The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] We have allowed long stretches of human evolution, and in connection with this, world evolution, to pass before our soul's gaze. We have seen how mysterious connections in world evolution were reflected in the actual evolution of human culture in the so-called post-Atlantean period. We have seen how the first period of our Earth's development was reflected in Indian culture; how the second, that of the separation of the sun from the Earth, was reflected in Persian culture; and then we have tried, as far as time allowed us, to describe and depict in particular detail how the most varied events and occurrences of the Lemurian epoch, which forms the third epoch of our Earth's development and where human beings received the first seeds of the I, were reflected in Egyptian culture. We have seen how the initiatory wisdom of the ancient Egyptians is a kind of memory of this period, which humanity first went through during the Earth's development. And then we saw how the fourth period, the time of the actual marriage between spirit and body, which we encounter so beautifully in the works of art of the Greeks, is a reflection of the experiences that human beings had with the ancient gods, those beings we call angels. And we saw that nothing remained that could be reflected in our time, in the fifth period that is now unfolding before us. But there are mysterious connections between the individual cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean period, connections that we already hinted at in the first lecture. You will recall that we pointed out how the spell that binds modern human beings to their immediate sensory environment, how this, one might say, materialistic belief that only what happens between birth and death, what is embodied in the flesh, is real, can be traced back to the fact that the ancient Egyptians took such special care to preserve their corpses. At that time, people tried to preserve the physical form of human beings. And this did not remain without effect on the soul after death. If the form is preserved in this way, then the soul is indeed still connected in a certain way after death to the human form it had during life. Thought forms then develop in the soul that cling to this sensual form; and since human beings incarnate again and again, the soul appearing in ever new bodies, these thought forms remain. Everything that the human soul had to experience when it looked down from spiritual heights upon its corpse preserved as a mummy became deeply rooted in it. Therefore, the soul has forgotten how to turn its gaze away from what is embedded in the physical flesh, and this has caused numerous souls that were incarnated in ancient Egypt to be incarnated again today with the fruit of the perception of the sensual body; they can only believe that this sensual body is the reality. This was implanted in the soul at that time. For all such things that take place in one cultural epoch are by no means unrelated to other cultural epochs.

[ 2 ] If we consider the seven successive cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean period, the fourth period, which is right in the middle, actually occupies a certain exceptional position. One need only look at this period exoterically to realize that in exoteric life the most wonderful external physical things are created, through which human beings conquer the physical world in a completely unique and harmonious way. Anyone who looks back at the Egyptian pyramids will say to themselves: In these pyramids we still see a kind of geometric form prevailing, which symbolically shows us how things have meaning. That deep marriage between the spirit, the formative human spirit, and the physical form has not yet taken place. We see this clearly in the Sphinx, whose origin we have derived from a memory of the Atlantean etheric human form. We see that this sphinx in its physical body cannot possibly give us immediate conviction, even though it is a great conception of humanity; we see in it the idea embodied that man is still animalistic below and that man is only formed in the etheric head. But what can confront us on the physical plane, we see ennobled in the Greek plastic forms, and what can confront us in moral life, in the fate of human beings, we see in the tragic art of the Greeks. In a really amazing way, we see the inner spiritual life carried over to the physical plane; we see the meaning of Earth's development, as far as the gods were connected with it.

[ 3 ] As long as the earth was connected with the sun, the high sun spirits were also connected with the human race. But gradually, with the sun, the high gods also disappeared from human consciousness, step by step until the last Atlantean epoch. Even after death, human consciousness was no longer capable of rising to the higher regions where a direct perception of the sun gods would have been possible. If we place ourselves — and this is permissible by way of comparison — in the position of the sun gods, we can say: I was connected with humanity, but I had to withdraw for a time. The divine world had to disappear, so to speak, from human consciousness in order to reappear in a renewed, higher form through the Christ impulse. A person living in the Greek world could not yet know what would come to the earth through Christ, but the initiate, who, as we have seen, already knew Christ beforehand, could say to himself: This spiritual form, which was held fast as Osiris, had to disappear for a while from human sight, the horizon of the gods had to darken; but we have the certain consciousness within us that it will reappear, the glory of God on earth. That was the cosmic consciousness that people had, and this awareness of a descent of the glory of God and of its reappearance was reflected in Greek tragic art, where we see how man himself is presented as the image of the gods, how he lives and strives and meets a tragic end. But this tragedy also implies that man can nevertheless triumph through his spiritual power. Thus, drama, the observation of living and dying human beings, was also meant to be a reflection of the greater context. Everywhere in Greece, in all areas of life, we see this marriage between the spirit and the sensual. This was a unique moment in the post-Atlantean era.

[ 4 ] Now it is remarkable how certain phenomena of the third epoch are connected with our fifth period as if through underground channels; certain things that were sown as seeds during the Egyptian period reappear in our time; others that were sown as seeds during the Persian period will reappear in the sixth epoch, and things from the first epoch will return in the seventh period. Everything has a deep, lawful connection, and what has gone before points to what is to come. This connection becomes clearest when we consider the most extreme case, that which connects the first period with the seventh. We look back on this first period, and we must not take into account what history tells us, but rather what existed in the ancient pre-Vedic times. Everything that emerged later was prepared in advance; above all, what we know as the division of people into castes was prepared. Europeans may have many objections to these castes, but in the cultural direction that existed at that time, these castes had their justification, for they were connected in the deepest sense with the karma of humanity. The souls that migrated from Atlantis were truly of very different values, and in a certain way it was appropriate for these souls, some of whom were more advanced than others, to be divided into such castes according to their previously determined karma. And since in those ancient times humanity was not left to its own devices as it is today, but was guided and directed in its development in a far higher sense than we can imagine today — since advanced individualities, whom we call the Rishis, had an understanding of what a soul is worth, what difference there is between the individual categories of souls — this division into castes is based on a well-founded cosmic law. However harsh it may have seemed in a later age, in those ancient times, when guidance was spiritual, this caste system was truly adapted to human nature. And just as it is true that in the normal development of human beings, those who carried a certain karma into the new epoch also came into a certain caste, it is equally true that one could only rise above the limitations of this caste by undergoing an initiation process. Only when one reached the stages where one cast off what karma had placed one in, only when one lived in yoga, could these caste differences be overcome under certain circumstances. We must be aware of the spiritual scientific principle that any criticism of evolution must be foreign to us, that we must only strive to understand things. However bad this caste division may seem, it was justified in the fullest sense, but we must view it in connection with a comprehensive, lawful determination in relation to the human race.

[ 5 ] When we speak of races today, we are referring to something that is no longer entirely correct; even in theosophical handbooks, major errors are made in this regard. It is said that our development takes place in such a way that rounds, and in each round globes, and in each globe races develop one after the other, so that we would have races in all epochs of the Earth's evolution. But this is not the case. For example, it no longer makes any real sense to speak of mere racial development in relation to humanity today. We can only speak of such racial development in the true sense of the word during the Atlantean evolution. During the seven corresponding periods, human beings were so different from each other in their external physiognomy that one could speak of different forms. But while it is true that races developed from this, it is no longer correct to speak of races for the Lemurian period that has passed; and in our time, the concept of race will disappear in a certain sense, as all differences that have remained from earlier times will gradually be blurred. So everything that exists today in relation to human races is a remnant of the differentiation that developed in the Atlantean period. We can still speak of races, but only in the sense that the actual concept of race is losing its meaning. But what concept will then replace the present concept of race?

[ 6 ] In the future, even more than in the past, humanity will differentiate itself, so to speak, dividing itself into certain categories, but not into imposed categories. Rather, people will come to know from their own inner spiritual capacity that human beings must work together for the benefit of the entire social body. There will be categories and classes, but even if class struggle is still raging today, those people who do not develop egoism but take up spiritual life within themselves, those who develop toward the good, will voluntarily integrate themselves into humanity. They will say to themselves: one must do this, another must do that. Division of labor, division even down to the finest impulses, must occur; and it will be such that those who are responsible for one thing or another will not need to impose their authority on others. All authority will be increasingly recognized voluntarily, so that in the seventh period we will again have a division among a small part of humanity that repeats the caste system, but in such a way that no one feels forced into a caste, but rather everyone says to themselves: I must take on a part of humanity's work and leave another part to someone else — and both will be recognized as equal. Humanity will be divided according to moral and intellectual differences, and on this basis a spiritualized caste system will emerge. Thus, as if conveyed through a mysterious channel, what was prophetically revealed in the first epoch will be repeated in the seventh. And so the third, the Egyptian cultural development, is also connected with our own. However little it may appear to the superficial glance, all those things that were, so to speak, laid down during the Egyptian period are now coming to the fore in our own epoch. Just think that the souls living today were for the most part embodied in Egyptian bodies, experienced the Egyptian environment, and after other intermediate incarnations are now embodied again and, according to the laws indicated, unconsciously remember everything they experienced in Egyptian times. In a mysterious way, this now reappears, and if you want to recognize such mysterious relationships between the great laws of the world from one culture to another, then you must familiarize yourself with the truth, not with all the legendary and fantastic representations that are given to us about the facts of human development.

[ 7 ] For example, people think about the spiritual progress of humanity in a pretty superficial way. They see that Copernicus appeared at a certain time. They say, “Well, he appeared because observations at that time led people to change their ideas about the solar system.” Anyone who holds such a view has not even studied exoterically how Copernicus arrived at his ideas about the connection in the heavens. Anyone who has studied this, and especially anyone who has followed the great, powerful ideas of Kepler, knows something different to say about it, and is further strengthened by what occultism has to say on the subject. Let us take this as an example to illustrate it clearly. Let us put ourselves in the soul of Copernicus. This was in ancient Egyptian times; at that time, it experienced the cult of Osiris in a particularly prominent place and saw how Osiris was regarded as a being equal to the high sun being. The sun stood in a spiritual relationship at the center of Egyptian thinking and feeling, but not the external, sensory sun, which was regarded only as the physical expression of the spiritual. Just as the eye is the expression of the power of vision, so for the Egyptians the sun was the eye of Osiris, the expression, the embodiment of what the spirit of the sun was. The soul of Copernicus had once lived through all this, and it was the unconscious memory of this that prompted him, in the form that was possible in a materialistic age, to renew this idea, this ancient Osiris idea, which was spiritual at that time. It confronts us where humanity has descended deeper into the physical plane, in its materialistic form as Copernicanism. The Egyptians had this spiritually; remembering this idea was Copernicus' world karma, and this conjured up the combination of directions that led to his solar system. It was similar with Kepler, who, in an even more comprehensive sense, depicted the movement of the planets around the sun in his three laws, which, however, seem very abstract to us. But he drew it from a deep conception. What is striking about this brilliant mind, however, is the passage he wrote himself, which fills us with awe when we read it and where what has just been said confronts us in a tangible way. Kepler wrote the words: “I have immersed myself in this solar system, it has been unraveled for me; I want to bring the sacred ceremonial vessels of the Egyptians into the modern world.”

[ 8 ] The thoughts that were implanted in the souls of ancient Egypt are coming back to us, and our modern truths are reborn Egyptian myths. We could pursue this in great detail if we wanted to. We can pursue it right down to the very nature of human beings. Let us think once again of the Sphinx, that wonderful, enigmatic figure, which then became the Oedipus Sphinx in Greek culture, posing the well-known riddle to humans. But we already know that it is composed of the human form that was still analogous to the animal form on the physical plane, while its etheric form had already taken on human shape. In Egyptian times, people were only able to see the Sphinx as an etheric form if they had undergone certain stages of initiation. But then it stood before them. And now the important thing is that, if one has a truly clairvoyant perception, one does not just see it as a block of wood, but certain feelings are necessarily associated with this perception. A cold person may pass by even the most significant artistic appearance and remain unmoved; the clairvoyant consciousness is not in this position: when it is truly developed, the corresponding feeling is aroused within it. The Greek legend expresses the correct feeling that the clairvoyant still had during the ancient Egyptian period and in the Greek mysteries when he had progressed to the point where the Sphinx appeared before his eyes. What was it that appeared before his eyes? Something unfinished, something that was to become. He saw this figure, which in a certain sense still had animal forms, and in the etheric head he saw what was to work into the physical form in order to make it more human. How this human being was to become, what task humanity had in its development, this question stood vividly before him as a question of expectation, of longing, of the unfolding of what was to come, when he saw the Sphinx. That all human research and philosophy arises out of longing is a Greek saying, but at the same time it is also clairvoyant. One has before one a figure that can only be perceived with astral consciousness, but it torments one, it presents one with a riddle: the riddle of how one is to become. Now this etheric figure, which existed in the Atlantean era and lived on in memory in the Egyptian era, has become more and more incorporated into the human being, and it reappears on the other side in human nature, in all the religious doubts, in the inability of our cultural epoch to answer the question: What is man? In all the unanswered questions, in all the statements that revolve around “Ignorabimus,” the Sphinx reappears. In times that were still spiritual, human beings could rise up and truly face the Sphinx; today it lives within them as the numerous questions that have no answer. This is why it is so difficult for humans to arrive at a conviction about the spiritual world, because the sphinx, which used to be outside, after the one who solved the riddle was found in the middle period, plunging it into the abyss, into the innermost depths of humans, now appears within humans.

[ 9 ] After the Greek-Latin period with its aftereffects had run its course in the 13th and 14th centuries, we have been living in the fifth period ever since. Since then, new doubts have increasingly replaced the old certainties. We are increasingly confronted with such things, and if we only want to, we can find the Egyptian ideas, translated into materialism, in many, many details of recent developments. But we must ask ourselves what actually happened, for this is no ordinary transfer; these things do not confront us directly, but in a modified form. Everything is developed in a more materialistic way; even the connection between man and animal nature reappears, translated into a materialistic view. The fact that humans knew that they could not yet shape their outer bodies in any other way than animal-like, and that they therefore depicted their gods in animal forms in Egyptian memory, confronts us in worldviews that derive humans from animals in a materialistic way. Darwinism is also nothing more than ancient Egyptian heritage in materialistic form.

[ 10 ] So we see that it is not merely a straight progression of development that confronts us here, but something like a split in development. One branch became more material, the other more spiritual. What used to run more or less in a straight line has split into two branches of human development. Go back to ancient times, to Egyptian, Persian, and ancient Indian culture: there was no science or faith that existed on its own. What was understood about the spiritual origins of the world runs in a straight line down to the knowledge of details, and one can ascend from the knowledge of the material world to the highest summit; there is no contradiction between knowledge and faith. What we today call this contradiction would not have been understood by an ancient Indian sage or a Chaldean priest; they did not yet know of a difference, and even the Egyptians did not yet know the difference between what one should merely believe and what should be knowledge. This difference only became apparent when humans sank deeper into matter, as material culture was conquered by humanity. But another institution was necessary for this.

[ 11 ] Let us imagine that this decline of humanity had not taken place. What would have happened then? We have already considered a similar decline yesterday, but it was of a different nature; this is a renewed decline in another area, which occurs when an independent science emerges alongside the comprehension of the spiritual. This is only the case in the Greek world; previously, there was no such contrast between science and religion; for the Egyptian priest, such a separation would have made no sense. Immerse yourself in what Pythagoras learned from the Egyptians: the theory of numbers. For him, it was not abstract mathematics, but rather what the musical secrets of the world gave him in the harmony of numbers; mathematics, which today appears to us as something abstract, was for him a sacred wisdom connected with a religious mood. But humans had to descend further and further with science into the material, physical world, and we see how even what was the spiritual wisdom of the Egyptians confronts us—transformed in memory—in the materialistic worldview myth. In the future, all the theories of today's people will be perceived as having only temporal value, just as the old theories about humanity are perceived today. Hopefully, people will then be wise enough not to fall into the same error as today's people, who say: Until the 19th century, humans must have been completely stupid in science, because only then did they become intelligent, since everything that was said in the past about the human body and anatomy is nonsense, and only what the last century has brought us is true. — But humans in the future will be more intelligent; they will not repay like with like. They will not look down on our myths of anatomy, philosophy, and Darwinism as dismissively as people today look down on the old truths. But it is true that even the transitory forms of truth that are regarded as so firmly established today are only temporary forms. They will be replaced by something else. The forms of truth are constantly changing; this has been brought about by man's immersion in materiality. However, in order for man not to lose all connection, an even stronger spiritual impulse had to come, an impulse toward spirituality. We characterized this strong impulse yesterday in the Christ impulse. Humanity had to be left alone “scientifically,” so to speak, for a while, and religion had to be brought into a different stream, saved from the advancing encroachment of science. Thus we see how science, which is concerned with the outer material world, splits off for a while, and the spiritual continues in a special stream. We see how the two currents, faith in the spiritual and knowledge of the external material world, run parallel to each other. Yes, we even see that in a very specific period of medieval development, in a period that preceded our own, knowledge and faith consciously opposed each other, but still sought a connection.

[ 12 ] Look at the scholastics. They say: Christ has given human beings a body of beliefs that we must not touch, that is given directly; but all the science that time has been able to produce since that division took place can only be used to prove this body of beliefs. Thus we see how, in scholasticism, there is a tendency to use all science to prove the revealed truth. Where scholasticism is at its peak, it is said that one can, so to speak, look up from below into the treasure of faith, and to a certain extent human science can penetrate it. But then one must surrender to the revealed. Then, however, in the further course of time, the relationship between faith and science is lost, and there is no longer any hope that they can come together; and we see the extreme in Kant's philosophy, where science and faith are completely driven apart, where on the one hand the categorical imperative with its practical postulates of reason is placed, and on the other hand pure theoretical reason, which has lost all connection and even admits that there is no possibility of finding a connection with spiritual truths from knowledge.

[ 13 ] But there is already a strong impulse returning, which in turn represents a memory of ancient Egyptian influences. We see how minds are once again coming together, seeking a convergence of faith and knowledge, seeking to recognize the divine in a deeper scientific understanding, and seeking to grasp God so clearly and securely that it becomes accessible again to scientific thought. A type of such thinking and viewing is Goethe, in whom religion, art, and science actually flow together, who feels the same way about Greek works of art as he does about religion, just as he researches a sum of plant forms in order to find the great idea of the deity manifested again in external expression.

[ 14 ] Here we see how Egyptian culture is reflected in its origins. We can examine the whole of modern culture: it appears to us as a memory of ancient Egypt. But this division in modern culture did not come about overnight; it was slowly prepared, and if we want to understand how this happened, we must take a brief look at how the post-Atlantean era was prepared in the Atlantean era.

[ 15 ] We have seen that a small group of people in the region of present-day Ireland were the most advanced in terms of the abilities that gradually emerged in successive cultural epochs. As we know, the ego predisposition has developed since the Lemurian epoch, but the stage of egoism that lived in this small group of people, who sent the cultural stream from West to East, so to speak, consisted in the predisposition to logical thinking and judgment. Before that, there was no such thing; if a thought existed, it was already proven. This little people had a predisposition for judgmental thinking, and they brought this germ of a predisposition with them from the West to the East, and during those colonization movements, one of which went south to India, the first predisposition for thought formation was made. Then the Persian culture was imbued with combinatory thinking, and in the third, the Chaldean culture, this combinatory thinking became even more intense; but the Greeks took it so far that they left behind the magnificent monument of Aristotelian philosophy. And so it goes on and on, combinatory thinking develops more and more, but it always returns to a center, and reinforcements arrive. We must imagine it like this: when culture moved from that point to a point in Asia, a movement turned toward India, which was still the least imbued with pure logical thinking. The second movement, which went to Persia, was already more imbued with it, the Egyptian even more so, and within this movement the people of the Old Testament separated themselves, who had precisely the predisposition for combination that had to be developed in order to take another step forward in this pure logical form of human knowledge. But now the other thing we have considered is also connected with this: the descent to the physical plane. The more we descend, the more thought becomes merely logical and dependent on external judgment. For logical thinking, pure human logic, which proceeds from concept to concept, needs the brain as its instrument; the trained brain merely mediates logical thinking. Therefore, this external thinking, even where it reaches astonishing heights, can never grasp reincarnation, for example, because this logical thinking is initially only applicable to the external, sensory world around us.

[ 16 ] Logic is applicable to all worlds, but it can only be applied directly to the physical world. So logic is absolutely bound to its instrument, the physical brain, when it appears as human logic; purely conceptual thinking could never have come into the world without descending further into the sensory world. You see, the development of logical thinking is linked to the loss of the old clairvoyant perception; in reality, human beings had to pay for logical thinking with this loss. They must now acquire clairvoyant perception again in addition to logical thinking. In later times, human beings will regain their imagination, but logical thinking will remain. First, the human brain had to be created, and human beings had to step out into the physical world. The head had to be fully formed, like the etheric head, so that this brain could be in human beings. Only then was it possible for human beings to descend into the physical world. However, in order to save the spiritual, the moment had to be chosen when the final impulse toward purely mechanical, purely external thinking had not yet been given. If Christ had appeared a few centuries later, he would have come too late, so to speak; humanity would have descended too far, become too entangled in thinking, and would no longer have been able to understand Christ. Christ had to appear before the last impulse, because then the religious-spiritual current could still be saved as a current of faith. And then the last impulse could be given, which pushed human thinking down to its lowest point, so that thoughts became completely bound and spellbound to physical life. This was brought about by the Arabs and Mohammedans. Mohammedanism is nothing more than a special episode in this Arabism, for in its spread to Europe it exerts its final influence on purely logical thinking, which cannot rise to anything higher, anything spiritual.

[ 17 ] Human beings are guided by what can be called a spiritual world government, a providence: First, spiritual life is saved in Christianity, then Arabism spreads around the south to Europe, which is to become the scene of external culture. Arabism is only capable of grasping the external. Do we not see how the arabesque itself cannot rise to the level of the living, how it remains stuck in form? We can see it in the mosque, how the spirit has been sucked out, so to speak. Humanity first had to be led down into matter. And on the detour through the Arabs, through the invasion of the Arabs, through what can be called the clash of Arabism with Europeanism, which had already absorbed Christianity, we see how modern science is first brought into being.

[ 18 ] So we see that on the one hand, the ancient Egyptian memory is reviving. But what makes it materialistic? What makes it the thought form of the dead? We can show this tangibly. If the path had continued smoothly, then the memory of the past would have emerged in our time. But as it is, we see how the spiritual saves itself into faith, and how one wing of European development is seized by materialism; how the memory of ancient Egypt is transformed in the course of Arabism in such a way that it appears to the person who remembers it in a materialistic form. That Copernicus grasped the modern solar system at all was an Egyptian memory. That he interpreted it in a materialistic way, that he made it into something mechanical, into a dead rotation, comes from the fact that, on the other side, Arabism pulled this memory down into materialism.

[ 19 ] Thus we see how mysterious channels run from the third to the fifth age. We see this even in the principle of initiation. For when modern life was to receive a principle of initiation in Rosicrucianism, what was it? We have seen in modern science the marriage between Egyptian memory and Arabism, which is directed toward the dead. On the other hand, we see another marriage taking place, a connection between what the Egyptian initiates implanted in their disciples and the spiritual. We see a marriage between wisdom and what has been saved in the truth of faith. We see this harmonious blend of Egyptian memory in wisdom with the Christian impulse of power in Rosicrucianism. Thus we see the ancient seed that was sown in Egyptian times returning, but not as a mere repetition, but differentiated, having reached a higher level.

[ 20 ] These are, however, thoughts that are not meant to be mere thoughts to teach us something about the world, the earth, and human beings, but thoughts that should enter into our feelings, even into our impulses of will, that can inspire us, because they show us the paths we must follow. They show us the paths to the spiritual, but they also show us how we can carry into the future what we have gained in a good sense and in a good style in the purely material realm. We see how the paths separate and come together again; and the time will come again when not only will Egyptian memory be united with spiritual truths of faith, so that we will have a Rosicrucian science that is at the same time a religion, and alongside it a science attached to the material, but also these two will be united, science with Rosicrucianism. This, too, will be shown to us in a pictorial illustration by a myth of the third cultural epoch.

[ 21 ] We find it in the Babylonian period. There we are referred to the god Marduk, who confronts the evil principle, the materialistic principle, the Old Testament serpent, and splits its head, so that in a certain sense what was formerly an adversary is divided into two parts. We see in fact what happened then, the separation of what existed in the ancient primeval waters, symbolized by the serpent; we see the higher in the truths of faith, the lower in the purely material view of the world. Both must be united, science and the spiritual, and they will be reunited in the future. And it will be precisely then, when spiritualism has been deepened through Rosicrucian wisdom and has become science, when it will once again meet what has been researched on scientific grounds. And then a great harmonious unity will arise again, and the various cultural currents will flow together through the channels of humanity. Do we not see how this union is being sought in the present time?

[ 22 ] If we could look back to the ancient Egyptian mysteries, we would see how religion, science, and art are still one. There, the evolution of the world is shown in the descent of God into matter in a great, powerful, dramatic symbol. And those who enjoy this symbol have science before them, for they experience in a living representation how this took place, how man sank into it, how he gradually flowed down into the world. But they have something else before them as well: they also have art before them, for they see in the image a symbolic representation of what science is. But both science and art do not merely stand before them; they become religion for them at the same time, for what is presented to them in images is filled with religious feeling. And then, later, this splits, and religion, science, and art go their separate ways. But even in our time, people feel that they must flow together again. What was Richard Wagner's meaningful striving other than what we have presented as spiritual striving, transformed into a cultural impulse in a great, powerful intuition? For the Egyptians, it was in vivid images, because the outer eye needed it. In our time it is repeating itself; the individual cultural currents are to be assembled into a whole again, but in a work of art whose element is preferably the flow of sound. Everywhere we can find the connection between Egypt and modern times, everywhere we can observe this reflection.

[ 23 ] But then it will strike us all the more that every age is not merely a repetition, but that there is an ascent, a continuous development of humanity. And then the deepest striving of humanity, the striving for initiation, must also find further development. What was the principle of initiation in the first period cannot be the principle of initiation for the changed humanity of today. It is not a matter of pointing out that the Egyptians found eternal truth and wisdom in ancient times, that we can find primordial wisdom in the ancient Oriental religious creeds and philosophies, and that all others who came later were basically only there to go through the same thing again and again if the highest initiation was to be achieved. No! That can never be the case. Every age needs its own special power, reaching into the depths of the human soul.

[ 24 ] When some people claim—as they indeed do—that there are some among theosophists who say that there is a Western initiation for our stage of culture, but that this is a late development and that true initiation can only be obtained in the East, the answer must be that no judgment can be made about this without further investigation. One must penetrate deeper into things than is usually done. There may be people who say that Buddha ascended to the highest regions and that Christ brought nothing new compared to Buddha; but only in what we encounter positively can we recognize what is at stake. Let us ask those who stand on the ground of Western initiation whether they deny anything about Eastern initiation, whether they speak differently about Buddha than those who stand in the East. No, they accept all of that; they say yes to everything. But they understand the further development and differ from those who reject the Western principle of initiation in that they understand how to say yes to what is given in Orientalism, while also knowing the advanced forms that have become necessary in the course of time. They say yes, and they say no to nothing in the field of Eastern initiation. Take a characteristic of the Buddha from someone who stands on the standpoint of Western esotericism. It will not differ in any way from what someone who stands on the ground of Eastern esotericism says. But the one who stands on the Western standpoint knows how to show that there is something else in Christ that goes beyond this. Those who stand on the Eastern point of view do not do this. It is not by claiming that Buddha is greater than Christ that anything is decided, but rather by what positive things are said. And here those who stand on the Western point of view say exactly the same thing about Buddha as those on the Eastern point of view. Those on the Western point of view do not say no to what those on the Eastern point of view say, but rather yes, but they also say yes to something else.

[ 25 ] One cannot think, “Oh, these Orientalists understand the life of Buddha very poorly if they believe they must take it literally that Buddha perished from eating too much pork.” From the point of view of the Christian esotericist, it is right to object that those who understand something trivial by this do not understand anything; it is only an image of how Buddha stood in his time. He had revealed too much of the sacred Brahmin secrets to the outside world. He perished because he gave the world too much of the occult. He perished as everyone who reveals hidden things perishes. This is expressed in that strange image. One may emphasize with all severity that there is no contradiction in Orientalism, but that one must only learn to understand the esotericism of such things. But if one wanted to say that it should only be regarded as something inferior—for no one could ever have thought anything of it, for example, when we are told that the Apocalypse was received by its writer amid thunder and lightning—and if one wanted to take this as an occasion to mock the Apocalypse, then one could reply: It is a pity that those who say such things do not know what it means that the Apocalypse was communicated to the earth amid thunder and lightning.

[ 26 ] We must note here that no negation passes the lips of the Western esotericist, and that much of what appears enigmatic at the beginning of the Theosophical Movement finds its explanation in Western esotericism. Anyone grounded in Western esotericism knows that they will never encounter the slightest conflict with the great, powerful truths about the world communicated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. If, for example, we recall that in the case of the Buddha we must distinguish between the Dhyani-Buddha, the Adi-Buddha, and the human Buddha, then this only finds its full explanation through the Western esotericist. For we know, of course, that what is regarded as the Dhyani-Buddha is nothing other than the etheric body of the historical, real Buddha, which has been grasped by the gods; that the etheric body was grasped by what we yesterday referred to as the individuality of Wotan. This is, of course, already contained therein; it merely needs to be grasped in the right way through Western esotericism. The anthroposophical movement will have to pay particular attention to ensuring that what has come before our souls as a feeling impulse from such a contemplation should inspire us to want to develop, so that we must not stand still for a single moment. The spiritual science movement does not gain value by preserving old dogmas, even if they are only fifteen years old, but by grasping the true meaning of such a movement, which can consist of nothing other than the opening up of ever new seeds, ever new spiritual sources. Then it will become a living current within humanity, and then it will bring about that future which has appeared before our souls today—albeit only as a sketchy hint—from what we have been able to observe from the past. That is the best we can take with us as such an impulse of feeling.

[ 27 ] It is not a matter of communicating theoretical truths, but of making our feelings and perceptions strong and powerful for action. We have considered the development of the world, the earth, and humanity; we want to understand what we have been able to glean from this in such a way that we ourselves are always ready to enter into development. What we call the future must, of course, have its roots in the past. The will for the future must correspond to the knowledge of the past; but this knowledge has no value unless it is transformed into driving forces for the future. What we have seen has given us a picture of such meaningful driving forces that not only our will and enthusiasm are stimulated, but also our joy of life and our sense of security. When we see such a confluence of different currents, we say: many seeds are in the womb of time, and they should all ripen. But through their ever-deepening knowledge, human beings should acquire the ability to become ever better nurturers of all these seeds that lie in the womb of time. Knowledge for the sake of action, for the sake of security in life—that is what must permeate all spiritual scientific contemplation as an emotional impulse. I would just like to point out in conclusion that all so-called spiritual scientific theories only attain ultimate truth when they are transformed into life, into emotional impulses and security in life, so that we do not merely contemplate them theoretically, but really enter into the development.