The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we saw how, in the post-Atlantean epoch of human development, human beings gradually conquered the physical plane, that is, our physical world; how they gained more and more understanding that this physical world, into which human beings only entered in the course of time, after having previously appeared to them in vague outlines, is the expression of spiritual powers and forces behind it. We have seen how, in the time when the Greeks and Romans were the leading peoples, there was, so to speak, a kind of balance between the understanding of the physical-material world and the spiritual world born out of human beings themselves. Human beings, if one may say so, have come to terms with the outer material world; they have gradually learned to understand and love it. Now we must not believe that these processes did not have their corresponding parallels in the other, spiritual world. Yes, we can even go further back in human evolution and find that to the same extent that the external conditions for human beings change in relation to the observation and perception of the physical world, the conditions for the other consciousness also undergo a fundamental transformation. So far, we have actually placed the main emphasis on what this consciousness was like when the human being withdrew from his physical body during sleep; we have seen how, in the Atlantean epoch, after he had perceived blurred contours while awake, the divine-spiritual beings appeared before him in a kind of twilight clairvoyance.

[ 2 ] But in order to understand the whole human being, we must also take into account those other changing states of consciousness that are connected with what we call death and what lies beyond death; and there we shall see that our ordinary life, which we can observe between birth and death, has another side to it that is quite different. We must pose the question as precisely as possible. We have considered the destinies of human beings in the life between birth and death from the Atlantean times to the Greco-Roman period. How are the destinies of human beings shaped between death and new birth, for human life does continue after death? At the very moment when, during the ancient Lemurian period, human beings enter into an earthly incarnation for the first time, and thus, so to speak, enters into an alternation between life in a physical body and life outside of it, that is, between death and new birth, at that very moment, when he considers his whole life, he has, in a sense, a double life, a double destiny, one on earth and one between his death and new birth in the spiritual world. And although there is a widespread belief that changes only occur in the physical, earthly world, and that everything between death and a new birth can basically be described in a few characteristic words, this belief is completely incorrect. Fates also change within this spiritual epoch of human development.

[ 3 ] We will understand best how these changes take place if we take a very rough look at the life that human beings lead here in the physical world and at their relationship to the other realms around them. For, as they are now developed, human beings are by no means beings that exist absolutely for themselves alone, but they stand in the most manifold relationships to everything around them. Just think how human consciousness, self-consciousness, depends on what is around us! If there were no other realms around us, no mineral realm, no plant and animal realm, if there were no atmosphere, no clouds to reflect light back to us, our ego as it is now would not have been able to ignite itself in an external world. Thus, in terms of his self-consciousness, man is, as it were, immersed in his environment during the day. He is also immersed in an environment between birth and death because he has an etheric body, a physical body. He takes his food and nourishment from the lower realms of nature. The mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms give him substances and forces that pass through him, so that he lets the kingdoms of outer nature flow through himself, as it were. We can say that as man develops up to birth and thereby enters earthly existence, he enters into a connection with the lower kingdoms of nature. However, he only enters into this connection to the extent that he takes on a physical body; only then is he dependent on taking in the other realms as his food, as his means of sustenance. Man is therefore not an absolute being here in the physical world. Consider, for example, how human beings are constantly dependent on taking in and expelling a certain amount of air. They are not enclosed within their skin; their being extends out into the air. Thus, when human beings enter physical existence, they enter into a certain relationship with the realms below them and are immersed in them.

[ 4 ] When humans leave their bodies in death, they ascend to the higher realms, to the realm of angels, archangels, primordial forces, and even higher realms. Just as they enter into a relationship with the lower realms through the needs of their physical bodies, so they enter into a relationship with the higher realms after death. And now let us transport ourselves back to the time when human beings first began their earthly incarnations, to the Lemurian past, where human beings did indeed immerse themselves in a physical body, but still had very little connection with the physical world, where their physical body had hardly yet incorporated the traces of sense organs, so that they had hardly any perception of the external physical world; where they also had little need of physical substances and forces, where they were still little at home in the physical world. Such a state, in which human beings had very few connections with the physical world, did indeed exist at the beginning of human incarnations. But this made them all the more at home in the spiritual worlds. This was also the time when human beings, when they left their physical bodies—not only in sleep, but also after death—immersed themselves in a world full of spiritual light, where they perceived a world of spiritual beings and, in a sense, drew their powers from these spiritual beings just as human beings now do from the physical world, where they extended themselves into the higher realms built above them, just as they now extend themselves into the physical world, where they extended themselves into the realms of the angels and archangels and the higher realms that extended into their own. It was so that with death, human beings only then truly attained their consciousness, albeit in a dim and vague form. Thus he lived his life, nourishing himself spiritually — figuratively speaking — from the contemplation of divine-spiritual beings. Man conquered his I in the course of time as he passed through various incarnations in the outer physical world; he did not have it before.

[ 5 ] Other beings, which we have said went through humanity at an earlier stage, had the I, and by being able to see these beings, humans learned to know the I; they only really came to know it properly in the time between death and new birth. It was so that when people died at that time, they had the feeling: Now I am beginning to live, now I am living in the vision of divine-spiritual beings. And it was indeed so: the further they moved away from death, the longer they lived after death, the higher stages they reached, the higher spheres of beings they entered. They became more and more conscious until a time came—between death and a new birth—when the being appeared to them that had actually given their life its true meaning, and they felt: I come from this being, I belong to this being. In those ancient times, this was the same being who later appeared on Earth, incarnated as the Christ. Although human beings did not see Christ in a physical body in the ancient Lemurian era, they saw him in the middle between death and rebirth, and thus they had become part of him; they knew him in the spiritual world. And the time drew ever nearer when human beings became more conscious in the physical world. We know that this full consciousness did not come until the middle of the Atlantean era, but it happened gradually. The more human beings became conscious in the physical world, the more they had the seed of the I in the physical world, the less their consciousness reached up into the higher worlds after death. At first, they could no longer rise to the sight of the Christ figure; they saw only angels and archangels. Later, in the Atlantean epoch, even the sight of angels and archangels was denied them; only the most advanced were granted this vision. Normally, human beings perceived angels only in the old, dim consciousness, and angels are also what the Greeks addressed as their deity in Zeus and the Germanic peoples in Wotan in their memory, in the Christian sense.

[ 6 ] We have spoken of how, during the Atlantean epoch, human beings were also companions of the gods during sleep, especially in the period between death and a new birth; these were angels, and in the highest cases archangels, and only when human beings had prepared themselves in this life through what were perceived as good deeds were they granted, in a certain sense, a glimpse of Christ through the subordinate beings of Christ. But human beings still knew him, this Christ, as it were through the deeds and beings of the angels and archangels. Just as light appears through colored glass, colored indeed, but still visible, so the figure of Christ appeared with gradually diminishing intensity. It was nothing other than the spirit of the sun appearing with diminishing intensity; diminishing intensity because human beings were moving more and more to the other side of the world, the physical side, and were growing fond of it.

[ 7 ] Thus, human beings lived out their lives from ancient times. And we have seen how, in the cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean period, the memory of that ancient, actually lived epoch revived; in the Egyptian period, the memory of the Lemurian period revived. How, then, will the initiate have presented life after death to human beings? He made sure that after death, even if only in a faint echo, people could experience that they rose up to what ancient humanity actually felt secure in, to this peak that was the sun spirit in ancient times. This was the meaning of what is called the ancient Egyptian judgment of the dead, where the dead were placed before their judge, who weighed their deeds. If their deeds were found worthy, they were allowed to participate in the physical world of being through their merits and to see what was perceived in the characterized way as a light god, as a sun god. It was the being, again, who was now called Osiris. The journey to Osiris, becoming one with him, was what was to be granted to the dead in the repetition of an earlier factual state. Thus we understand what has been preserved for us in the Book of the Dead, that remarkable document of the Egyptian people. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, due to the nature of the circumstances, it was of course not possible to touch upon the full esoteric meaning of such things, but the point is that these things can be explored in much greater depth. If, in accordance with the ancient Egyptian view, it was found that such a soul was worthy of this vision after death because of its deeds, it was allowed to unite with Osiris. Yes, it is even addressed as an Osiris itself, because it had united with him. The formula was: Osiris was purified in the pond that is south of the field of Hotep and north of the field of locusts, where the gods of greenery wash themselves in the fourth hour of the night and in the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day. It is impossible to express all the profound relationships of this formula. It is important to understand the expression “from night to day.” It is night before, but the soul is transferred into a day, a spiritual day, where it will be united with Osiris, where it may itself be an Osiris.

[ 8 ] Thus, the soul actually experiences its destiny in another world that exists between death and birth. And consciousness becomes increasingly obscured, but never completely, for consciousness never ceases to exist between death and birth. But it darkens, to put it trivially: the more the human being grows fond of the sensual-physical world, the more he must content himself with beholding lower beings; the higher beings are less and less able to commune with the human being, who slips away from the higher entities. All the beings that were still good companions of humans in the Atlantean era, when humans were still clairvoyant, especially in the period between death and rebirth, disappear; little by little, the bond between humans and those ancient gods is lost. We have seen how there were still remnants of the old clairvoyance into later times of European culture, how there are still people who, in certain states of consciousness, can rise to the perception of the gods. Such people enjoy a more vivid communion with the gods after death, the more intimately they live together with them. And this is not only good for humans, it is also good for the gods, because humans bring up to them what they have conquered here in the physical world in terms of love. The gods receive back as a sacrifice what humans receive in the physical world as love. But humans are less and less capable of doing this because they are becoming increasingly attached to the physical world.

[ 9 ] And for the souls of those who live in the regions from which the Germanic peoples originated, it is so that, little by little, they rarely participate in the sight of the gods between death and birth, that the gods have little communion with them. This gives rise to a certain underlying mood, a certain feeling that the gods are losing their cohesion, their dominion over the earth, which they themselves created. And out of this feeling flows the idea of the twilight of the gods. This is the real reason for the depiction of the twilight of the gods: the gods must, so to speak, withdraw from the world they themselves created. They, who in the Atlantean era had descended into the bodies of exceptional human beings and taught the higher mysteries in the Atlantean mysteries, had to gradually withdraw, and the only way they could still come into contact with the physical world was by making the most advanced human beings their tools, their shells. It certainly happened in the post-Atlantean era, and those who were initiated into the ancient Druidic mysteries know that, for example, an ancient Atlantean individuality, who was always referred to as Sig, appeared in the bodies of European people in many different ways long after the Atlantean catastrophe, and all the names that have been preserved, such as Siegfried, Sigurd, are only meant to point exoterically to the fact that an ancient individuality was always present, ultimately only perceptible and visible to those initiated into the mysteries. They connected themselves with such a higher initiate, and the closer we come to our own time, the more necessary it becomes for such an individuality to seek out those who have already passed through many incarnations and are therefore purified human beings.

[ 10 ] Now, in order to understand our time completely, we must touch upon the edge of a great mystery that makes much of what has happened in our culture understandable. We turn our gaze once more to the center of the Atlantean development, where human beings, one might say, first received the physical world. This was a kind of crossroads for the gods, for those who were the ancient companions of human beings in higher regions. Human beings had descended from spiritual heights, ever deeper into the physical world. They had passed through three epochs. The third was the Lemurian, the fourth was the Atlantean, and these were followed by three others. We are now in the fifth epoch. The Lemurian epoch was destroyed by great fire catastrophes, the Atlantean epoch was destroyed by enormous ice and water catastrophes; our time will find its downfall through other forces, through a tremendous excess of egoism in human nature, and thus through a war of all against all. Only those who turn to spiritual life will, just as a small group of people found their way out of the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, find a way out of the catastrophe that is the war of all against all, and this war of all against all will be even more terrible for the masses of people in which it occurs than the fire and water catastrophes were, however terrible they may seem to us. And it can only be the task of those who turn to spiritual life today to do everything in their power to ensure that as much as possible of the good seeds of our time are carried over into the sixth epoch, which will replace the fifth. This fifth epoch consists of large subdivisions: the ancient Indian epoch, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Greek-Latin, and “ours, in which we live; and two others, the sixth and seventh, will follow it until the war of all against all.

[ 11 ] This is where we stand today in our development. We have passed the midpoint of the Earth's development. If, back then, around the middle of the Atlantean epoch, just before the point when they fully entered the physical world, human beings had once again turned toward spiritualization, then all the conquests of the physical plane that we spoke of yesterday would not have taken place. In truth, humanity has gone down a path, deeper and deeper into physical development. Human beings have descended below the point that would have been the lowest point if they had turned back toward spiritualization at that time. This point, which lies in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, was an important crossroads for certain spiritual beings. They had to decide, so to speak, whether they wanted to descend into a kind of abyss from which they could later rise again all the more strongly, precisely because they had sunk deeper and therefore had to develop greater powers, or whether they wanted to take the direct path. Certain spiritual beings who had previously been companions of human beings now took the direct path; they decided, as it were, never to enter human bodies again, but to remain in the realm of spirits. This development of humanity therefore passes them by more or less without a trace. On the other hand, there were other divine beings, among whom a large number have been preserved in the memory of European and other peoples under the names of Zeus and Wotan, who decided to take on human bodies again and again for the good of humanity and to descend in order to work for them. But it was not possible for all of them to descend to the same degree, for as man descended further and further into the physical world, the bodies became less and less suitable instruments for the divine beings. These bodies were increasingly able to accommodate the evolving human souls, and increasingly less able to be instruments and shells for the divine beings. Only those who purified their bodies in a certain way, who had achieved a noble body through many incarnations, who had etheric and physical bodies so strongly purified that they completely eradicated certain connections with the physical world in their souls; people who, in their whole disposition and being, lived more in what was not on earth than in what the earth offered, only such people could still receive the souls of higher spiritual beings within themselves, just as man receives his soul in his physical body. But this also meant that such beings, in whom divine-spiritual beings were hidden, who could not descend deeply enough into the physical world, stood before the world in a peculiar way.

[ 12 ] Let us imagine such a being who, through many incarnations, had developed its body, that is, the powers of its body and the inner control of its powers, to such an extent that it lived more in the spiritual than in the physical world and could thus become the bearer of such a higher being. Could such a being be fully understood by those human beings who had descended completely into the physical world, who were striving more and more to love this physical plane and to carry out their work on this physical plane? Or could it not be better understood by those who had retained more of the character of an earlier time, who had remained more like stragglers from earlier ages? In fact, such a being could be understood far better by the stragglers of the Atlantean era themselves. Namely, it is the Mongolian peoples who did not descend so deeply, who did not become so entangled in the physical plane, nor did they do as much to conquer it as the European peoples. We see how it is precisely the latter peoples who have achieved what we call the outer physical culture, the conquest of the physical plane, while the stragglers, the latecomers of the Atlantean culture, have something stationary about them and therefore cannot find their place in the post-Atlantean world of development because they have retained certain character traits and then degenerated. It is often pointed out today that the Japanese are undergoing a significant development based on their character traits; this is an illusion. It is not a development that they are undergoing based on their characteristics; when they won the last war with warships and cannons invented by European peoples, they made use of a foreign culture. It is not further development when a people adopts what has sprung from the nature of a foreign people, but only when it can develop from its own nature. That is what matters. From such peoples, who have remained stationary in a certain sense, who represent conditions in a later period which the European peoples have outgrown through personal consciousness and a sense of freedom, spiritual individualities who were still companions of human beings in the Atlantean era could be understood. Their education therefore had to be directed toward such people. And we see the great mystery unfolding here, that these beings, who were fully understood at that time when the European population was still at an earlier stage of development, also incarnated there and appeared as teachers in the great schools of initiation, and were therefore later worshipped as gods. We see how Wotan, who had previously lived as an initiate in a human body and taught the sacred mysteries, how Wotan, precisely because he had not descended deeply enough, was able to incarnate in that group of people who were in a certain sense backward, who precisely because of this felt something of the futility of the physical plane, did not regard him as a full expression of the deity, but considered him a place of suffering, woe, and pain, so that it was truly blissful to withdraw from this physical plane.

[ 13 ] This individuality of Wotan—we are speaking within a community of students of spiritual science, and therefore such a secret may be touched upon here—this individuality, which truly taught as Wotan in the mysteries of the Germanic peoples, is the same that later reappeared for the same mission as Buddha. No other individuality was responsible for mediating the connection between our world and the higher worlds as Buddha than the one who once roamed the regions of Europe and whose memory has been preserved in northern Europe under the name of Wotan.

[ 14 ] In this way we see how provision was made, so to speak, for those people who had retained certain inclinations and connections with earlier states, who led a religious life and did not want to grow fond of the physical plane. And the outward historical appearance of the favorable reception of Buddhism among the Mongolian peoples will now also become understandable to you. All this corresponds to such a wise guidance of humanity.

[ 15 ] As humanity had to conquer the physical plane more and more, it was no longer possible in a later time for such spiritual beings to incarnate directly into a human body. This required a stronger spiritual being, the being that had been proclaimed earlier by all who had taught before him. Even the ancient Egyptians, who still recalled their affiliation with the ancient spirit of the sun in the name Osiris, said: The kingdom of Osiris will be reestablished on earth. Such an individuality was necessary for this, like the one we recognize as Christ. While he withdrew more and more from the realm of the dead, so to speak — and we see him literally disappearing on the side beyond life — he draws ever closer from the other side until, in the fourth epoch, he is visibly embodied in a human body, albeit one that had to be specially prepared for this purpose. Such a human body as those that have descended all the way down to the physical plane could not immediately receive the Christ principle. Something else was necessary for this. Even a being such as the one we refer to as Jesus of Nazareth, who had lived through many incarnations and had reached a high level and attained a high degree of initiation, even he was not capable of becoming the bearer of the Christ individuality at the time of his birth. However, after preparing himself through a life of thirty years, he became capable of purifying and cleansing the outer human sheaths, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, to such an extent that the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth could leave these purified bodies. The individuality of Jesus of Nazareth left the outer shells, which had been purified by the power of this individuality, in the thirtieth year of his life. This leaving of the outer body shells is hinted at in the Gospel by the baptism of John in the Jordan. This is where the essence is exchanged, where the Christ individuality takes possession, now not of an ordinary human body, but of a body that has been purified over thirty years. Thus we have the three years in which Christ walked on earth in the body of Jesus, which are indicated in the Gospel as the years between the baptism and the mystery of Golgotha. Not as in the ordinary course of things did an individuality appear here in such a way that it was able to give itself such a form at birth as was made possible by the experience of many incarnations, but in such a way that this individuality was taken up into a body that had lived for thirty years entangled in the physical world, that was fully turned toward the physical world, which was to receive the great impulse through Christ. Thus, when the Christ individuality was taken up into the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, something very, very significant happened, something that the esotericist can also read in the Gospel if he really knows how to read it. It is written there, but such things are veiled.

[ 16 ] At this baptism, where the meaningful symbol of the dove appears above the head of Jesus, which is not merely inspired but directly intuited by Christ, something shoots through the whole body of Jesus of Nazareth into those members which in the present stage of human evolution are most withdrawn from the influence of the human being: something happens right down to the bones. Now I will say something that seems like madness to the materialistic consciousness of the present, but that does not matter. The effect extended into the bones, as the body of Jesus of Nazareth was transfigured and fired by the Christ individuality, by the high Sun spirit. When you burn a bone, the cartilage burns and the bone ash remains. This is something that becomes clear to you when you consider that the bone mineral mass and the cartilage mass are held together by a power that is opposed to fire but also connected with it. Today, this is completely beyond human control; but it was placed in the control of the one who was later to undergo the event of Golgotha. Today, human beings are able to move their hands, but they have no power to influence the chemical forces in their bones; they are bound in their bones. The body of Jesus of Nazareth, as the only body that has ever existed on earth, gained dominion over the force that holds together the cartilage and bone ash through the intuition of the Christ. This is indicated to us by the fact that through this dominion over the bones, the force came into the world that is capable of truly conquering death in physical matter. For the bones are responsible for the death of man; by being formed in such a way that the solid bone mass became incorporated into him, man became entangled with the mineral element of the earth. Through this, death became inherent in him, and it is not without reason that death is represented by the skeleton; such a representation has its great justification.

[ 17 ] This is the living force that is capable of transforming the bones back again, that is, of gradually leading them into spirituality, which will happen in the future mission of Earth's development. Therefore, no foreign physical power was allowed to interfere with this bone tissue: “You shall not break a bone of him!” The legs of the others who were hung on the cross were broken. The words of the prophet had to be fulfilled in him: “No bone shall be broken,” so that what had been communicated as a great, powerful central impulse of the earth would not be destroyed by a foreign influence. Thus, in the mystery that took place at the baptism of John, the high Sun Spirit, who through his separation from the earth had allowed humanity to enter physical matter, which had first brought it to ossification, now worked so that it received the impulse to lift this ossification, to spiritualize it. As daring as it may seem to say such things in our time, it is the mission of the anthroposophical world movement to speak out about these things, which have always been known in the mysteries and have always been taught and seen. But because this has been accomplished, another mystery has become possible, and only through this has it become possible.

[ 18 ] You all know that the individual parts of the physical body correspond to the human members: the physical body corresponds to itself, the glandular system corresponds to the etheric body, the nervous system to the astral body, and the blood system to the ego. Externally, physically, the I entered into humanity through the fact that human beings were physically endowed with more and more blood, and through this the human being became increasingly capable of descending into the physical world, into the material, so that the world of blood became stronger and stronger. A time had to come when the excess blood had to be sacrificed. As horrible as it may seem to chemists, it is nevertheless true that the excess ego, the ego that would have led humanity into a war of all against all through the excess of egoism, that excess blood flowed out through the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha. At the very moment when the wounds of the Redeemer bled, at that very moment the seed was sown in humanity to rise again from the place where it had sunk so deeply. If people had turned back then, in the Middle Atlantic period, they would never have attained full independence. They had to conquer the physical plane. But then an even stronger impulse was needed on this physical plane, and this impulse came through Christ. And because it was stronger, it was able not only to lift humanity out of its degradation, but something else important happened as well! A piece of the world was conquered by human beings, which will be incorporated into the spiritual worlds, which will be carried back to the spiritual worlds.

[ 19 ] Yesterday we saw that when the Greco-Latin period arrived, human beings had progressed so far in their conquest of the physical world, had become so deeply entangled in this physical world, that they needed a God in human form in order to perceive Him at all, for they would no longer have been able to ascend into the spiritual world to comprehend such a thing. In the meantime, conditions had also changed on the other side of life — between death and new birth. As human beings descended further and further onto the physical plane, grew to love it more and more, and drew more and more enjoyment from it, what lay beyond, on the other side of life, became less and less perceptible to them. Human beings remained, so to speak, with a good portion of their memory of this world when they lived between death and rebirth. This too has been preserved in legend. When Greek culture tells us that the hero Achilles said, “Better to be a beggar in the physical world than a king on the other side,” this is a true expression of that time. Because human beings had conquered so much of the physical plane, they longed to return to it, but it did not allow them to take much with them at that time. It was only through the appearance of Christ on earth, through man's preparation during the Old Testament period, through man's acceptance of the figure of Christ into his spirit, into his imagination, that he took with him from the physical world into the beyond that which brought him light again in the world beyond. They took with them what makes this world beyond bright and clear again, what gives them back Christ, and in a higher splendor than in the world here. This is why we see how the consciousness of humanity in the beyond becomes increasingly clouded the closer it approaches the time we described yesterday, and how it then becomes clearer as a result of human beings in this world getting to know Christ, getting to know what is reported about Christ. For what he takes in of Christ in the world here is not lost to him in the time between death and new birth; he takes it with him, and that is what corresponds to the expression “dying into Christ.”

[ 20 ] Thus we see how, through this development of the world, not only the life of the living but also the life of the dead is changed. And because the dead live on between death and rebirth from what they learned here about Christ, from the power they have acquired here from Christ, between death and birth, because it bears fruit for them there, and because they always return in ever new incarnations, they will also appear in ever more powerful, Christ-filled human bodies and make the earth more and more an expression of what Christ can become in the transformation of the physical world, in the elevation of the earth to higher stages.

[ 21 ] Thus we see how this world and the world beyond work together to make the earth ripe again for what we have considered: that through the incorporation of the Christ Spirit it will reunite with the sun, and that through this a higher stage will be reached within the entire cosmos. Therefore, this event, the appearance of Christ, is not only a fact that is important for human beings, but has significance for the development of the cosmos.