flood, and arose the later post-Atlantic cultures, those cultures that I have often described to you, which we call the ancient Indian culture, within which the holy Rishis themselves taught people, the old Persian, the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian culture, then the Greek-Latin and finally our culture. If we want to describe the mood in which people were in the post-Atlantic period and to some extent already in the last times of the Atlantic epoch, this mood comes to us like this: Everywhere the peoples, even those who had moved to the east and settled there as the descendants of the Atlantic peoples, still had the old memories, the old legends and myths that reflected what people had experienced in an earlier time, in an earlier state of consciousness of the Atlantic period. The peoples of the Atlantean era had brought this treasure trove of legends with them, and they preserved and told it. That was what fulfilled them, and the oldest inhabitants of the north still felt the power that spoke to them from the legends and myths because the oldest ancestors had the memory that the ancestors themselves had once given what is being told. Something else was preserved within these peoples, which the peoples themselves did not experience, but which was experienced by the initiates of those ancient times, the mystery priests and mystery sages. They were allowed to look spiritually into the same depths of world existence that are being opened up again today through spiritual research. They were allowed to look into them because the soul states of the human ancestors within the initiates were exactly the same as those of the folk soul, which in ancient times still lived in the midst of the spiritual world. Even if only dimly, this clairvoyant state still existed in those ancient times. In this way the nations preserved their legends and fairy tales and myths, which showed in many refracted rays what had been experienced earlier. In the same way, the ancient wisdom preserved what was seen in the mysteries, which had been cultivated in ancient times: a comprehensive world view that could then be brought to direct individual consciousness in the mysteries for those who were initiated. It was only possible to artificially evoke those states in the ancient mysteries that were natural in ancient times.

[ 13 ] Why was this state of spiritual perception natural in those ancient times? Because there was another connection between the physical and the etheric body. The present-day connection only arose during the last Atlantean period. In Atlantean man, the upper part of the etheric head and many other parts of the etheric body protruded far beyond the physical head, and only gradually, towards the end of Atlantis, did the etheric head move completely into the physical head. Thus the etheric body almost coincided with the physical body. This merging of the physical and etheric parts of the head brought about the later state of consciousness that had become characteristic of man after the Atlantean period: the ability to perceive physical objects in the modern sense within clearly defined boundaries. The fact that he can hear sounds, perceive smells, and see colors on the surface, where they are no longer witnesses to the spiritual interior of things, was all connected with that firmer joining of the physical body and the etheric body, which occurred gradually at that time.

[ 14 ] In still older times, when the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body, it was still the case that this part of the etheric body still outside could still receive impressions from the astral body, and these impressions were the perceptions of the old dim clairvoyance. Only when the etheric body was completely submerged in the physical body was the old dim clairvoyance completely withdrawn from man. In those ancient pre-Christian mysteries, therefore, the state that had been natural in Atlantean times had to be artificially evoked in the initiatees by the initiators. We see that the pupils to be initiated in the mystery temples were treated in such a way that, after the astral body had received the appropriate impressions, the etheric body was partially lifted out by the initiating priest, causing the physical body to fall into a lethargic sleep, a kind of paralysis, for three and a half days. Then, while the etheric body was free, the astral body was able to impress into it all the experiences that the earlier Atlantean man had in a natural state. There the old initiate could see what was no longer merely preserved for him in writing, no longer tradition, but what now became an individual experience for him.

[ 15 ] Let us visualize what the person to be initiated experienced. While the mystery priest was partially extracting the etheric body from the physical body and introducing the impressions of the astral body into this extracted etheric body, the person to be initiated experienced the spiritual worlds so intensely that he brought the memory of them into the physical world with him. He had become a witness to what was taking place in the spiritual worlds. He could bear witness to it, and he was raised above all that which was otherwise divided according to peoples and nations, for he was initiated into that which connects all, all peoples with each other: into the primal wisdom, into the primal truth. Such were the ancient mysteries. It was the same in those moments of which I was able to speak to you in connection with the Christmas Mystery, when those things that actually formed the characteristic features of later consciousness disappeared from the initiate's view. Consider that the essential thing about the post-Atlantic consciousness was that man was no longer able to look into the interior of things, that there was a boundary between him and the interior of the thing, and that he saw only the surface of the things of the physical world. What had become inscrutable and opaque to the consciousness of man in the post-Atlantic era became transparent and comprehensible to the one being initiated. When the great moment approached, in what is called Christmas, he could see through the solid earth, and he could “see the sun at midnight,” see the spiritual of the sun “at midnight”.

[ 16 ] In essence, then, this pre-Christian initiation was something like a recall of what was natural to people in ancient times, what people in ancient times experienced as their natural state of consciousness. More and more, people outgrew this memory of ancient times. We have seen how, step by step, with the advancing cultural cycles, humanity has outgrown those old memories and how it has increasingly lost the ability to experience something outside of the physical body.

[ 17 ] In the early post-Atlantean era, in ancient India, in Persian, Chaldean, and even in Egyptian culture, there were still many people who had not yet so firmly linked their etheric body to their physical body that they could not have received impressions from the spiritual worlds like atavistic remnants from an earlier time. But then, during the Greco-Latin period, all these remnants of an earlier time, so to speak, faded away, and the possibility of carrying out the old initiation in the same way as before became less and less. The possibility of preserving the memories of the ancient wisdom for humanity also became increasingly smaller. We are approaching more and more our own fifth epoch, which, when viewed inwardly, means something very special within the evolution of humanity.

[ 18 ] In the fourth period, that is, in the Greco-Latin period, it was still the case that one could say that there was still just as much possibility of remembering remember what humanity had once seen in the dim light of ancient clairvoyance, just as, on the other hand, some people were able to live completely within the physical body and were thus completely cut off from the spiritual worlds. Our whole life shows us that man in our fifth post-Atlantic age is even more immersed in the physical body. The outward sign of this is the appearance of materialistic conceptions. These first appear in the fourth period, among the ancient Hellenic atomists. Then they disappear and keep reappearing until they become more and more powerful in the last four centuries, so that man not only loses the positive old content of the memory of the spiritual worlds, but also faith in the spiritual worlds in general. That is the fact. So deeply has man immersed himself in the physical body in this fifth period that he has even lost his faith. In many people, this belief in the existence of the spiritual worlds has been completely lost.

[ 19 ] Let us now ask ourselves from a different point of view: What has been the course of human development? We look back to that ancient Atlantean time, which we have tried to visualize, and we can say that man still lived with his gods then. He not only believed in himself and in the three kingdoms of nature, but he also believed in the higher realms of the spiritual worlds, for he was, after all, their witness in the Atlantean time. There was no great difference between his nocturnal and his daytime consciousness. They were still in balance, and man would have been a fool if he had denied what was actually perceptible around him, for he saw the gods. Religion in our present sense could not yet exist at that time, because religion was not yet needed. What the content of religion is was a fact for the people of the Atlantean period. Just as you do not need a religion to believe in roses, lilies, rocks and trees, the Atlanteans did not need a religion to believe in gods, because they were facts for them.

[ 20 ] But more and more these facts disappeared. More and more, the content of the spiritual worlds was preserved in memory, partly preserved in traditions of what was told from ancient times that the forefathers had seen, partly preserved in the legends and myths and in what individual, particularly predisposed clairvoyant people still saw for themselves. But most of all, the contents of the spiritual worlds were preserved in the mysteries that the mystery priests guarded. All that the priests of Hermes in Egypt, the priests of Zarathustra in Persia, the Chaldean sages, and the Indian successors of the holy Rishis preserved was nothing other than the art of making man, in initiation, a witness again of what pre-humanity saw naturally in its environment. And depending on the nature of a people, with its particular abilities and perceptions, and depending on the climate in which it lived, what was kept in the mysteries was embodied in the religion of the people, as it was in this religion and in that religion. But the original wisdom was the basis of all these religions as the great unity of them. This original wisdom was the same, a unified one, whether it was cultivated by Pythagoras in his school, by the disciples of Hermes in Egypt, by the Chaldean sages in the Near East, by Zarathustra in Persia or the Brahmans in India taught it: everywhere the same ancient wisdom, only graded according to the needs and the special circumstances in the popular religions, as they appear to us in the individual regions. There we see the becoming of religious culture.

[ 21 ] So what is this religious culture? Religious culture is the way of imparting the spiritual worlds for that humanity that no longer has the ability to experience this spiritual world with its own instruments of perception. Religion became the knowledge, the message from the spiritual world for all those who could no longer experience the spiritual world as fact. Thus, spiritual life spread as culture in religious form across the globe. It lived in the different cultural periods, from the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Latin epochs to our times.

[ 22 ] Man has immersed himself in his physical body for the purpose of experiencing the outside world, of experiencing it with his physical senses, in order to take what he experiences outside with his physical senses and incorporate it into his spirituality, in order to guide it towards future stages of evolution. But now, inasmuch as we have descended into the physical body because we have passed the midpoint of our post-Atlantean cultures, we find ourselves in a very special case. Not all of them, but many people are already in this case. All development within humanity takes place in a remarkable way. It progresses to a certain point, so to speak, and from there it then moves in the opposite direction. After evolution has descended to a certain point, it rises again and arrives at the same stages again, only in a higher form, so that man today actually faces a strange future: the future - as everyone knows who is aware of this deeply significant fact of the development of the human race — that his etheric body is gradually becoming looser again, after having been submerged in the physical body, in which it perceived within sharply defined boundaries and forms everything that can be perceived in the physical world today. The etheric body must again become looser, must again stand out, so that the human being can ascend to spiritualization and perceive in the spiritual world. Indeed, humanity today is already at the point again where, in a large proportion of human individuals, the etheric bodies are again becoming looser.

[ 23 ] Now we encounter something highly remarkable. It is nothing less than the secret of our cultural era, which we touch on when we visualize this fact. We have to imagine that the etheric body has penetrated deep into the physical body and now has to start the return journey. It must take with it from the physical body everything that it was able to perceive with its physical senses. But as the etheric body loosens again, everything that was once physical reality will gradually have to spiritualize again. Man must now take with him into the future the awareness, the certainty, that there is a spiritual reality in the physical as well. Otherwise, what happens to him? His ether body otherwise goes out of the physical body, but the person retains only the belief in the physical world and lacks the awareness that the spiritual in the physical has a reality, which emerges with the ether body itself as the fruit of what has been experienced in the physical body. So it could happen that people, so to speak, would not be able to connect with this emergence of their etheric body.

[ 24 ] Let us firmly and precisely grasp the point where the human being's etheric body is completely within the physical body and begins to emerge again. Let us now assume that a person lets go of his ether body in such a way that he has lost his faith, his awareness of a spiritual world, while he was living in the physical body, that he has cut himself off from the connection with the spiritual world in the physical body. Let us assume that he has descended into the physical body so firmly and energetically that he has been able to save nothing but the belief that physical life alone is reality. And now he enters the following time. The etheric body emerges, leaves him without fail, and man is not able to save himself from this state, that there is a consciousness of a spiritual world. He does not recognize this spiritual world. This is what could happen to humanity in the near future: that it does not recognize the spiritual world, which it would have to experience through the loosening of the etheric body, that it considers it to be imagination, fantasy, illusion. And those who have descended into the physical body in the most sophisticated way - perhaps we should say, to avoid being suggestive, in the most subtle way - who have become the most materialistic scholars, that is, who have have acquired the most rigid concepts about matter. These are the ones who, when their etheric body is loosened, are most in danger of having no idea that there is a spiritual world. They then consider everything they experience from a spiritual world to be illusion, fantasy, reverie.

[ 25 ] Let me give you just one example: a German professor recently published a book on psychology. It is supposed to show that the soul is actually completely identical with the brain and only shows the workings from a different side, sometimes from the outside, sometimes from the inside. The internal aspect is feeling, perception and will, and the external aspect is the brain, examined anatomically and physiologically. In this book you will find a strange saying; it points out that if there were an independent soul, then one would have to assume that this independent soul would increase or decrease its powers through all the impressions that a person receives. But now there exists the law of energy, which states that all those forces that a person absorbs from the outside must also flow out of him again, and it is pointed out how a person also gives off all the heat energy that he absorbs. Since this is subject to the general law of energy, and since it can be seen that what goes in comes out again, one must conclude that no independent soul is involved in this, but that purely material processes are at work in there, which are transformed there and which in turn flow out.

[ 26 ] Nothing derogatory should be said about such a book and about such a teaching, which is taught at the official lecterns of our official science, because people cannot help inventing such teachings; they live under the most terrible suggestions. It is just as clever to examine how much warmth enters and leaves a person and conclude that he has no soul as it is for someone to stand in front of a bank office and try to determine how much money goes in and out and then, after all the energy, i.e., the money, has come out, conclude that there are no bank officials inside! Thought forms like this can be found almost everywhere today in all that is considered official psychology. And how tremendously suggestive they are to our present-day humanity! This is the age in which those who want to be the leaders of humanity and who believe that they are operating with an unconditional science are most immersed in the physical body. During the immersion of the etheric body in the physical body, they have completely lost consciousness of the fact that there is a spiritual world, and it must be said that it is precisely these scholars who will be most subject to the fate that I must now describe to you. What then can be the fate of these people in the future?

[ 27 ] If man is to live his life correctly in the future, when the etheric body is loosened again, man must have an awareness of what presents itself to this etheric body and what then corresponds to humanity. And in order that he may have a consciousness of what presents itself as knowledge of the spiritual world, it is necessary that humanity should preserve for itself the knowledge that there is a spiritual world, beyond the point where man is completely immersed in the physical-sensual. The connection between religious life and life in knowledge must never be lost. Man started out from life among the gods; he will ascend again to a life with the gods. But he will have to recognize them! He will really have to know that the gods are realities. Man will no longer be able to remember the old days when his etheric body is loosened again. If in the Middle Times he has lost consciousness of the spiritual world, if he has appropriated only the belief that life in the physical body and what can be seen in the physical body are the only realities, then he will be adrift in the air for all future time. Then he is not at home in the spiritual worlds, then he has lost the ground under his feet. Then he is in danger of what is called 'spiritual death'; for that which is around him is then unreality, illusion, the reality of which he is not conscious, in which he has no faith, and he dies away. That is the real dying in the spiritual world, is something that threatens men when they do not bring with them the awareness of this spiritual world when they enter the spiritual worlds. But where is the point in the evolution of mankind where the awareness of the spiritual world can be completely attained? There is the point where, through a descent into a physical body and through the conquest of it, the great example has been set before men, that great example which is given in the Christ. In the complete understanding of the Christ, that can be attained which offers mankind the possibility of gaining access to all the memories of the past and to all the prophecies of the future. For all the religious founders before Christ, what did they point to? They pointed to the earlier incarnations and to the later incarnations of man. The Christ entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth when Jesus of Nazareth was thirty years old. Christ was the entity that lived only once in a physical body. And through this unique conquest of death, if it is rightly understood, man is shown how he must live in order to bring into all future times the realization that there is a spiritual world. That is the union with the Christ.

[ 28 ] And how will the idea of Christ live in the man of the future? The man of the future will look back on our epoch, when man lived in the physical body, just as the man of the post-Atlantean time looks back on the Atlantean time, when men still lived together with the gods. He will feel himself to be the victor over that which is experienced in the physical body. When he then ascends again to the spiritual plane, he will point down to the physical as to that which has been overcome. We are to feel this in a great prophetic act when we look at the Easter miracle.

[ 29 ] Man of the future has two possibilities before him. One possibility is that he remembers back to the time when he had experiences in the physical body and says to himself: Only what was then was real. We are now in the world of illusions; reality was life in the physical body. This person looks at the abandoned physical body as at a grave, and what he sees in the grave is a corpse; but the corpse, as the physical, represents true reality for him. That is one possibility. The other possibility is that man looks back on what he has experienced in the physical world, again as if on a grave, but in such a way that he says and deeply feels the truth of these words to those who believe that the physical alone has been the true, the real: “He whom you seek is not here anymore!” The grave is empty and the One in question has risen! The empty tomb and the risen Christ, this is the mystery of prophecy; and so in the Easter mystery we have the mystery of prophecy.

[ 30 ] The great synthesis of the Christmas mystery as a repetition of the ancient mysteries and the Easter mystery, as the mystery of the future, the mystery of the resurrected Christ, that is what Christ wanted to present to humanity. That is the mystery of Easter. The future of Christianity will be that the Christian idea is not just something like a message from higher worlds, not just something like religion, but that the Christian idea is a confession and an impulse of life: a confession because in the resurrected Christ man sees what he himself has to experience in the future, an act of life, because Christ is not just something to which he looks up, which is only '[rusty', but the great example to which he aspires by overcoming death. To live and work in the spirit of Christianity, to see in Christ not merely the Comforter but to see Christ as He who precedes us and who in the deepest sense is related to our deepest being, and whom we follow: that is the Christ-idea of the future, which is capable of permeating all knowledge, all art, all life. And if we wish to recall all that the Easter idea contains, we shall find in it a symbol of Christianity in true deed and true life.

[ 31 ] When people will no longer need religious messages that bring them tidings from the gods of ancient times, because they will live among the gods again, then Christ will be the one who will make them strong and powerful to find the right point of view in the midst of the gods. Religion will then no longer be needed to believe in gods, which men will see again, as it was not needed in the past when they lived among gods. Then they did not need to believe, and they will not need to believe in the gods, which they will see again when they, strengthened and invigorated with what can be gained from Christianity, will step under these gods. Then they themselves will be spiritualized among spiritual beings and then be able to accomplish their work among the spiritual beings. So in the not too distant future, man will again see how the physical world loses its significance for him and how, so to speak, physical things fade. Their reality will fade, even if man will still be on earth for a long time. But when physical things lose their meaning and importance and fade away, then man will either see the essentiality of the physical dwindle and be unable to believe in the spirituality that rises before him, or he will be able to believe and save his consciousness for the spirituality of the future, and he will not then experience spiritual death.

[ 32 ] To face a reality that is not recognized as such means to be spiritually deranged. People would live in spiritual turmoil if the spiritual worlds emerged before them when the etheric body relaxed and they did not recognize them as such. Today many a person could have an awareness of the spiritual world, but they do not have it, and so it rebounds on them, and this shows in their nervousness, neurasthenia, in the pathological fear of illness. This is nothing other than the backlash of what the lack of awareness of the spiritual world brings about. Those who feel this also feel the necessity of a spiritual movement that grows beyond mere religion, preserving faith in the human being, in the whole human being, that is, also in the spiritual human being, and bringing full knowledge of the spiritual human being. And to recognize Christ is also to recognize the spiritual human being.

[ 33 ] To live with the idea of Christ into the future of humanity means to go beyond Christianity as a religion and to bring Christianity as knowledge onto the broadest horizon. Christianity will merge with art, will expand and invigorate it, and will give artistic creative power in the richest measure. Richard Wagner's Parsifal is a preparation for this. Christianity will be immersed in all life and activity on earth, and when religions are no longer necessary for humanity, humanity will be strong and powerful under the influence of the Christian impulses that had to be given to humanity when it was in the middle of the fourth cultural period. In the Greco-Latin cultural period, the Christ came among humanity. Just as humanity had to descend into the deepest depths of material life, so it must be brought up again to the knowledge of the spirit. And the appearance of the Christ has given this impulse.

[ 34 ] These intuitions should make us blissfully happy in the days when we symbolically have the Easter Mysteries around us, during Eastertide. For the Easter mystery is not only a mystery of remembrance, but also a mystery of the future, of prophecy for man, who is gradually freeing himself more and more from the bonds and entanglements of the merely physical-sensual life.