The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] We have seen how, in our time, what will later emerge in the outer life of human beings can be written into their souls. Just as there are seven successive cultural epochs in our time, so the seven periods of human development after the war of all against all appear to the apocalypticist who looks into the future; he sees these seven periods in the seven seals. However, he makes a sharp distinction between the periods he records as the first four. Each time he opens one of the seals, one of the four horses appears to him with a rider on it.

[ 2 ] The apocalyptic visionary is thus dealing with the clairvoyant perception of the seven future periods. These are astral images of what will once be. Those human beings who have absorbed something of the spiritual culture will have overcome their lower nature; they will then control their instinctive human nature. What man has overcome is expressed in the seal in the form of horses. With what he will have made of his soul, he will be victorious over his lower nature; he will master it, like the rider who is the master of the horse.

[ 3 ] Everything that has been experienced in our period since ancient Indian times will reappear after the war of all against all. Thus, in the repetition, the ancient Indian period appears first. At that time, everything in the physical world was illusion, Maya, to human beings; at that time, the soul had become ripe to be victorious over everything in the sensual world. The fruit of this Indian period appears to the apocalypticist in the image of the white horse. It is characteristic of this human soul that the outer, material culture does not yet appear to have been touched by human hands; the rider with his bow is as innocent as the bright sunlight. Like a victor, he has earned the right to be victorious over lower nature after the war of all against all. But this lower nature is still there; man has grown together with it, as depicted in the second seal as a red horse. The soul is no longer clothed in white innocence. As a result, man cannot appear as the victorious rider during this period; he appears to us as bringing with him the fruits of egoism. After the war of all against all, he no longer appears in white robes, but once again takes peace from the earth, once again showing himself in the struggle for existence with the sword.

[ 4 ] Now we see the fruit of the third period, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, in which humanity learned to calculate and count. Man has descended deeper and deeper into matter, into the darkness of lower nature; this is symbolized by the black horse and the rider with the scales. Weighing, measuring, and counting are expressed to the apocalypticist as a black horse and the human soul as the rider with the scales. In Persian culture, there are not yet such social institutions through which man allocates property according to intelligent, state-social orders; there was no such thing in ancient India or ancient Persia. In ancient India, people still believed in their Atlantean incarnations. In ancient Indian times, people saw their position in life as a consequence of what they had prepared for themselves in ancient Atlantis. They told themselves that they belonged to a certain caste as a result of human karma; they looked up to the higher castes as a just division according to individual karma. However, this division into castes became increasingly impossible due to the development of the human ego. The period in which the division of property and goods began to be calculated primarily on the basis of intelligence was the Egyptian-Chaldean period. The fruit of this third period thus appears as the rider sitting on the black horse with the scales, with which all thinking and human intelligence are weighed. Thus, to the apocalyptic, what will appear as the fruits of our seven cultures after the war of all against all appears symbolically.

[ 5 ] The fourth period, as Greek-Latin culture, conquered the beauty of the physical world. The Greeks idealized nature in their art and beautified existence. How beautiful Greek sculpture and architecture appear to us in contrast to Egyptian art, the Sphinx, and the pyramids. But the Greeks had become so attached to physical, sensual existence that the spiritual world had become dark to them, and light only penetrated what was for them complete shadow through the event of Golgotha. The soul had been completely shackled in this fourth period. But during this period, the lower nature underwent a beautification, receiving, as it were, a covering of beauty and art. This is truly characteristic of the soul in this most beautiful period for the earthly realm; but for the soul itself, the fruit of this period is synonymous with death. The souls will reap the least fruit from this period, which has given them dominion over the outer physical nature.

[ 6 ] And now we come to the fifth period, where the Yahweh-Christ principle shines upon the souls even between death and a new birth. There the souls become ever more alive. What happens in this fifth period? The astral body becomes increasingly luminous and brighter through what the soul absorbs from the Christ impulse. We imagine, as if looking with clairvoyant eyes, the astral body radiating from the ego; to the apocalyptic visionary after the war of all against all, it appears as a white garment. Thus, in the fifth period after this war, the soul will appear permeated with the aura that is already illuminated by the light of Christ... [gap]

[ 7 ] But those who already accepted the Christ principle in the early days of Christianity had to suffer greatly in terms of outward physical martyrdom. But things are coming to a head in this fifth period. Through the Rosicrucian theosophical spiritual current, the Christ impulse will be taken up in an increasingly selfless self and with living understanding, and its followers will develop toward an ever higher spiritual life.

[ 8 ] But another current is working as a sharply opposing current toward a certain cultivation of the ego, in order to drive this ego ever deeper into materialism, so that materialism ultimately wins the victory over the personality. All external practical life detaches itself from the individual and becomes materialized, for example through the measures of joint-stock capital, which is increasingly detaching itself from the personality. Human beings will increasingly be overcome in their personal abilities. The share is the path to the materialization of this branch of practical human participation.

[ 9 ] Thus we see materialism gaining more and more the upper hand; the tendency will increasingly be for the spiritualization of the human personality to form the opposite pole to the ever more dominant materialism. What is sharply opposed will appear at the end of our period as humanity that has been overcome externally. And the people who were strangled for the sake of the word will have much to suffer; but they will be the most important bearers of culture beyond the war of all against all.

[ 10 ] And a sixth period dawns with the community of Philadelphia. Apart from these spiritual people, the rest of humanity is completely entangled in social life, lost in ever-increasing materialism. But these people will master the forces of nature to a high degree, as we already see in wireless telegraphy and air travel. It is not irrelevant whether the airspace is filled with spiritual thoughts or with thoughts of material needs. This will affect our entire globe. We are looking into a period in which human beings will intervene to a high degree in the air and light space.

[ 11 ] What will be the fruits of this period? In its true form, it appears that for a certain period of time these electrical waves will have a retroactive effect on the forces of the earth, and depending on the good and evil, earthquakes and earth tremors will occur as a result of human actions. “And I saw when he opened the sixth seal, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the sun's brightness was taken from it.” (Rev. 6:12) By communicating his feelings to the air, man changes the whole of nature, and something like a meteor shower occurs. In this way, man unleashes the forces of nature, but he does not go unpunished for his actions.

[ 12 ] Seeing this, it seems to us at the same time that man will find his downfall within these unleashed forces of nature. But those who connect themselves with the spirit appear as sealed people. Such people must take into themselves what can come to humanity as spiritual teaching.

[ 13 ] What people take into themselves as spiritual will be their spiritual and soulful heart's blood in the future; it will be the light that will shine out of them as spirit. In the Atlantean and post-Atlantean cultures, human beings stand firmly on two feet, on water and on earth. But they must take wisdom into themselves like a book that is devoured. This figure points upward to the spiritual world; he gives the book to the apocalyptic figure, who is to devour it. It is to be indigestible to the lower human nature, but sweet as honey to the higher nature, because one does not read the book but devours it. The person who, with today's modern logical thinking and through occult training has become clairvoyant, can relive what the apocalyptic writer has recorded, sees the visions of the apocalyptic writer in the Rosicrucian seals. The seal with the two pillars represents the tenth chapter of the Apocalypse.