The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday, in a kind of introduction, we characterized the spirit of the Apocalypse of John in general. We tried to establish some broad guidelines by which we can realize that this apocalypse describes what can be called a Christian initiation or a Christian initiation. It will be my task today to present to you the essence of initiation or initiation in general, to describe to you what happens in man when, through initiation, he is to be put in a position to look into those spiritual worlds that lie behind the sensual worlds, and it will also be my task to describe in a few major lines what the experiences within the initiation are like. For it is only by delving a little more deeply into the nature of initiation that we can gradually bring this important religious document of the Apocalypse to our understanding.

[ 2 ] First, we must again take a close look at the two states of consciousness of the human being, that is, the state of consciousness that lasts from morning, when the person wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, and the other state of consciousness that begins with falling asleep and ends with waking up. We have often explained to the soul that man, as he appears to us in his present form, is first of all a fourfold being, that he consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. In the outer form, these four members appear to the clairvoyant consciousness in such a way that first, like a kind of core, in the middle is the physical human body. Let us visualize the matter schematically (it is drawn). During the day, this physical body is permeated by the so-called etheric body, which only protrudes very slightly, initially around the head, like a bright halo, but which permeates the head completely. Further down, the etheric or life body becomes increasingly misty and indistinct, and the more we approach the lower limbs of the human being, the less it shows the form of the physical body in such a strict sense.

[ 3 ] During the day, these two members of the human being are in turn enveloped by what we call the astral body, which protrudes in all directions like an ellipsoid, like an egg, and in its basic form has luminous rays that actually look as if they run from the outside in and penetrate the human being from the outside in. An enormous number of different figures, all kinds of lines and rays, some lightning-like, some in strange coils, are drawn into this astral body. All this surrounds the human being in the most diverse light phenomena. The astral body is the expression of his passions, his instincts, drives and desires, but also of all his thoughts and ideas. In this astral body, clairvoyant consciousness sees reflected everything that is called psychic experience, from the lowest instinct up to the highest moral ideal. And then we have the fourth limb of the human being, which could be drawn as something that sends rays into the point that lies about an inch behind the forehead. This would be the schematic representation of the fourfold human being. In the course of these lectures, we will see how the individual parts look in the whole.

[ 4 ] This, then, is the human being during the day, from the moment he wakes up in the morning until he falls asleep in the evening. In the evening, when he falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, and a kind of outpouring of what we have called the astral body can be seen. The term 'outpouring' is somewhat imprecise. Actually, it is as if a kind of mist were forming, so that at night we see the astral body that has emerged from the physical and etheric bodies as a kind of spiral mist around the person, while the fourth limb of the human being almost disappears completely to one side, that is, it fades into the indefinite. The part of the astral body that extends downwards can only be seen very weakly, while the upper part is addressed as the externalized astral body.

[ 5 ] Yesterday we emphasized what has to happen for a person to receive the initiation. If a person occupies himself only with the things that people generally occupy themselves with in our age, he cannot receive an initiation. He must be prepared in such a way that he does, during the ordinary course of his daily life, those exercises which are prescribed for him by the schools of initiates: meditation, concentration, and so forth. These exercises are basically the same in all schools of initiation in terms of their significance for the human being. They differ only to the extent that the further we go back in time to the pre-Christian schools of initiation, the more they are directed towards training and exercising the powers of thought. The more we approach Christian times, the more they are directed towards training the powers of the mind, and the closer we come to more recent times, the more we see, as in the so-called Rosicrucian training, a special kind of will culture, of will exercises, being introduced due to the demands and needs of humanity. Even if the meditations are at first similar to those in the other pre-Christian schools, a special schooling of the will element is found everywhere at the basis of the Rosicrucian exercises. But what is important, and what was likewise achieved by the exercises of the oriental mystery schools, as with the Egyptian and Pythagorean schools and so on, and what also constitutes the effect of those exercises that preferably start from the meditation of the Gospel of John, is that during the day, even if only for a short time, five or fifteen minutes is enough for me, the effect is such that when that state occurs in the sleeping person, where the astral body goes out, the effect remains even then. In a person who does such occult exercises, let us say, the astral body gradually shows the most diverse changes at night. It exhibits other light phenomena, it shows the plastic structure of the organs that we have already spoken of; and then this becomes clearer and clearer. The astral body gradually acquires an inner organization similar to that of the physical body in its eyes, ears, etc.

[ 6 ] But that would still not lead to seeing much, especially not in today's man. However, man does perceive some things when his internal organs have been developed for a while. Then he begins to have consciousness during sleep. Spiritual environments dawn from the usual general darkness. What a person can perceive there, and what people perceived in the older times, because today it is rarer, are wonderful images of plant life. These are the most primitive achievements of clairvoyance. Where there used to be only the darkness of unconsciousness, something like a dreamlike living but real plant form arises. And much of what has been described to you in the mythologies of ancient peoples has been seen in this way. When it is described in legends that Wotan, Wile and We found a tree on the beach and that they formed man from it, this indicates that it was first seen in such an image. In all mythologies you can perceive this primitive way of seeing, of plant-based seeing. The description of such a vision is also Paradise, especially with its two trees of knowledge and of life; that is the result of this astral vision. And it is not without reason that it is hinted to you in Genesis itself that Paradise and what is described at the beginning of the Biblical account was seen. One must only learn to read the Bible, then one will understand how deeply and significantly it captures this mysterious state in its descriptions. What is taught today about Paradise, about the beginning of the Bible, was not taught in the past. They pointed out: Adam fell into a sleep – and that was the sleep, as the first Christians were told, in which Adam, looking back, perceived the phenomena described at the beginning of Genesis. Only today do we believe that such words as “Adam fell into a sleep” are there by chance. They are not there by chance. Every word in the Bible has a deep meaning, and only those who know how to appreciate every single word can understand the Bible.

[ 7 ] So that is the first thing. But then something special had to happen in the pre-Christian mysteries. When a person had practised for a long time — and that took a very long time — when he had roughly absorbed what was necessary to create order in his soul, when he had absorbed within himself what we might call today anthroposophy, then in the end he became partaking of the actual old initiation. What did this ancient initiation consist of?

[ 8 ] It is not enough that the organs are formed in the astral body. They must imprint themselves on the etheric body. Just as a seal imprint its letters on sealing wax, so the organs of the astral body must imprint themselves on the etheric body. For this purpose, in the old initiations, the disciple to be initiated was placed in a very special position. He was brought into a death-like state for three and a half days. We will increasingly recognize that this condition can no longer be carried out today, but that we now have other means of initiation. I am now describing the pre-Christian initiation. In this initiation, the person to be initiated was brought by someone who understood it into a death-like state for three and a half days. Either he was placed in a kind of small chamber, in a kind of tomb. There he rested in a state of death-sleep. Or he was tied to a cross in a special position with outstretched hands, because that promotes the entering into that state which one wanted to achieve.

[ 9 ] We know from the most varied lectures that death occurs in man because the etheric body leaves with the astral body and the ego, leaving only the physical body behind. Something occurs at death that never otherwise occurred between birth and death in the regular course of life. The ether body never left the physical body, not even in deepest sleep, but was always within it. In death the ether body leaves the physical body. During that death-like state at least a part of the ether body also left the physical body, so that a part of the ether body, which was otherwise within, was outside in this state. As you know, this is described in more exoteric lectures by saying that the etheric body is drawn out. That is not actually the case. But we can only make these fine distinctions now. So during these three and a half days, while the priest-initiator was watching over the person to be initiated, we have the human being in a state in which only his lower part is united with the etheric body. This is the moment when the astral body, with all the organs it has developed within it, is imprinted in the etheric body. At this moment, enlightenment occurs. When the person to be initiated was awakened after three and a half days, what happened to him was what is called enlightenment, which is what had to follow the purification, which consists only in the formation of the organs of the astral body. Now the disciple was a knower in the spiritual world. What he had experienced earlier was only a preliminary stage of seeing. This world, which consisted of a kind of formation that mainly resembled plants, was now supplemented by essentially new formations.

[ 10 ] Now we come to a more exact characterization of what the initiate began to see. Now that he had been led to enlightenment, it was clear to him when he was awakened that he had seen something that he could never have taken into his knowledge before. What had he seen? What could he call up in his soul as a significant memory of his vision in a certain respect? If we want to understand what the person in question had seen, we have to look a little at the development of the human being. We have to remember that it was only gradually that man acquired the degree of individual consciousness that he has today. It was not always the case that he can say “I” to himself in such a way as he does today. We need only go back to the time when the Cheruscians, Heruli and so on lived in the areas where the Germans live today. There, the individual did not feel as an individual human being, but as a member of his tribe. Just as fingers do not feel as separate entities, so the individual Cheruscan did not feel in the sense of saying “I” to himself. The “I” was the “I” of the entire tribe. The tribe represented an organism, and groups of people who belonged together and were connected by blood had, so to speak, a shared “I” soul. Just as today your two arms belong to your ego, so in those days you yourself were members of a larger community.

[ 11 ] This is still clearly expressed in the people who profess the Old Testament. Every individual felt that he was a member of the people. It is the case that the individual did not speak of himself in the highest sense when he spoke the usual “I”, but that he felt something deeper when he said, “I and my father Abraham are one.” For for him, a certain sense of self extended up to Abraham, and came down through all generations from Abraham to the individual. What was related by blood was united in one self. It was like a common soul of the group, which embraced the whole nation, and those who saw through things said to themselves: That which really constitutes our innermost, immortal being does not dwell in the individual, it dwells in the whole nation. All the individual members belong to this common self. Therefore, every such confessor was also clear: if he dies, he unites with an invisible essence that goes up to Father Abraham. Truly, the individual felt that he was coming into the bosom of Abraham. There he felt secure in the group soul of the people. This group soul of the whole people could not descend to the physical plane. They only saw individual human forms there. But for them these were not the reality; the reality was in the spiritual world. They sensed that what flows through the blood is divine. And because they had to see the God in Jehovah, they called this divine being Yahweh, or also his countenance: Michael. They regarded Yahweh as the spiritual group soul of the people.

[ 12 ] The individual person here could not see these spiritual entities. The initiate who experienced the great moment when the astral body was imprinted in the etheric body was the first to see the most important group souls. If we look back to the ancient times of humanity, we find everywhere that the present self has developed out of such group consciousness, group self, so that for the seer, when he looks back, the individual people merge more and more into the group souls. Now there are mainly four types of group souls, four archetypes of group souls. If you take all the different group souls of the various souls, they have a certain similarity, but also differences. If you classify them, you get four groups, four archetypes. You can see them clearly when you clairvoyantly look back to the time when man was not yet in the flesh, had not yet descended to earth. For now we must picture to ourselves more exactly the moment when man descended into the flesh from the spiritual regions. We can describe this moment only in great symbols.

[ 13 ] Once upon a time our earth had a much softer matter than today, where rock and stone were not yet as solidified as today, where plant forms still looked different, where the whole thing was embedded in water caves like a primeval sea, where air and water were not separated, where of all the creatures that live on earth today, animals and plants were formed in the water. When the mineral beings began to take on their present form, it could be said that man emerged from invisibility. This is how he presented himself to those to be initiated. Surrounded on the outside by a kind of shell, he descended from the regions that are now the air regions. Man was not yet physically present when the animal was already present in the flesh. He was a fine air being, even in the Lemurian times. And he has developed in such a way that the clairvoyant picture presents itself with the four group souls: on the one hand like a lion's image, on the other like the image of a bull, above like that of an eagle, and in the middle below something that is already human-like. This is how the clairvoyant picture presents itself. Thus man comes out of the darkness of the spirit world. And that which has developed his strength appears in a kind of rainbow formation. The more physical powers surround the whole formation of this human being like a rainbow. One must describe this becoming human in the most diverse fields and in the most diverse ways. Now it is described as it appears to the researcher in retrospect: how these four group souls have emerged from the common Divine-Human that descends. From time immemorial this moment has been given a symbolic form, which you will find depicted on the second of the so-called seven occult seals. This is the symbolic representation, but it is more than a mere symbol. There you have these four group souls emerging from the indeterminate spiritual, the rainbow all around and a number twelve. We must also understand what this number twelve means.

[ 14 ] When you see what has just been described emerging, then you have the clairvoyant feeling that it is surrounded by something that is of a completely different nature and essence than that which emerges from the indeterminate spiritual. And that which surrounds it was symbolized in ancient times in the zodiac, in the twelve signs of the zodiac. The moment of entering clairvoyance is also linked to many other experiences. The first thing that the person whose etheric body is emerging perceives is that he feels as if he is getting bigger and bigger and expanding to include what he perceives. There comes a moment when the initiate says to himself: I do not just see these four figures, but I am in them, I have expanded my being beyond them. He identifies with them. He perceives what is symbolized by the twelve constellations, by the number twelve. What is expanding around that which is revealing itself can best be understood if we remember that our Earth has undergone previous embodiments. We know that before the Earth became Earth, it went through the state of Saturn, then through that of the Sun, then through that of the Moon, and only then did it become Earth in the present sense. This was necessary. For only through this was it possible for the entities that have just emerged to come out on today's Earth. They had to gradually work their way through such transformations.

[ 15 ] Thus, when we look back into the remote past, we see the first state of our Earth, that of ancient Saturn, which at the beginning of its existence did not even shine. It was a kind of state of warmth. You would not have been able to see it as a shining sphere, but if you had approached Saturn, you would have entered a warmer space because it was simply in a state of warmth.

[ 16 ] Now one might ask: Did world-becoming begin with Saturn? Did not other conditions perhaps first bring about what Saturn became? Did not other embodiments precede Saturn? — It would be difficult to go back before Saturn, because something begins only with Saturn, without which we cannot go back before Saturn at all. For it is only with Saturn that what we call time begins. Before that, there were other forms of being, that is to say, we cannot really speak of a before, because there was no time yet. Time also began at some point. Before Saturn there was no time, there was only eternity, duration. Everything was simultaneous. That processes follow one another only occurred with Saturn. In that state of the world, where there is only eternity, duration, there is also no movement. Because time is part of movement. There is no revolution, there is duration and rest, as it is also said in occultism: there is blessed rest in duration. That is the expression for it. Blessed rest in duration preceded the state of Saturn. The movement of the world bodies only began with Saturn, and the path indicated by the twelve signs of the zodiac was understood as a sign of this. And while a planet was moving in such a constellation, it was spoken of as a world hour. It was regarded as a world hour. Twelve world hours, twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night! A succession of world hours is reckoned to each of the world bodies, Saturn, the Sun and the Moon, grouped into world days, and finally so that of these twelve periods seven are outwardly perceptible and five pass more or less outwardly imperceptibly. Therefore one differentiates between seven Saturn cycles or seven great Saturn days and five great Saturn nights. You can also say five days and seven nights, because the first and last days are days of twilight. It is customary to call such seven cycles, seven world days “Manvantara” and the five world nights “Pralaya”. If you want to have it completely in line with our counting of time, then you count two planetary states together, Saturn and Sun, Moon and Earth. Then you get twenty-four cycles each. These twenty-four cycles form important epochs in the world picture, and these twenty-four epochs are thought of as regulated by entities in the universe, who are indicated to you in the Apocalypse as the twenty-four elders, the twenty-four regulators of the world cycles, the world times. On the seal image, they are indicated as the world clock. The individual numbers of the clock are only interrupted by the double crowns of the elders, to indicate that these are the kings of time because they regulate the orbits of the world bodies. (See the second seal image.)

[ 17 ] Thus the initiate first looks back into this picture of prehistoric times. But now we must ask ourselves: Why does the initiate see this picture? — Because in this picture the forces are symbolically and astraly represented, which in his present form have formed the human etheric body and then the physical body. You can easily imagine what that is like. Imagine a person lying in bed, leaving the physical body and etheric body with his astral body and I. But the astral body and the I belong to the physical body and etheric body, as they are today, to the present physical human body and etheric body. This physical body and this etheric body cannot exist by themselves. They have become what they are because the astral body and the I have been incorporated into them. Only a physical body in which no blood flows and which has no nervous system can be without an astral body and I. Therefore, the plant can be without an astral body and I because it has no blood and no nervous system. For the nervous system is connected with the astral body and the blood with the ego. No being has a nervous system in the physical body that is not permeated by an astral body, and no being has a blood system in the physical body that is not permeated by the ego. Think about what you do every night. You abandon your physical and etheric bodies and leave them to their own devices with their blood and nervous systems. If it were only up to you, your physical body would have to perish every night as a result of you leaving your nervous and blood systems. It would die at the same moment as the astral body and the ego leave the physical and etheric bodies. But the clairvoyant gaze sees how other entities, higher spiritual entities, then fill it. It sees how they enter into it and do what the human being does not do at night: take care of the blood and nervous systems. But these same entities have created man, insofar as he consists of a physical and etheric body, not only today, from incarnation to incarnation. These are the same entities that gave rise to the first formation of the physical body on ancient Saturn and that formed the etheric body on the sun. These beings, which have been active in the physical and etheric bodies since the very beginning of Saturn and the Sun's existence, are active in them every night while man sleeps and disdainfully leaves the physical and etheric bodies, so to speak, abandoning them to death; they penetrate them and take care of his nervous and blood systems.

[ 18 ] Therefore it is also understandable that at the moment when the astral body touches the etheric body in order to imprint itself in it, that, since man is permeated by these forces that have formed him, that he sees the image of these forces, which are symbolized in the second seal. What sustains him and connects him to the entire cosmic universe, that is illuminated in this moment of initiation. He sees that which has formed the two limbs of his being, the physical and etheric bodies, that which sustains them every night of their life. But he himself has no part in it yet, because he cannot yet work into these two limbs of his being. In the human being, the physical and etheric bodies, lying in bed at night, would be condemned to a plant-like existence, for he leaves them to their own devices. Therefore, for the human being, the state of sleep is unconscious, as a plant always is.

[ 19 ] What about what has been moved out during sleep in the ordinary person, what about the astral body and the ego? These are also not conscious at night. In the ordinary person, nothing is experienced within the astral body during the night's sleep. But just imagine you were practising the seven steps of the St. John's initiation, these momentous moments of the Christian initiation of the soul. Then you would experience more than just what has been described so far. Quite apart from the fact that you can develop clairvoyant power when the astral body comes into contact with the etheric body, something else would happen. Man becomes aware of the soul-like qualities of the astral world and the devachanic world, from which he is actually born according to his soul. And there is a still higher symbol that appears to fulfill the whole world. For those who go through the stages of the John initiation, something is added to this symbol of the old initiation, which is best represented by the first seal. In a clairvoyant vision, he sees the Priest-King with a golden girdle, with feet that seem to be made of cast metal, his head covered with hair like white wool, a flaming fiery sword from his mouth and in his hand the seven world stars: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

[ 20 ] The figure in the center of the second seal image was only hinted at in the old initiation as the fifth of the group souls. It is that which was only present in the germinal stage in humanity of ancient times and only emerged in the Christian initiation as that which is also referred to as the Son of Man, who rules the seven stars when he appears before man fully in his true form.

[ 21 ] So then, through this initially symbolic form of presentation, it should be clear to us above all that what occurs in today's human being as a separation of the various limbs — physical and etheric body on the one hand, astral body and I on the other — can be treated in such a way that both can, so to speak, contribute to the initiation, firstly through the form of initiation when the astral body comes into contact with the ether body, where the four group souls shine forth, and then during the treatment of the astral body, so that the astral body becomes particularly clairvoyant. In the past, actual clairvoyance in the supersensible world had at most reached a kind of vegetative experiencing of the world. Through the Christian initiation, what a higher level of initiation means in the astral body is given and what is symbolically indicated by the second picture.

[ 22 ] There you have described the two things from the initiation principle itself, which you find described at the top of the Apocalypse. Only the apocalyptic has described them in reverse order, and rightly so. He first described the face of the Son of Man, the face of him who is, who was and who is to come, and then the other. Both are symbols for what the initiate experiences during initiation.

[ 23 ] Thus we have allowed ourselves to be confronted by what happens in certain cases of initiation and is initially experienced. Tomorrow we will proceed to the details of these real experiences, and we will see them reflected in the grandiose presentation of the Apocalypse of John.