The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday it became clear to us how the Book of Revelation prophetically points to the cycle of human development that lies between the great upheaval on our earth that different peoples refer to as the Great Flood, that geologists characterize as the Ice Age, and that epoch which we call the war of all against all. In the period between these two epochs lies all that the apocalyptic book prophetically points out with the seven letters, this book that shows us the realities of the past in order to deduce from them what should fuel our will, our impulses for the future. And we have seen how we ourselves, within the spiritual movement in which we stand, are to regard the words of the so-called fifth epistle as a call to action, to work. We have seen how it is pointed out that we are to follow that being with the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. And we have seen how the next period of time is prepared through this spiritual spiritual movement, which is represented by the church of Philadelphia, the period of time in which that brotherly love is to prevail over the whole earth among all those who have understood the word of the command, which is prescribed in the Gospel of John. After that, another, seventh sub-period will follow, which is characterized by the fact that, on the one hand, we are shown everything that is bad in the church that represents the seventh period, which is lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, which could not warm itself for the spiritual life and must therefore fall away, and on the other hand, those who have understood the word of command are shown, who will form the following of him who says, I am the Amen - that is, I am he who unites the goal of the human being in himself, who contains the Christ principle in himself.

[ 2 ] We will now keep for a later time everything that could be added to the further explanation of the individual epistles, and everything that could be added to the justification of the individual names of the cities. Today we want to continue our consideration of what presents itself to man when he treads the next step of initiation. The seven sub-periods of our cycle of humanity have been presented to us, and we have said that this whole cycle with its seven sub-cycles is itself a small cycle in a great and comprehensive course of time, which likewise contains seven individual epochs. Our cycle of seven periods was preceded by the Atlantean one, in which the races whose echoes are still present today developed. Our present cycle, that is to say its seventh sub-cycle, will be immediately followed by another period consisting of seven links. This period is also indirectly prepared by the present one. So that we can say: Little by little, our culture will evolve into a culture of brotherly love, where a relatively small proportion of people will have understood the spiritual life, will have prepared the mind and the attitude of brotherly love. This culture will then in turn select a smaller proportion of people who will live beyond the event that will have such a destructive effect on our cycle, beyond the war of all against all. In the face of this general destructive element, there will be individuals everywhere who will stand out from the rest of humanity, who will wage war against each other, individuals who have understood the spiritual life and who will form the basis for a new, different epoch, the epoch of the sixth period.

[ 3 ] This is also how it was when the fourth period passed into our time. The one who can trace back the course of time with clairvoyant eyes comes, when he has passed through the periods that we have considered – the Greco-Roman, the Egyptian-Babylonian, the Old Persian and the Old Indian – when he has also passed through the time of the great flood, he then comes into the Atlantic time. We need not consider it in detail, but we must at least realize how this Atlantean culture developed. Here too, the majority of the Atlantean population was not ready to develop further and was unable to make the transition to our times. A small part, which lived in an area near present-day Ireland, developed into the highest cultural flowering of the Atlantean country and moved east. We must be clear that this is only the main migration. Peoples always migrated from west to east, and all the later peoples in European areas, in northern and central Europe, all these originated from that migration that went from west to east. Only the part of the population that had achieved the highest level of development was the furthest advanced under the leadership of a great human leader. They settled in Central Asia as a very small tribe of chosen people, and from there the colony went to the cultural areas we have mentioned. From there the cultural current went to ancient India, to Persia, Egypt, Greece and so on.

[ 4 ] You may well ask: Is it not an extremely grim thought that whole masses of people remain immature and do not develop the ability to flourish, that only a small group is able to provide the seed for the next culture? But this thought will no longer be frightening to you if you distinguish between racial development and soul development. For no soul is doomed to remain within any particular race. The race may lag behind, a community of nations may lag behind, but the souls transcend the individual races. If we want to imagine the matter very precisely, we have to say to ourselves: All souls that dwell in the bodies of the civilized countries today were once embodied in Atlantean bodies. There some developed further in a corresponding way. They did not remain with the Atlantean bodies. Because they had developed further, they could become the souls of the bodies that were also more advanced. Only those souls that had remained behind as souls had to move into bodies that had remained behind at a low level as bodies. If all souls had progressed accordingly, either the remaining race would have been very small in number, or the bodies would still have been inhabited by newly added low souls. For there are always souls that can inhabit retarded bodies. No soul is bound to a retarded body if it does not bind itself.

[ 5 ] How soul and race development relate to each other is preserved for us in a wonderful myth. Let us imagine race upon race, cultural community upon cultural community. The soul that fulfills its mission on earth in the right way is embodied in a race. Within this race, it strives to acquire the ability of this race in order to be embodied in a higher race the next time. Only those souls that are submerged in the race, that do not strive to rise out of physical materiality, are held back in the race by their own heaviness, so to speak. They appear a second time in the same race, a third time possibly in the body of similar races. Such souls have a retarding effect on the bodily race. This has been beautifully preserved in a saga.

[ 6 ] We know that man progresses in the path of his mission on earth by following the great leaders of humanity who point out the goals to him. If he rejects them and does not follow them, then he must remain with his race and cannot rise above it. Let us imagine a personality who has the good fortune to stand face to face with a great leader of humanity, let us imagine such a personality, for example, standing face to face with Christ Jesus Himself, who sees Him doing all the signs to lead humanity forward, but who wants to know nothing of this ascent, who repels the leader of humanity. Such a personality, such a soul would be condemned to remain in the race. And if we think this through to its radical conclusion, such a soul would have to appear again and again in the same race, and we have the saga of Ahasver, who must appear again and again in the same race because he rejected Christ Jesus.

[ 7 ] In these brazen tablets of legend, the great truths of human evolution are presented to us. We must separate soul evolution and race evolution. No soul has had to remain undeservedly in old bodies, no soul will remain undeservedly in the bodies of our age. The souls that will hear the voice calling to move forward will survive the great destructive period of the war of all against all and will appear in new bodies, in bodies of a very different nature from today's. For it is very short-sighted to think of the Atlantean bodies of men, for example, as being like today's bodies. In the course of millennia, people also change in terms of their external physiognomy, and the human being who will come after the great war of all against all will be shaped quite differently than today's human being. Today, man is shaped in such a way that he can conceal his good and his evil within himself in a certain relationship. A person's physiognomy already reveals a great deal, and those who understand it will be able to read many things from a person's facial features. But it is still possible today for the villain to smile sweetly with the most innocent expression and be mistaken for an honorable man. And the opposite is also possible, that what lives in the soul in terms of good impulses remains unrecognized. It is possible that everything that lives in the soul in terms of cleverness and stupidity, of beauty and ugliness, will hide behind the general physiognomy that this or that breed of people has. Such will no longer be the case in the period that will follow ours, after the great war of all against all. On the forehead and in the whole physiognomy it will be written for man whether he is good or evil. The innermost part of the soul will be worn by man as a physiognomy on his face, yes, the whole body will be an image of what lives in his soul. How man has developed within himself, whether he has developed good or evil instincts, will be written on his forehead. And after the great war of all against all, there will be two kinds of people. Those who had previously tried to follow the call to a spiritual life, to spiritualization, to the ennobling of the soul-spiritual life, will bear this soul-spiritual life on their faces and express it in their gestures and hand movements. And those who have turned away from the spiritual life, as they are represented to us by the congregation of Laodicea, who were lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, will live on into the next age as those who delay the evolution of humanity, who preserve the backward forces of development. They will bear the ugly, the unintelligent, the evil-looking passions and instincts on their ugly, unintelligent, evil-looking faces. They will form an external image in their gestures and in the way they do everything they do, which lives in their souls. Just as people have separated into races and cultural communities, so they will divide into two great currents, the good and the evil. And they will be seen for what they are — individuals will no longer be able to deny what their souls have brought about.

[ 8 ] If we look back at how humanity has developed so far in the course of our Earth, we will find this future development, which has just been characterized, in complete harmony with it. Let us look back to the origin of our Earth's development, after Saturn, Sun, Moon and a longer interval had passed. Then the Earth emerged anew from the darkness of the world. At that time, in the early days of the Earth's development, there were no creatures on Earth other than man. He is the firstborn. He was completely spiritual. For the incarnation consists in a condensation. Let us imagine a mass of water that could float freely. Through some process in this mass of water, parts of it become crystallized. First, let us imagine a small part of the water crystallized into ice, and then let us imagine that the same process is repeated over and over again. And now let us imagine that a part of the water mass has dropped the small pieces of ice that have crystallized out, so that these small pieces of ice are now separated from the whole mass of water. Because each small piece of ice can only grow as long as it is within the whole mass of water, it remains at the level at which it stands when it has fallen out of this mass. Let us imagine a part of the water mass as small pieces of ice that have been separated out. Let us imagine the freezing of the water masses progressing further and further, and on the next step, new water masses joining the small ice clumps, which then in turn fall out, and so on, until finally a very large part of the water mass has crystallized and taken on the form of ice. The latter has taken the most out of the water mother substance, it has been able to wait the longest before separating from this water mother substance.

[ 9 ] That is how it is with evolution. The lowest animal creatures could not wait, left their spiritual mother substance too early and therefore stopped at an earlier stage of evolution. And so the lower beings, ascending in stages, represent stages that have stopped in their development. Man waited until the end, only at the end did he leave his spiritual-divine mother substance and descended as a dense mass into a carnal form. The animals descended earlier and therefore remained. We shall see later why this happened; now we are interested in the fact that they descended and held on to earlier stages of development. What then is an animal form? A form which, if it had remained connected with the spirit from which it emerged, would have developed up to the present-day human being. But it remained where it was, it left the spiritual germ, it split off and today is in decline, representing a branch of the great tree of humanity. Man had animality in him in ancient times, as it were, but split it off as side branches. All animals in their various forms represent nothing other than individual human passions condensed too early. What man still has spiritually in his astral body today is represented physically by the animal forms. He has kept this in the astral body until the latest period of his earthly existence. Therefore, he could ascend to the highest.

[ 10 ] Even now, man has something within him that, like the other animal forms, must emerge from the general development as a downward-going branch. What man has within him as tendencies towards good and evil, towards cleverness and stupidity, towards beauty and ugliness, represents the possibility of progress and of remaining behind. Just as the animal form has developed, so the race of the wicked with ugly faces will develop out of progressive humanity, which is moving towards spiritualization and will achieve the later goal of humanity. Thus, the future will not only see animal forms that are the embodied images of human passions, but a race will live that is now hidden within man as part of evil, which he can still hide today, but which will appear later. What will mainly appear in the future will become clear to us through a consideration that you may find strange.

[ 11 ] It must be clear to us that this separation of animal forms was actually necessary for man. Every animal form that has separated itself from the general stream in the past means that man has advanced a step further. Consider that all the qualities that are dispersed in animal life were once in man. He has purified himself of them. This enabled him to evolve. If we have a cloudy liquid in front of us and let the coarse part of it settle as sediment, the finer part remains at the top. Likewise, in the animal forms, the coarser elements, which man could not have used in his present state of development, have settled like sediment. By casting out these animal forms as his older brothers in his line of development, man has come to his present height. Thus, by separating out the lower forms from itself, humanity rises to purify itself. And humanity will continue to ascend by once again discarding a kingdom of nature, the kingdom of the evil race. Thus humanity ascends. And every quality that man has today he owes to the fact that he has set aside a particular animal form. He who looks at the various animals with the eye of the clairvoyant knows exactly what we owe to each individual animal. There we look at the lion form and say to ourselves: If the lion did not exist, then man would not have this or that quality, because by setting him free, he has acquired this or that quality. — And so it is with all the other forms in the animal world.

[ 12 ] Now, our entire five epochs of human development, the various cultural stages from ancient India up to our own, are actually there to develop intelligence, reason and everything that belongs to these two abilities and powers. All this was not present in the Atlantean period. Memory was present, as were other faculties, but developing intelligence with all that it entails, with the ability to focus one's gaze on the external world, that is the task of the fifth period. The person who looks at the world with clairvoyance asks: To what fact do we owe the fact that we humans have become intelligent? What animal form did we abandon in order to become intelligent? However strange and grotesque it may seem, it is true: if it were not for the animals around us, represented by the horse-nature, man would never have been able to acquire intelligence.

[ 13 ] Man in early times still felt this. All the intimate relationships that take place between certain human races and the horse stem from a feeling that can be compared to the mysterious feeling of love between the two sexes, from a certain feeling for what man owes to this animal. Therefore, when the new culture emerged in ancient India, it was a horse that played a mysterious role in worship and everything that is connected to the horse in terms of customs can be traced back to this fact. If you look around at peoples who were still close to ancient clairvoyance, at the ancient Germans for example, and see how they have mounted horse skulls in front of their houses, this leads you back to this awareness: man has outgrown the unintelligent state by isolating this form. There is a deep awareness that the attainment of wisdom is connected with this. You only have to remember Odysseus, the wooden horse of Troy. Oh, there is deep wisdom in such legends, much deeper wisdom than in our science. It is not for nothing that such a type as the horse type is used in legend. Man has outgrown a form that still contained, so to speak, what was embodied in the horse. In the form of the centaur, art has depicted a human being in his connection with the animal in order to recall the stage of human development from which he has outgrown, from which he has wrested himself in order to become today's human being.

[ 14 ] What took place in the past to lead to our present humanity will be repeated on a higher level in the future. However, it is not as if the same thing has to happen in the physical world in the future. For the person who becomes clairvoyant at the boundary between the astral and devachan planes, it becomes apparent how man is increasingly ennobling and educating himself, which he owes to the separation of the horse-like nature. He will bring about the spiritualization of intelligence. What is mere intellect and cleverness today, he will raise to wisdom, to spirituality, after the great war of all against all. This will be experienced by those who will have reached the goal by then. What could develop in humanity as a result of the segregation of the horse nature will show itself in its fruit.

[ 15 ] And now let us imagine a clairvoyant who can see into the future of humanity. What will he see? Everything that man has prepared through the seven cultural periods – for his soul was embodied in the past cultures and will also be in the future ones – all this will be embodied in a following period and survive the great war of all against all into the more spiritual age. In each period he took in what was to be taken in. Think back with your soul to how you lived in the ancient Indian culture. There you absorbed the wonderful teachings of the holy rishis; even if you have forgotten them, you will remember them later. And you progressed from one incarnation to the next. You were able to learn what the Persian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman cultures made possible. Today this is in the soul. Today it does not yet show in the countenance as an external expression. You will live on into the time of Philadelphia, you will live on into the time that will be dominated by the Amen, and more and more a community of humanity will develop, which will show in the countenance of people what has been prepared in our time periods. What is already working in your soul, what you have taken in through the Indian period, will show in your physiognomy in the first sub-period of the next period, after the great war of all against all, and what man has acquired in the Old Persian period will change the face on the second stage, and so step by step. Everything that you, as you sit here now, take in with your souls, the spiritual teachings of today, which connect with your souls, will bear its fruits in the time after the great war. Today you combine what the seven spirits of God and the seven stars give with the life of your soul. You take it home. No one will read it in your countenances today, nor even after centuries, but after that great war of all against all it will come out. Then a fifth period will come and you will bear the image of it in your countenance. It will be written on your foreheads what you have now worked out, what your thoughts and feelings are now.

[ 16 ] Thus, after the great war of all against all, what is now hidden in the soul will gradually come out and reveal itself. Let us imagine the dawn of the great war: the soul that has heard the call that the Christ principle has sounded from period to period will survive into everything that is indicated in the epistles. What these periods can give has been invested in them for seven periods of time. Let us imagine the soul waiting, waiting for the future. It is sealed seven times. Each cultural period has given it a seal. What the Indians have written into the soul is sealed in you, what the Persians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans have written into the soul is sealed in you, and what our cultural epoch is writing into it is sealed in you. The seals are broken, that is, outwardly revealed, the things that are written into them appear after the great war of all against all. And the principle, the power that leads people to the true fruits of our cultural periods appearing on their faces, this principle, this power, we see in Christ Jesus. Seven seals must be broken from a book. What is this book? Where is it?

[ 17 ] We want to be clear about what a book, a Bible, is in the sense of the Scriptures. The word “book” occurs in the Bible only in a few places. This should not be overlooked. It occurs when you open the Old Testament Genesis 5, 1: “This is the book of the generation of man. In the beginning God created man, and made him male and female.” And so on. You can turn to any page you like, but you won't find the word ‘book’ again until the first gospel, chapter 1: ”The book of the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob,” and so on. Again, the generations are enumerated. It is enumerated, what flows through long series. And again the expression ‘book’ appears here in the Apocalypse of John. It appears where it is said that the Lamb alone is worthy to open the book with the seven seals. The term “book” is always used in the same way, never differently. Now, the deeds must be understood literally. A book in our modern sense is not meant by this. Rather, the term “land register” has retained the old meaning of the word book. The word book is used where something is entered in succession, where one thing depends on another, where, in other words, ownership is entered so that it can be inherited. We are dealing with such a document, which creates a basis for that which reproduces itself. In the Old Testament, the word book refers to a document in which the lineages that inherit through blood are recorded. It is used in no other sense than to record the generations. Likewise, it is later applied in the first gospel to the recording of genealogies. So what follows in time is written in a “book”. A book is never meant to mean anything other than the recording of what follows in time, roughly in the sense of chronicle or history.

[ 18 ] The book of life, which is now being created in humanity, in which, from cultural period to cultural period, what each period gives is inscribed in the human ego, this book, which is written in the souls of men and which is unsealed after the great war of all against all, this book is also meant here in the Apocalypse. In this book they will be written, the entries of the cultural periods. Just as the entries have been made through the generations in the genealogies of the old books, so it is also here, only that now what man acquires spiritually is being entered. And since he acquires through wisdom what can be acquired in our time, the progression of this development will gradually be imaginatively represented by the symbol that corresponds to wisdom. The fact that man has lived through the Indian period in a mood in which he looked up from the physical world and directed his gaze towards the spiritual, will enable him to triumph over the physical-sensual in the first period after the war of all against all. Man will be the victor by appropriating what has been written into his soul in the first period. And further: What emerged in the second cultural period, the conquest of matter by the ancient Persians, this conquest appears to us in the second period after the war of all against all: the sword, which is the instrument for conquering the external world. What man has acquired in the Babylonian-Egyptian cultural epoch, when he learned to measure, when he learned to measure everything fairly, that is what is indicated by the scales in the next period after the great war of all against all. And the fourth period shows us what is most important, what man has acquired through Christ Jesus and his appearance in the fourth period of our cycle: the spiritual life, the immortality of the ego. That everything that is not suitable for immortality, that which is doomed to die, must fall away, that must be shown for this fourth period.

[ 19 ] Thus, one after the other, everything that has been prepared in our periods of time comes to light, and it comes to light through being hinted at to us through the symbol, which corresponds to intelligence. If we read the unsealing of the first four seals in the sixth chapter of the Apocalypse of John, we will see that what is revealed here expresses to us step by step in powerful symbolism what will one day be revealed. “And I saw, and behold, a white horse” – this is the suggestion that the spiritualized intelligence comes out – ”and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering, and that he might conquer. And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And lo, another horse went out, red, and to him that sat on it was given to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another.” That is, that it perish, which is not worthy to go along in the ascent of humanity. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice under the four beasts say, “A measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a penny” — measure and penny to indicate what humanity has learned within the third period: the fruits are carried over and unsealed. And in the fourth period, Christ Jesus has appeared to overcome death, and the revelation of this achievement is revealed: “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’ And I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and its rider's name was Death, and Hell followed with him.” “Behold, a pale horse": all those who fall away, who go over to the side of evil; but he who has heard the call, who has overcome death, embraces the spiritual life. Those who have understood the ‘I am’ and its call are the ones who have overcome death. They have spiritualized intelligence. And now what they have become can no longer be symbolized by the horse. A new symbol must be found for those who have learned to follow the call of Him who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars. They now appear under the symbol of those clothed in white robes, who have taken on the garment of immortal, eternal spiritual life.

[ 20 ] And now we are told how everything that goes up into good comes out, and what goes down into evil. This is clearly expressed to us. “And when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained. And they cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?’ And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.” — be killed in the external sense and resurrect in the spiritual sense. How is this expressed?

[ 21 ] Let us visualize what happens to the external, sensory world in the right anthroposophical life. How did we describe the seven stars? We went back to Saturn and showed how the physical human body came into being, how it was put together out of warmth. We saw how the sun emerged. In spirit, we have traced this world. The sun is not just a physical sun for us, it is the bringer of life, which will appear as spiritual life in its highest form in the future of humanity. For us, the moon is the element that stops the rush of life and slows man down as much as is necessary. We see spiritual powers in the sun and moon. And what we acquire as anthroposophical wisdom also appears to be correctly symbolized in the future time frame: the sun and moon appear before our spiritual gaze as that which has built us humans up. Symbolically, the outer physical ball of the sun, the outer moon, disappears and becomes like a human being, but in an elementary form. “And I saw that it opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun turned black as a sack of hair, and the moon became like blood.” All this is the symbolic fulfillment of what we seek in the spiritual life.

[ 22 ] Thus we see that what is prepared in this period is prophesied in significant images for the next period. Today, we invisibly carry within us the transformation that we undergo with the sun and moon when the physical is transformed into spiritual elements. When the clairvoyant gaze turns to the future, the physical indeed disappears and the symbol of humanity's spiritualization appears before us.

[ 23 ] In somewhat daring strokes, we have today hinted at what the seven seals and their unveiling in the Apocalypse are meant to tell us. We must, however, delve deeper into this, and then much of what may seem unlikely to us today will become completely clear. But we can already see how the mighty images that the seer saw of the present and future of human development are arranged inwardly, how this leads into a further future and thus gives us ever stronger impulses to live into the future ourselves, to help spiritualize human life.