The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] When we ask ourselves what spiritual science should be for human beings, we will probably find that all kinds of impressions and feelings that we have formed in the course of our work in this field will repeatedly bring one answer to our minds: Spiritual science should be a path to the higher development of our humanity, of the humanity within us.

[ 2 ] In doing so, we have set ourselves a goal in life that is, in a certain sense, self-evident for every thinking and feeling human being, a goal that includes the attainment of the highest ideals, but also the unfolding of the most significant and deepest powers in our souls. Basically, the best of humanity in all ages have asked themselves the question: How can human beings properly develop what is inherent in them? — And answers have been given in the most varied ways. Perhaps none can be found that is shorter and more concise than the one Goethe gave from a deep conviction in his “Secrets”:

From the power that binds all beings,
The human being who overcomes himself is freed.

[ 3 ] There is an enormous amount of meaning in these words, for they show us clearly and concisely what is important in relation to all development. What is important is that human beings develop their inner feelings by rising above themselves. In this way we find that we rise above ourselves, so to speak. The soul that overcomes itself finds the way beyond itself and thus to the highest goods of humanity.

[ 4 ] We should remember this noble goal of spiritual science when we are about to deal with a subject such as the one that concerns us here. It will first lead us beyond the ordinary horizons of life to higher matters. We will have to survey long periods of time if we are to deal with our subject, an epoch stretching from ancient Egypt to our own time. We have millennia to survey, and what we hope to gain will truly be something connected with our deepest soul concerns, something that touches the innermost core of our soul life. For it is only apparent that by striving for the heights of life, man distances himself from what is immediately given to him; it is precisely through this that he comes to understand what occupies him every hour. Man must depart from the misery of the day, from what everyday life brings, and look up to the great events of world and national history; only then will he find what the soul preserves as its most sacred treasure. It may seem strange to suggest that we should seek out intimate connections between ancient Egypt, the time when the mighty pyramids and the Sphinx were built, and our own present. At first glance, it may seem odd to want to understand our time better by looking so far back. But that is precisely why we must look back over much more comprehensive, longer periods of time. This will also provide us with the result we have in mind, the result we are seeking: the possibility of transcending ourselves.

[ 5 ] To those who have already studied the basic concepts of spiritual science in depth, it will not seem strange at all to seek connections between periods of time that are far apart. For it is a fundamental belief of ours that the human soul always returns, that the experiences between birth and death are repeated for human beings. The doctrine of reincarnation has become increasingly familiar to us. As we consider this, we may ask: Yes, these souls that dwell in us today have been here many times before; is it not possible that they were also here in ancient Egypt, at the time of the Egyptian cultural epoch, that the same souls are in us that looked up at the gigantic pyramids and the mysterious sphinxes in ancient Egypt?

[ 6 ] The answer to this question is yes. The picture has been renewed, and our souls have looked up at the ancient cultural monuments that they see again today. So it is basically the same souls that lived then, that passed through later periods and have reappeared in our time. And we know that no life remains without fruit, we know that what the soul has gone through in experiences and lessons remains in the soul, that it reappears in later incarnations in the form of forces, temperaments, abilities, and predispositions. Thus, the way we view nature today, the way we perceive what our time brings forth, the way we view the world today, was predisposed in ancient Egypt, the land of the pyramids. At that time, we were prepared to look out into the physical world as we do today. We want to explore how the vast periods of time are mysteriously linked.

[ 7 ] If we want to consider the deeper meaning of these lectures, we must go far back in the evolution of our earth. We know that our earth has changed many times. Ancient Egypt was preceded by other cultures. With the means of occult research, we can look back even further, into the gray prehistory of human evolution, and there we come to times when the earth looked very different from today. It was very different on the soil of ancient Asia and Africa. If we look down clairvoyantly into ancient times, we come to a time when a tremendous catastrophe, caused by the forces of water, took place on our Earth and completely changed its face. And if we go back even further, we come to ancient times when the Earth had a completely different appearance; we come to times when what today forms the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and America was above, was land. We come to a time when our souls lived in bodies completely different from those of today; we come to ancient Atlantis, to ancient times about which external science can tell us little today.

[ 8 ] Then great water catastrophes brought about the downfall of these lands of Atlantis. The bodies of human beings had different forms at that time, and later they took on different forms. But the souls that dwell in us today also dwelt in the ancient Atlanteans. Those were our souls. Then the water catastrophe caused an inner movement among the Atlantean peoples, a great migration from west to east. These peoples were we ourselves. Towards the end of Atlantis, things became quite turbulent, and we ourselves migrated from west to east, through Ireland, Scotland, Holland, France, and Spain. Thus the peoples migrated to the east and populated Europe, Asia, and the northern parts of Africa.

[ 9 ] Now one must not believe that what migrated from the west as the last great migration did not encounter any peoples in the areas that gradually formed Asia, Europe, and Africa. Almost all of Europe, the northern parts of Africa, and large parts of Asia were already populated at that time. These parts of the world were not only populated from the west, but had already been populated earlier, so that it was basically a foreign population that was already there when this migration encountered it. We can imagine that when calmer times came, special cultural conditions emerged. For example, there was an area near Ireland where, before the catastrophe that lies thousands of years behind us, the most advanced parts of the entire earth's population lived. These parts then migrated through Europe under the special leadership of great individuals to an area in Central Asia, and from there cultural colonies were sent to various regions. One such colony of the post-Atlantean period, which came into being when a colony was sent to India by that group of people, encountered a population that had been there since ancient times and also had a culture. Taking into account what already existed, the colonists founded the first post-Atlantean culture, which is many millennia old and about which external documents reveal very little. What they say lies thousands of years later. In those significant collections of wisdom that we call the Vedas, in the ancient Vedas, we have only the last echoes of what remains of a very early Indian culture that was guided by superhuman beings and founded by the holy Rishis. It was a unique culture, of which we can only have a vague idea today, because the Vedas are only a reflection of that ancient sacred Indian culture.

[ 10 ] This culture was followed by another, the second cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean period, the culture from which the wisdom of Zarathustra later flowed, the culture from which the Persian culture emerged. Indian culture lasted a long time, as did Persian culture, which reached its conclusion in Zarathustra.

[ 11 ] Then, again under the influence of colonists sent to the Nile region, a culture emerged that we can summarize with four names: Chaldean-Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian culture. In the Near East, in the northern parts of Africa, there developed the culture that we must designate as the third of the post-Atlantean era, which reached its peak on the one hand in the wonderful Chaldean astronomy, the Chaldean wisdom of the stars, and on the other hand in Egyptian culture.

[ 12 ] Then comes a fourth age, which developed in southern Europe, the age of Greek-Latin culture, whose dawn is evident in the songs of Homer, which show us what could be revealed in Greek works of art, which show us a poetry that produced such significant works as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Roman culture also belongs to this period. It is an era that began around the 8th century, 747 BC, and lasted until the 14th and 15th centuries, 1413 AD. From then on, we have the fifth period, in which we find ourselves, and this will be replaced by a sixth and seventh period. In this seventh period, ancient humanity will reappear in a new form.

[ 13 ] We will see that there is a peculiar law that makes us understand the workings of wonderful forces throughout these periods and the connection between different cultural epochs. If we first look at the first period, that of Indian culture, we will find that we will later see this first culture reappear in a new form in the seventh period. The old Indian culture will reappear in a new form. Very mysterious forces are at work here. And the second period, which we called the Persian period, will reappear in the sixth period. After our culture has passed away, we will see the religion of Zarathustra revive in the culture of the sixth epoch. And in our lectures we will see how, in our fifth epoch, a kind of revival will take place of the third, the Egyptian epoch. The fourth epoch stands in the middle; it is something unique, it has no equal either before or after.

[ 14 ] To make this mysterious law more comprehensible, the following should be said. We know that the inner nature of humanity has something that strikes modern people as foreign in their sense of humanity; this is the division into certain castes, the division into the priestly caste, the warrior caste, the merchant caste, and the worker caste. This strict division is foreign to the modern consciousness. In the first post-Atlantean culture, it was not something foreign, but something self-evident. At that time, it could not be otherwise than that humanity was divided into four degrees according to the different abilities of the souls. This was by no means felt as harsh, for people were divided by their leaders, and these were such authorities that what they ordered was naturally authoritative. It was said that the leaders, the seven holy Rishis, who had received their instruction from divine beings in Atlantis itself, could see where each person belonged. Thus, such a division of people was something quite natural. The grouping of people in the seventh period will be quite different. Whereas in the first period it was authority that brought about the division, in the seventh period it will be something else: people will group themselves according to practical considerations. We see something similar in ants; they form a state which, in its wonderful structure and in its ability to perform a relatively enormous task, is unmatched by any human state. And yet there we find precisely what seems so foreign to humans today: the caste system; each ant has a specific task.

[ 15 ] Whatever one may think today, humans will realize that the division into objective groups is the salvation of humanity, and they will find the possibility of division of labor and yet equality. Human society will appear as a wonderful harmony. This is something we can see in the annals of the future. Thus, ancient India will reappear. And in a similar way, certain characteristics of the third period will reappear in the fifth period.

[ 16 ] If we now look first at what immediately encompasses our subject, we also see a vast area: we see the gigantic pyramid, the enigmatic Sphinx; we will see that the souls that belonged to the ancient Indians were also embodied in Egypt and are still embodied today. And if we follow these general characteristics in detail, two phenomena will immediately strike us, showing us how we can trace mysterious threads between the Egyptian and present-day cultures, as we have already seen in the super-earthly connections. We have seen the law of repetition in the various periods, but it will appear infinitely more meaningful to us if we follow it in the spiritual realm.

[ 17 ] We are all familiar with an image of profound meaning that has surely touched our souls at some point, that famous painting by Raphael, which, through a chain of circumstances, has found its way to us in Central Germany: I am referring to the Sistine Madonna. In this image, which can be seen in countless reproductions, we have perhaps learned to admire the wonderful purity that is poured out over the entire figure; we have perhaps also felt something in the mother's face, in the peculiar floating of the figure, perhaps also something in the deep expression of the child's eyes. And when we then see the cloud formations around them, from which numerous little angel heads appear, we have an even deeper feeling, a feeling that makes the whole picture seem more comprehensible to us. I know that I am saying something daring when I say: if someone looks deeply and seriously at this child in its mother's arms, behind it the clouds forming a multitude of angel heads, then they have the idea that this child was not born in the natural way, but is one of those floating beside it in the clouds. This baby Jesus is himself such a cloud figure, only a little denser than if such a little angel had flown down from the clouds onto the Madonna's arms. That would be a healthy feeling. If we bring this feeling to life within ourselves, our view will broaden, it will free itself from certain narrow conceptions about the natural connections of existence. It is precisely from such an image that our narrow view can expand to the realization that even what must happen according to today's laws could once have been different. We will understand that there was once a form of procreation other than sexual reproduction. In short, we will see in this image the deep connections between the human and the spiritual forces. That is what lies within it.

[ 18 ] When we turn our gaze back from this Madonna to Egyptian times, we encounter something very similar, an equally noble image. The Egyptians had Isis, the figure associated with the words: I am that which was, that which is, that which will be. No mortal has yet lifted my veil.

[ 19 ] A deep mystery, hidden under a deep veil, is revealed in the figure of Isis, the lovely spirit of God, Isis, who stood in the spiritual consciousness of the ancient Egyptians, just as our Madonna stands with the baby Jesus, with the baby Horus. In the fact that this Isis is presented to us as something that carries the eternal within herself, we are reminded again of the feeling we have when we look at the Madonna. We see deep mysteries in Isis, mysteries that are rooted in the spiritual. The Madonna is a reminder of Isis; Isis appears again in the Madonna. That is the connection. We must recognize with feeling the deep mysteries that represent a supernatural connection between Egyptian and modern culture.

[ 20 ] We can establish yet another connection today. We remember how the Egyptians treated their dead; we remember the mummies, how the Egyptians placed importance on preserving the outer physical form for a long time, and we know that the Egyptians filled their tombs with such mummies, in which they had preserved the outer form, and that they placed certain utensils and possessions in the tomb with the deceased as reminders of their past physical life, utensils that corresponded to the needs of physical life. In this way, what the person had had in the physical realm was to be preserved. In this way, the Egyptians connected their dead with the physical plane. This custom became increasingly widespread. It was precisely this that distinguished ancient Egyptian culture.

[ 21 ] But something like this is not without consequences for the soul. Let us remember that our souls were in Egyptian bodies. It is absolutely true that our souls were embodied in these bodies that had become mummies. We know from earlier accounts that when a person is freed from their physical body and etheric body after death, they have a different consciousness and do not live in an unconscious state in the astral world. He can look down from the spiritual world, even if he cannot look up today, but he can then look down upon the physical earth. It is not irrelevant whether the body is preserved as a mummy or whether it is burned or decomposed. This creates a certain kind of connection. We will see the mysterious connection. Because bodies were preserved for a long time in ancient Egypt, souls experienced something very specific in the interval after death. When they looked down, they knew: that is my body. They were bound to it, to this physical body; they had the form of their body before them. This body became important to the souls, because the soul is impressionable after death. The impression made by the mummified body was deeply engraved, and the soul was shaped by this impression.

[ 22 ] Now this soul passed through incarnations in the Greco-Latin culture, and today it lives in us in our time. It is not without effect that these souls saw their mummified bodies after death, that they were thereby repeatedly drawn back to these bodies; this is not insignificant. They took them into their sympathy, and the fruit of this looking down appears today, in the fifth period, in the inclination that souls now have to attach great value to the outer physical life. Everything we call attachment to matter today comes from the fact that souls were able to look down from the spiritual world at their own embodiment. This is how human beings learned to love the physical world, and this is why it is so often said today that only the physical body between birth and death is important.

[ 23 ] Such views do not come out of nowhere. This is not meant to be a criticism of mummy culture, but only to point out the necessities associated with the recurring embodiment of the soul. In their further development, human beings would not have been able to do without looking at mummies. Today, humans would have lost all interest in the physical world if the Egyptians had not had the mummy cult. It had to happen in order to awaken a legitimate interest in the physical world. The fact that humans today have arranged their world in such a way that we see the world as we see it is a consequence of the Egyptians mummifying the physical body after death. For this cultural trend was also influenced by initiates who could see into the future. Mummies were not made on a whim. At that time, high individuals led humanity and decreed what was right. It was done on authority. In the schools of the initiates, it was known that our period is connected with the third period. These mysterious connections were clear to the priests at that time, and they ordered mummification precisely so that the souls would take on the disposition that seeks spiritual experience from the physical, outer world.

[ 24 ] This is how the world is guided by wisdom; this is another example of such connections. The fact that people today think the way they do is the result of what they experienced in ancient Egypt. Here we glimpse deep mysteries that reveal themselves in cultural currents. We have only touched upon these mysteries, for what has been shown in the Madonna as a reminder of Isis, and what we have seen in mummification, only faintly touches upon the real spiritual connections. But we will shine even deeper into those conditions; we will not only have to consider what appears outwardly, but we will have to consider what lies beneath the outer appearance.

[ 25 ] Outer life takes place between birth and death. After death, human beings live a much longer life, which we know as Kamaloka and the experiences in the spiritual world. The experiences in the supersensible worlds are not any more monotonous than the experiences here in the physical world. What did we experience as ancient Egyptians in the other world?

[ 26 ] When we let our gaze wander along the pyramid, when we directed it toward the Sphinx, how different that life was, how different our soul lived between birth and death! This cannot be compared with life today; it would make no sense. And even more varied than the external experiences are the experiences between death and a new birth. Back then, during the Egyptian period, the soul experienced something completely different than in the Greek world, than in the time of Charlemagne, and than in our time. In the other, spiritual world, too, a development takes place, and what human beings experience today between death and a new birth is something completely different from what the ancient Egyptians experienced when they shed their outer form at death. And just as mummification developed in a peculiar way, so that it is the cause of today's attitude, just as this outer life is repeated from the third to the fifth period, so too is there a continuation of development in those mysterious worlds between death and birth. We will have to consider this as well; there too a mysterious connection will emerge. And then we will have gathered something to truly understand what lives within us, what is the fruit of that ancient time within us.

[ 27 ] Admittedly, we will be led down into the deep shafts of the labyrinth of Earth's development. But precisely through this we will also recognize the full connection between what the Egyptians built, what the Chaldeans thought, and what we live today. What was wrought in those days, we will see shining forth again in what surrounds us, in what interests us in our environment. We will gain physical and spiritual insights into this connection. We will see how development progresses, how the fourth period forms a wonderful link between the third and fifth periods. And so our souls will rise to the meaningful connections of the world, and the fruit will be a deep understanding of what lives within us.