The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Let me first say that it fills me with deep satisfaction to be able to speak to you in a large gathering, in a series of lectures on subjects of spiritual knowledge. As important and necessary as it is for our time that spiritual science provides inspiration in individual lectures, it is no less necessary, especially for those who want to delve deeper into spiritual scientific life and striving, that such explanations and presentations be offered in a certain context. One can then say certain things more precisely, one can place them in a context where they receive their proper light, their proper coloring, whereas otherwise this or that can easily be subject to misunderstanding. For in the present time, even among the most prepared souls, many words drawn from the spiritual realm still encounter a certain difficulty of understanding. In order to grasp how things are actually meant, it takes more than good will and intellect; one must, in the true sense, offer them something in return, something that could be called patience, even in the esoteric-occult sense. And this patience is meant here in a deeper sense. We must first allow other things to shed light on certain ideas and views, and wait quietly until the context gives rise to an understanding of things that at first could only be taken as hints and were difficult for some to believe.

[ 2 ] In today's lecture, we will focus more on characterizing the basic outlines of our task in a kind of introduction. We do not want to actually enter into this task itself, but first want to agree on what we want to talk about in the next few days. For we have before us a broad and extensive subject: the world, the earth, and humanity—that is, an outline of the scope of all knowledge that we can acquire about the visible and invisible worlds. Our feelings are carried out to the furthest reaches of the cosmos when the term “world” is used in a serious and dignified sense. The word “earth” points us to the stage on which humanity is placed, on which we are to live and work, which we are to understand according to its tasks and goals. And finally, the word “human” points us to what the mystics of all ages have meant by the saying, “Know thyself, O man,” which we want to grasp in an occult sense. And we have a subtitle to our theme. The very fact that we have set ourselves such lofty and significant tasks justifies this subtitle in a certain sense; for when we consider the connection between that wonderful pre-Christian culture, the Egyptian culture, and our own culture, we see how mysterious forces permeate human life. Three periods of human striving and research, human development, human morality, and way of life come to mind when we speak of Egypt and the present. When we speak of Egypt in the occult sense, we mean the long culture that lasted for thousands of years, spread across northeastern Africa on the banks of the Nile, and lasted until the 8th century BC. We know that this Egyptian culture was replaced by another, which we call the Greco-Latin culture, centered on the one hand on the wonderful, sublime people of Greece and on the other hand on the powerful Roman Empire. We also know that this cultural epoch includes the great event in the evolution of our Earth that we know as the appearance of Christ Jesus. And then comes our actual present, the epoch in which we ourselves live. Egyptian culture with all that belongs to it — and much belongs to it —, the Greek-Latin period with its great achievements and the emergence of Christianity from it, and our present epoch: these are the three periods that appear before our spiritual eye when we consider the subtitle of our lectures. And it will be shown that mysterious forces are at work between the first of the cultural epochs mentioned and our own. It is as if certain seeds were sown in the Egyptian era in the womb of humanity as it gradually developed; seeds that remained hidden during the Greek-Latin culture and are now sprouting in a very special way in the present epoch. So that much of what springs up in our souls today, what surrounds us today, what people talk and dream about today, what our researchers think, much of this is like a seed of ancient Egyptian culture that has sprouted without people knowing it. Most of you are more or less familiar with the electrical equipment used in so-called telegraph apparatus. You know that wires connect the apparatus from one place to another, and without having any deeper knowledge of these things, you understand that the force that sets the apparatus in motion has something to do with the force that flows through the wires. But you may also know that there is a connection below, underground, that the wire is connected to the earth at its ends. But this connection is not visible; it is made invisible by more or less mysterious forces through the earth itself. Something similar exists as a deep mystery of human development. We see the threads spinning in history, which lie in the open. We can trace what happened in ancient Egypt with the means of history and with the means of occultism. We see how the threads of culture extend into Greek, Roman, Christian, and even into our own time. All of this is like a kind of above-ground conduit. But there is also an underground, hidden force, one that has been working more or less directly from ancient Egyptian times to our own. And many strange mysteries will be revealed to us if we follow and understand these connections.

[ 3 ] Today we will draw up a kind of outline of our task. First, let us briefly mention the peculiarity referred to in the subtitle of our topic, which we have just characterized.

[ 4 ] When we turn our gaze back to ancient Egypt and consider just a few of the, one might say, highly significant documents of this Egyptian civilization, we are struck, for example, by the pyramids and also by the Sphinx, that wonderful, enigmatic figure. Then we let our gaze wander up to ancient Greece. There we encounter the Greek temple with its unique architecture. And we consider what we know of Greek civilization from its external history and admire the plastic works of art, those great, ideal, perfect human figures that are addressed as gods: Zeus, Demeter, Pallas Athena, Apollo. And further on, we turn our gaze to ancient Rome. Something strange strikes us when we let our gaze wander from the ancient Greek peninsula to the Italian peninsula. Before our eyes appear the figures of ancient Rome that have remained most vivid in our memory, figures clothed in togas, which are more than mere outer garments. What do we feel toward these Roman figures? Oh, one could say that one feels toward certain figures from the early Roman royal period, from the Roman Republic, as if the ideal figures of the Greeks had descended from their pedestals, as if they had appeared before our souls in the Roman toga figures as people of flesh and blood. For what makes them appear to us in this way is the inner strength they possess; and we feel what lies in this inner strength when we compare the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of a member of the Greek state, for example, a Spartan or an Athenian, with what developed in ancient Rome as Roman. We feel what this is all about. The citizen of Sparta, of Athens, felt himself first and foremost a Spartan, an Athenian. Endowed with a certain relationship, to a certain degree with a common soul, the Spartan, the Athenian, feels what we call the Greek polis more than his own individual humanity; he felt more like a Spartan, an Athenian, than a human being; he feels more strongly the powerful force that works within him, arising from the common spirit of the polis, than his own personal power. The Roman, on the other hand, appears to us to be entirely centered on his own personality. Therefore, something very specific emerges above all else in Roman culture, and that is the concept of civil law. For everything that legal scholars dream of regarding the previous development of the concept of law is something entirely different from what, in better times of research, was rightly called Roman law. In ancient Rome, people learned to feel themselves as individuals; they no longer stood on their own two feet as members of a city, but as Roman citizens, which means that they felt themselves to be at the center of their own humanity. Thus, the time has come when the spiritual, which previously was perceived as floating in higher regions, so to speak, has descended to our earth. There is something peculiar about Roman law and its culture. Let us take the case of the Greek who felt himself to be a Theban or a Spartan—what is the spirit of Thebes or Sparta? For us anthroposophists, it is not an abstraction, but something like a spiritual cloud, which in turn is the physical expression of a spiritual being in which the city of Sparta or Thebes is embedded; but it is not a being that would be visible on the earthly, physical plane. The Greek does not look at himself first, he looks up to something above him; the Roman looks at himself first. It is he who first recognizes as human the highest that can take shape in the flesh on the physical plane. The spiritual has descended completely into humanity: this is the time when even the highest spiritual, when the divine itself, could descend to incarnation, to becoming human in the flesh, in Christ Jesus.

[ 5 ] It is a wonderful process, how the first of our cultures mentioned above reaches over into this Greek-Roman period. Let us remember how Moses, when he was in Egypt—as Scripture tells us—received the commission from higher regions to lead his people to the “One God,” how he asked God: What shall I say to my people when they ask me who sent me, who gave me this mission? Then God answered—and we shall see what profound

[ 6 ] truth is hidden in this statement: “Tell those to whom I send you, ‘I am’ has sent you.” “I am” thus becomes the name for a unified God who still reigns and works in spiritual heights, who has not yet descended to the physical plane. To whom does this voice belong that calls down to Moses: “Tell your people, I am the ‘I am’”? To whom does this voice belong, which can make itself audible to the initiated Moses, which speaks to him, so to speak, from spiritual worlds? It is the same being — and this is the secret of the ancient Egyptian mysteries — who later appears in the flesh as Christ; only that afterwards he stands visibly before those who are around him, whereas before he could only speak to the initiated from spiritual heights. Thus we see the divinity, the spiritual, descending more and more, after humanity has been prepared, after it has experienced in Roman times how significant incarnation in the flesh, appearance on the physical plane, is.

[ 7 ] And we see how, in an enormously deepened form, a series of cultural phenomena now grows out of what human beings have received as a new gift. We see how temple building and pyramid building are transformed into the Romanesque church — again, such a document of inner human creativity! — and we see how, from the 6th century onwards, the cross with the dead Jesus appears. And little by little, a remarkable figure grows out of this stream of Christianity, whose mysteries are deeply, deeply hidden. We need only bring this figure of pictorial art before our eyes in the wonderful form it has taken in Raphael's Sistine Madonna. You all know this wonderful virgin woman in the center of the picture. You know this child carried by the Madonna, and you have certainly all had the corresponding shivers of emotion before this picture. But let me mention one thing about this picture, which is such a wonderful expression of the spiritual striving of humanity at the stage that concerns us in the three cultures I mentioned: it is not without reason that the artist has surrounded this Madonna with a cloud formation from which a large number of similar children, angelic figures, emerge.

[ 8 ] And now let us immerse ourselves completely with our feelings in this image of the Madonna. Anyone who has enough inner feeling to immerse themselves in it will sense and feel that there is something else here quite different from what an ordinary, profane mind can see in this picture. Don't these cloud angels around the Madonna tell us something? Yes, they tell us something very significant, if we only look at them deeply enough. It whispers to our soul when we immerse ourselves intimately in this image: here is a miracle before us in the best sense of the word. — And we do not believe that this child whom the Madonna carries in her arms, as this figure appears to us, we do not believe that it was born in the ordinary way from a woman. No, these angelic figures in the clouds tell us: wonderful, fleeting as if in the process of becoming, they appear, and the child in her arms appears to us only as a condensed expression, as something more crystallized than these fleeting angelic figures. As if taken down from the clouds and held in her arms, this child appears to us, not as born of a woman. And we are pointed to a mysterious connection between the child and the virgin mother. And when we paint this image before our mind's eye, another virgin mother appears before us: the ancient Egyptian Isis with the child Horus. And one can suspect a mysterious connection between the Christian Madonna and the Egyptian figure standing before us as Isis, at whose temple the words were written: “I am that which was, that which is, that which will be; no mortal can lift my veil.” What we have just delicately hinted at as a miracle in the image of the Madonna is also suggested to us by Egyptian mythology, in that Horus is not born through conception, but through a ray of light from Osiris falling on Isis, a kind of immaculate birth: the child Horus appears. Here we see how the threads are woven together; what we are exploring here is, so to speak, without earthly connection.

[ 9 ] And again we let our gaze wander further, to the point where our time begins. We immerse ourselves in the Gothic cathedral with its wonderful pointed arches; we call to our soul what took place in the Middle Ages in the assemblies where the truly faithful stood before real priests. We remember how this Gothic cathedral made an impression with its different colored window panes through which the sunlight streamed in; we remember how some of those who could speak of the deeper mysteries of the creation of the world were able to produce sounds that were reflected in the wonderful, color-divided light. And time and again the priests pointed out that the collective power of the divine existence communicates itself to humanity in individual rays of power, like this light streaming in through the colored windows. The division of the light presented itself to the senses, and what lay spiritually behind this image was stirred in the soul. Thus the power of the mind and the senses permeated such a Gothic cathedral. Now let us penetrate a little deeper into what is presented to our soul. Let us look at the Egyptian pyramids—a peculiar architectural structure! We must strain our minds to unravel what they are trying to tell us. Little by little, we will see how the pyramid expresses the mystery of the world, the earth, and humanity; we will see that it expresses what the Egyptian priest felt according to his religious form. We will delve deeply into all these things; today, let us only draw attention to what such a priest felt and communicated to his people in images. This Egyptian wisdom, which found expression in the form of religion, was profound; it was a direct result of ancient traditions; this Egyptian wisdom was like a memory, and the Egyptian sage who met Solon was right to say: “Oh, you Greeks, you remain children all your lives; nothing of the ancient sacred truth lives in your childlike souls.” —- He wanted to point to the age of Egyptian wisdom. Where did it come from?

[ 10 ] Our present humanity, as you know, was preceded by another humanity that lived on the continent now covered by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. When the great Atlantic flood came, the knowledge of the Atlanteans was carried eastward through what is now Europe. What remained here were the Norse myths, as memories of the ancient Atlantean wisdom. We know that the ancient Indian and Persian cultures were carried to Asia by the descendants of the Atlanteans, that Egyptian wisdom was partly inspired by Asia, but that it also flowed directly from the West to the East, from Atlantis to Africa. And what was this wisdom of which the Egyptian sage spoke as an ancient tradition? This becomes clear to us when we consider for just a moment the difference between life in ancient Atlantis and our life today. At that time, human beings were endowed with a dull clairvoyant power. They saw beings around them that are still around us today, but which modern human beings no longer see. The earth is not exhausted with plants, minerals, and animals. Around us are spiritual beings, but they are only visible to the clairvoyant eye. Back then, in Atlantis, humans had clairvoyance as a normal faculty; not only plants, minerals, and animals were their companions, but also divine spiritual beings, with whom they lived as you live with humans today. At that time, there was not yet the strict division between day and night that we have today. Today, when humans immerse themselves in their physical bodies with their astral bodies and their egos in the morning, they are surrounded by physical objects. And when they emerge from their physical bodies and etheric bodies with their egos and astral bodies in the evening, it becomes dark and gloomy around them. This is how normal humans are today. It was not like this in Atlantis, especially in ancient times. When people stepped out of their physical bodies in the evening, darkness did not spread around them, but they entered a world of spiritual beings: they saw those divine-spiritual figures as we see physical figures today. Wotan, Baldur, Zeus, Apollo, they are not invented fantastical figures, they are the expression of real beings who only at that time in the Atlantean era had not taken on a physical body, but whose densest body was the transparent etheric body. And when man stepped out of his physical body at night, they were around him as etheric figures, And when he re-entered his physical body in the morning, he was in this world of reality, which is now the only one for him; he left, so to speak, the world of the gods for a time and immersed himself in the world of physical flesh, and there was no strict boundary between the perception of night and day. And when, in those days, the initiate spoke to normal people about such divine figures, he was not talking about something unknown to them. It was as if we speak today about people and call them by name. They spoke of beings such as Wotan and Baldur, because they knew them as divine etheric beings.

[ 11 ] The memory of that ancient wisdom and experience was carried over with the emigrants who moved to the East; and from these memories, in connection with a very specific constitution of the Egyptian people, which we will learn about in detail, the confidence developed within ancient Egypt that a spiritual and therefore eternal being lives in man, that when the body lies as a corpse, it is abandoned by a divine spirit. This was expressed in the most varied images and messages that the Egyptian priests gave to the people. But this was not an abstract truth for the ancient Egyptians; it was a truth that they experienced directly. Let us characterize what the Egyptian felt. He said to himself: I see the corpse lying here, the dust of the human being who was the bearer of an ego; I know, because I know it from ancient tradition, I know it from the experiences of my ancestors, that something remains that goes into other worlds. That would not fulfill its purpose, said the ancient Egyptian, if it lived solely in that spiritual world; a bond of attraction must be established between the spiritual world and the earthly, physical world. We must have, so to speak, a magnetic bond for the soul that moves to higher regions at death, in order to awaken in it a lasting feeling so that it can return and appear again on this earth.

[ 12 ] We know today from spiritual science that humanity itself ensures that the soul returns again and again to new incarnations; we know that when a person passes into other spheres at death, during the time of Kamaloka, the time when they are weaning themselves off the earthly, they are bound to the physical with certain forces. We know that it is these forces that prevent him from immediately ascending to the regions of Devachan, and that it is also these forces that pull him back down into a new incarnation. But we are people today who live in abstractions, who present such things as “theory.” In ancient Egypt, this was a tradition; the Egyptians were the opposite of theorists, of mere thinkers; they wanted to see with their senses how the soul makes its way out of the dead body and into the higher regions. They wanted to have this built up before them, and they built this idea into the pyramids: the path of the soul's ascent, how it leaves the body, how it is still partially bound, and how it is led up to higher regions. In the architecture of the pyramid, we can see the soul's bondage to the earthly realm. Like an image of Kamaloka, it confronts us with its mysterious forms. We can say that, in our external perception, it is an image of the soul leaving the body and ascending to higher regions.

[ 13 ] And further! We try to understand these ancient traditions. In ancient Atlantean times, people still saw much around them that is completely hidden from people today. We remember from earlier lectures that in those days the etheric body of human beings was not yet as intensely connected with the physical body as it is today; the etheric head still protruded far above the physical body. In animals, this form is still retained today. If you look at a horse clairvoyantly, you see the etheric head towering above the horse's muzzle as a figure of light; and if you could see that strange structure that forms above the trunk of an elephant! The etheric head was present in the ancient Atlanteans in a similar form, though not as strongly, but later it gradually receded into the head so that today it is approximately the same in size and shape. But then the physical head, which was only partially dominated by the etheric head and still had many powers outside that are now inside, was not yet human-like to that high degree; it was still developing, and one could still see something of a lower animal head shape, so to speak. What was it like when the ancient Atlantean looked at one of his companions during the day? He saw a receding forehead, protruding teeth, something that still resembled an animal. When the human being fell asleep in the evening, when Atlantean clairvoyance began, the gaze was directed not only at the animal-like figure, but the ethereal human head form, a far more beautiful form than it is today, grew out of the physical head. The animal-like features became indistinct in the nighttime gaze, and the beautiful human form emerged. And in even more remote times, the Atlantean clairvoyant could look back to times when human beings were even more animal-like, but connected to a completely human-like etheric body; this etheric body was much more beautiful than today's physical human body, which has adapted to the strong, dense forces. Now imagine this memory of the ancient Atlantean consciousness symbolically placed before people in Egyptian times! Imagine that the Egyptian priest wanted to tell his people: “In Atlantean times, when your souls were awake, they saw human forms in animal shape, but at night a beautiful human head grew out of them.” This memory, vividly depicted, is the Sphinx. Only then can one understand these forms; one must learn to understand that they are not figments of the imagination, but realities.

[ 14 ] And again we go further in our consideration. We advance from the Egyptian pyramid to the Greek temple. Only those who have a feeling that forces are at work in space can understand such a temple. The Greeks had such a sense of space. People who study space from the standpoint of spiritual science know that this space is not the abstract emptiness that our ordinary mathematicians and physicists dream of, but that it is in fact highly differentiated. It is something that is filled with lines, with lines of force here and there, from top to bottom, from right to left, straight lines and curved lines in all directions. One can feel space, penetrate it emotionally. Anyone who has such a sense of space knows why certain old painters were able to paint the freely floating angelic figures in Madonna pictures so wonderfully lifelike; they know that these angels hold each other, just as the bodies of the universe hold each other in space through their gravitational pull. It is quite different when you look at Böcklin's painting “Pieta,” for example. This is not to detract from the other merits of the painting, but anyone who has retained a lively sense of space has the feeling that those strange angelic figures are about to fall down at any moment. The old painters still had a sense of space from earlier clairvoyance; in more recent times, this has been lost.

[ 15 ] When art still had occult traditions, people knew about such mutually supporting forces that are present in space, flowing back and forth. Such forces were felt by those in whose minds the idea of the Greek temple arose. They did not think it up, but perceived the forces flowing through space and gave them form in stone: they filled with matter what was already there occultly. Thus, the Greek temple is a material expression of forces working in space; a Greek temple is a crystallized idea of space in the purest sense of the word. The consequence of this is something very important. Because the Greeks gave material form to the forces of space, they gave the divine-spiritual beings the opportunity to use this material form. It is not a figure of speech, but reality, that in those days God descended into the Greek temple in order to be among human beings on the physical plane. Just as today a pair of parents provide the physical form, the flesh of their child, so that the spiritual can live out its life on the physical plane, something similar happened in the Greek temple. An opportunity was given for divine-spiritual beings to flow down and embody themselves in the architectural structure of the temple. That is the secret of the Greek temple: God was there in the temple. Anyone who truly felt the Greek temple form also felt that no human being needed to be anywhere near it, not even in the temple itself, and yet the temple was not empty, for God was truly present in the temple. The Greek temple is a whole in itself because it contains the forms that bind God within it.

[ 16 ] And when we now look at Roman church architecture, especially those with a crypt, we already see a kind of further development. In the pyramid we see represented the path that the soul takes after death, the outer architectural form for the departing soul. The Greek temple is the expression of the divine soul that likes to dwell on the physical plane. The Roman building with the crypt corresponds to the cross on which the dead body of Jesus hangs. Humanity has progressed to a higher consciousness in spiritual spheres. The bondage to the earthly, the Kamaloka period, is represented in the pyramid; the victory over the physical form, the victory over death, is expressed in the cross on which the dead Jesus hangs, reminding us of the spiritual victory over death, of Christ.

[ 17 ] And a little further on we come to the Gothic building. It is not complete unless the faithful congregation is inside. If we want to feel everything together, the pointed arches must unite with the folded hands and the feelings they express, which flow upward. But not feelings like those in the crypt, where the memory of the spiritual victory over death was celebrated, but victorious feelings such as those felt by the soul, which already feels victorious over death in the body. The soul that is victorious in the body belongs in the Gothic building; it is not complete unless such feelings flow through it. The Greek temple is the body of God; it stands alone. The Gothic church presents itself as something that calls the community; it is not a temple, but a cathedral. Cathedral is the same word that is expressed in the suffix “tum,” as in the words humanity or folklore. The Russian word Duma is also based on the word “tum.” A cathedral, a “tum,” is where individual members are called together to form a community.

[ 18 ] So you see how human thoughts and human attitudes progress through time, and thus we gradually arrive at our own time. And we will see how these forces continue to play out not only in the above-ground world: beneath the surface, mysterious occult currents are at work, so that what is emerging in our culture today appears to us as a reincarnation of much of what was placed into humanity in ancient Egyptian times. And let us conclude with a thought that will give you a first glimpse of such mysterious connections.

[ 19 ] What is it that constitutes the materialism of our present-day culture? Let us characterize this materialism. What is particularly characteristic of the person of broad outlook who today has lost the harmony, the reconciliation between faith and knowledge, when he wants to look at something spiritual? He sees nothing! He looks at the coarse, material, physical; he knows that it is real, that it really exists, and he even goes so far as to deny the spiritual. They believe that human existence is fulfilled when the human corpse lies in the dust; they see nothing rising up into the spiritual worlds. Can such a view arise as a consequence of something that was sown in a time when there was a firm belief in the survival of the soul, as was the case in ancient Egypt? Yes, because in culture it is not like in the plant kingdom, where only similar things arise again and again from the seed. In culture, one value must alternate with another that is apparently not similar to it—and yet there are deeper, intimate similarities.

[ 20 ] The human gaze today is bound to the physical body; it regards this physical body as reality and cannot rise to the spiritual. These souls, which today look out through their eyes upon physical human bodies and cannot rise to the spiritual, were incarnated in earlier tribes as Greeks, Romans, and ancient Egyptians. And everything that lives in our souls today is the result of what we absorbed in earlier incarnations.

[ 21 ] Imagine your soul transported back to the ancient Egyptian body. Imagine your soul being led back through the passage of the pyramid to higher spheres after death, but your body remaining behind as a mummy. This had an occult consequence. The soul always had to look down when the mummy body lay below. There, thoughts became solidified, ossified, hardened; there, thoughts were banished into the physical world. Because the ancient Egyptian soul had to look down from the regions of the spirit onto its preserved physical body after death, the thought became rooted in it that this physical body is a higher reality than it actually is. Think back to your soul at that time; you looked down at the mummy. The thought of the physical form hardened, it carried over through the incarnations: today this thought appears in such a way that people cannot tear themselves away from the physical body form. Materialism as a thought is in many ways a fruit of the embalming of corpses.

[ 22 ] So you see how thoughts and feelings work from incarnation to incarnation. This is only meant to give you an idea of how cultures live on through incarnations, how they reappear in completely different forms; it is only meant to give you a faint inkling of the numerous occult threads that run hidden down there.

[ 23 ] Today we wanted to pull a few threads, to hint at the questions that will occupy us. We will now let our gaze wander up to the highest regions of the world that the Egyptian priest saw, we will have to focus our gaze on the essence, the goal, and the destiny of human beings, and we will understand how such riddles are solved when we see that the fruits of one cultural epoch reappear in a wonderfully mysterious way in another, later one.