The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we spoke about the mysterious connection between the earlier stages of our Earth's development and the various worldviews of the successive cultural periods of the post-Atlantean era. And we discovered the remarkable fact that when the Atlantean catastrophe changed the face of the Earth, the pre-Vedic, ancient sacred Indian culture with its powerful philosophical conception of the first cultural period showed something like a mirror image of the events that took place at the beginning of Earth's development in a distant past, when the sun, moon, and Earth were still united. What was seen in the spirit at that time, and to which those who were given it rose, was nothing other than a spiritual form grasped in the spirit, which was real when our Earth stood at the beginning of its development. And we have seen that the second state of the Earth, when the Sun had detached itself but the Earth and Moon still formed one body, that this peculiar juxtaposition of two worlds in the second cultural period, the ancient Persian, emerged as a philosophical-religious system in the opposites of the principle of light in the sun's aura and the principle of darkness, as the opposition of Ormuzd and Ahriman. The third of the great cultural periods, the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian, is a spiritual reflection of what took place when the Earth, Sun, and Moon became three bodies. And we have already been able to sketch out that the astral trinity of the third epoch of the Earth, the trinity of stars: Sun, Earth, and Moon, is reflected in the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. We have also already pointed out that this separation took place in the Lemurian epoch, which was followed by the Atlantean epoch, the fourth stage of our Earth's development, where completely different conditions of consciousness prevailed than today. At that time, human beings lived together with the gods they knew through a different form of consciousness, with the gods who were later named Wotan, Baldur, Thor, Zeus, Apollo, and so on. These are beings that the Atlantean human being was able to perceive with his clairvoyance. We have the repetition of this vision of divine-spiritual beings in the Atlantic epoch in the memory of the peoples of the Greco-Latin period, including the peoples of northern Europe. It was the memory of the experiences of earlier states of consciousness. Whether it was Wotan or Zeus, Mars, Hera, or Athena, they were all memories of the ancient spirit figures that made up the content of that ancient world of gods.

[ 2 ] Thus, the fourth cultural period appears in such a way that its religions reflect what took place in the Earth's development during the Atlantean epoch. Now we must gradually delve a little deeper into the souls of the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cultural humanity. If we want to form a true picture of these experiences, of what lived religiously in the ancient cultural epochs, we must bear in mind that both the most important elements of these ancient peoples and the enlightened individuals, the seers and prophets, were all successors of those human beings who had already lived in the Atlantean epoch, and that by no means did everything immediately perish after the great catastrophe. What was the ancient Atlantean culture? Rather, what lived at that time was gradually transplanted into the new era. And we will best understand the souls of the ancient post-Atlantean descendants if we immerse ourselves in the soul life of the last Atlanteans.

[ 3 ] In the last Atlantean period, people were very different from one another. Some had retained a high degree of clairvoyant abilities. This clairvoyant ability did not suddenly disappear completely; it was still present in many of the people who took part in the great migration from the West to the East, while others had already lost it. There were advanced and backward people, and it is understandable that, according to the whole nature of the development at that time, it was precisely the least advanced who were best able to see clairvoyantly, for they had, so to speak, remained standing still and had preserved the old character of the Atlanteans. The most advanced were those who first acquired physical perception of the world, who had already adopted our way of seeing things during the day. These were the most advanced, who ceased to see the spiritual world clairvoyantly at night and saw the ever sharper contours of objects during the day. And it was precisely this small group, already mentioned, led by one of the great, by the greatest initiate, commonly referred to as Manz, and his disciples, this little people, which was led deep into Asia and from there fertilized the other cultural countries, precisely this little group, which lost the gift of ancient clairvoyance earliest in relation to the ordinary conditions of life, was composed of the most advanced people of that time. Day consciousness became increasingly apparent to them, what we perceive as physical objects with their sharp boundaries. And their great leaders had led this people as far as possible into Asia so that they could live in seclusion; otherwise they would have come into too much contact with other peoples who had still preserved the old clairvoyance. Only by remaining separated from other peoples for a time could they grow into a new kind of humanity. A colony was established in Inner Asia, from where the great cultural currents were to spread to the most diverse peoples.

[ 4 ] Initially, northern India was the country that received its new cultural current from this center. Now, it has already been hinted here that these small masses of people who were sent out as cultural pioneers did not find any uninhabited land, because even before that great migration from west to east, there had always been large migrations, and whenever new stretches of land rose from the sea, they were populated by the migrating hordes. So the people who were sent out from that Asian colony had to mix with other masses of people, who were all more backward than those who had been led by Manu. Among the other peoples, there were still many who had preserved the old clairvoyance.

[ 5 ] The initiates did not colonize in the same way as today; they did it differently. They knew that one had to start with the souls of those one encountered in the countries to be colonized. It was not that the emissaries imposed what they had to say. They took into account what they encountered. A balance was created, and the needs of those who were the old inhabitants were taken into consideration. One had to reckon with the religious beliefs based on memories of earlier times and with the old clairvoyant abilities. It was therefore natural that pure ideas could only develop among a small group of the most advanced. Among the masses, compromise ideas developed from the old Atlantean and post-Atlantean beliefs. That is why we find everywhere in these masses of people, both in India and Persia, as well as in Egypt, everywhere where the various post-Atlantean cultures arose, we find everywhere at the bottom, for that time, less advanced, more uncultivated religious ideas, which were nothing other than a kind of reproduction of the old Atlantean ideas.

[ 6 ] In order to understand what these ideas actually were in these folk religions, we must first form a picture of them. We must put ourselves in the souls of the last Atlantic population. We must remember that in the Atlantic era, human beings were not unconscious at night, but perceived just as they did during the day, if one can speak of day and night at all in this era. During the day, they perceived the first traces of what we now see so clearly as the world of sensory perceptions. At night, they were companions of divine spiritual beings. They needed no proof that gods existed, just as we today need no proof that minerals exist. The gods were their companions; they themselves were spiritual beings at night. In his astral body and ego, he wandered around in the spiritual world. He himself was a spirit and met beings who were of a similar nature to him. Of course, the higher spiritual beings were not the only ones he encountered. He also met lower spirits than those who were later described as Zeus, Wotan, and so on. These were not the only ones, of course; they were only the most select figures. It was like when we see kings and emperors today. Many people do not see them, yet they believe that kings and emperors exist. In this state, which was generally human, even though we were conscious during the day, we perceived the objects around us differently than we do today. Even our daytime consciousness was different, and we must try to understand what this latter consciousness of the Atlanteans was like.

[ 7 ] It has been described how divine beings withdrew from a person as they descended into their physical body each morning. They saw objects as if shrouded in a mist. Such were the images of waking up in those days. But these images had another peculiar characteristic that we must grasp very clearly. Let us imagine such a soul approaching a pond. This soul did not perceive the water in this pond as sharply defined as we do today; but when this soul directed its attention to it, it experienced something quite different from what someone today experiences when approaching a pond. As it approached the pond, merely by looking at it, a feeling arose within it, as if it were getting a taste of what lay physically before it, without needing to drink the water of the pond. By merely looking at it, it would have sensed: the water is sweet or salty. It was not at all like how we see water today. Today we see only the surface, but we cannot penetrate into the interior. The person who, in earlier times when dim clairvoyance still existed, approached the pond, did not feel a sense of alienation toward it; he felt himself immersed in the qualities of the water; he did not stand before the object at all as we do today; it was as if he could have penetrated into the water. Suppose we had come upon a block of salt; as we approached, we would have sensed its taste. Today we must first taste the salt; back then, that would have been provided by mere observation. Humanity was, as it were, immersed in the whole, and perceived things as animated. It perceived, so to speak, the essences that, for example, gave the thing its salty taste. Thus everything came alive to them. Air, earth, water, fire—everything, everything revealed something to them. Human beings could feel their way into the inner nature of objects; they lived within the essence of their being. What appears to consciousness today as soulless objects did not exist back then. That is why human beings also perceived everything with sympathy and antipathy, because they saw the inner nature. They felt and experienced the inner essence of objects.

[ 8 ] Memories of these experiences remained everywhere. As a result, the parts of the Indian population that encountered the colonists were imbued with such a connection to things. They knew that souls lived in things. They had retained the ability to see the properties of things. Now let us imagine this whole relationship between human beings and things. At that time, when a person approached a pond, he perceived the taste of the water. He saw a spiritual being that gave the water its taste. He could meet this spiritual being during the night when he lay down beside the water and fell asleep. During the day, they see the material world; at night, they see what lives through everything. During the day, they see objects, stones, plants, animals; they hear the wind blowing, the water rushing; at night, they see within themselves what they perceive during the day in its true form; they see the spirits that live in everything. When he said: In minerals, in plants, in water, in clouds, in the wind, spirits live, spirits live everywhere—this was not poetry for him, it was not fantasy, it was something he could perceive.

[ 9 ] We must now descend so deeply into the souls to understand them. And then one understands that it is terrible nonsense when today's scholars speak of animism, which causes the popular imagination to animate and personify everything. Such a popular imagination does not exist. Those who really know the people do not speak of this. One can repeatedly find the strange example: just as a child, when it bumps into a table, hits the table because it animates the table — so the scholars say — so too would primitive man, childlike man, have animated the objects in nature, the trees and so on, having imagined something into everything. This analogy has been repeated ad nauseam. There is certainly imagination involved, but it was the scholars who had the imagination, not the people. It is they who dreamed. Those who originally perceived everything as animated did not dream; they only reproduced what they themselves perceived.

[ 10 ] This perception emerged as a remnant in the memory of ancient peoples. Even a child does not see the table as animate; it does not yet feel the soul within itself, it sees itself as a block of wood. Because it feels itself to be soulless, it places itself on the same level as the soulless table by hitting it. The opposite of what is written in the books of scholars is the truth. Whether we go to India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, or anywhere else, we find the same ideas that have been described above. And into these ideas was poured what was given as culture by the ancient initiates.

[ 11 ] In ancient India, culture was guided by the rishis. But now we must also understand a little what actually gave rise to the figure that emerged as one of the most important figures in Indian thought. We know that at all times there have been so-called mystery schools where those who were able to develop their spiritual abilities learned to look deeper into the universe, where they awakened dormant abilities to see the spiritual connection between things. The spiritual impulses of cultures emanated from these mystery centers everywhere. And in order to understand the initiates properly from the ground up when we look at them, we usually look at them in the post-Atlantean era, because their nature is easiest to understand there. However, we would also encounter something similar to schools of initiates in the Atlantean era. In order to understand them properly from the ground up, let us put ourselves in the shoes of such an ancient Atlantean initiation school.

[ 12 ] At that time, the states of consciousness just described existed. When we go back to those times, we find that human beings were not yet in their present form. At that time, they were still very different. We are going back to the first half of the Atlantean period. Human beings already consisted of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and the I, but the physical body looked very different. The physical body was such that we could compare it to the bodies of some sea creatures, transparent, which we could hardly see, which we could just about grasp, already permeated by certain lines of direction that shone within them. The physical body of human beings was much softer than it is today; there were no bones yet. Although there were already cartilage-like beginnings, this physical body in the earliest times was not at all like the one we have today.

[ 13 ] In contrast, the etheric body of human beings was the much more important member. The physical body of human beings was more or less small at that time, but the etheric body was extraordinarily large. This etheric body differed for each individual in such a way that one could perceive about four different types. These four typical forms existed in such a way that some people showed one type, others another. Now these types have been preserved in four names. They are the names of the apocalyptic animals: ox or bull, lion, eagle, man. Now, it is not entirely correct to imagine that these forms were completely similar to today's animals, but they nevertheless resembled the impression made by the corresponding animals today. The impressions made by the etheric bodies could be understood through the image of the lion, bull, eagle, or human being. One group made an impression with their strong reproductive capacity or extraordinary appetite, which was compared, for example, to that of the bull; another type of human being was one that already lived more in the spiritual realm, the eagle people, who did not feel very comfortable in the physical world. And then there were people who were already similar in their etheric bodies to today's physical bodies; although they were not quite the same, they were already like the human form. We must of course imagine that in individual cases not only one type was represented, but that all four were present in everyone, but that one of these four dominated.

[ 14 ] Such was the nature of the etheric bodies of the Atlantean population. Then the astral body was particularly powerful but undeveloped, and the I was still completely outside the human being. So people looked very different then than they do today. Of course, precocious individuals took on their later form earlier, but essentially the people of that time can be characterized as we have just done. This was the normal average state of humanity at that time.

[ 15 ] It was quite different for the more advanced, for the students of the mystery centers, for those who sought initiation in ancient Atlantis. Let us now enter in spirit one of these ancient Atlantean initiation centers and try to imagine what the teacher had to give us. What was this teacher himself?

[ 16 ] If a person today were to encounter an initiate, they would not be able to recognize them at all by their outward appearance. Very few people today would recognize such an initiate outwardly, because today, after the physical body of the human being has developed so far, but the initiate still has to live in the body, they differ from other people only in intimate subtleties. At that time, however, the initiate was very, very different from other people. The others still had more animal-like forms, their physical bodies were small in relation to their gigantic etheric bodies, and they were more of a clumsy animal substance and mass. Now, the initiated person differed in that he was more similar in his physical body to the human form of today, that he had a human face similar to that of today's human beings, that he possessed a forebrain like the average human being of today. At that time, the initiated already had a very well-developed brain for that time, while the brain of the others was still undeveloped. Now there were such initiates, and they had their schools, and into these initiation schools they admitted pupils from normal humanity, using certain methods, depending on how mature and sufficiently developed these pupils proved to be.

[ 17 ] There is something we must take into account if we are to fully understand what follows. We must realize that, as time has progressed, the spiritual aspects of the human being have, with few exceptions, completely lost their dominion over the physical body in modern humans. Even though people today can move their legs and arms and pedal a bicycle, even though they can control their facial expressions—in short, even though they have a certain degree of control over their bodies—all of this is merely a pitiful, final remnant of the old relationship of control over the physical body as it existed in the Atlantean era. Back then, thought and feeling had a much greater influence on the physical body. What a person thought exerted a much more significant influence on the physical body at that time. If today a thought is given to someone for weeks, months, or even years, it will continue to affect only the etheric body in very special, exceptional cases. Very rarely, for example, will the physical body be influenced by meditation. If someone were able, for example, to move a somewhat receding forehead slightly forward—that is, if the frontal bones were to shift a little further forward, so that there were an effect extending into the bones—that would already be a tremendous success today. This is very, very rarely the case today. Today, an immense amount of energy must be developed if thought is to affect the physical body. It is certainly easier to influence blood circulation or respiratory conditions, but that is still difficult. Thought can already affect the etheric body today, and in the next incarnation, thought will have exerted such a powerful influence that the physical conditions will have changed. One should work today in such a way that one knows one is not working for a single incarnation, but beyond that, for future incarnations. The soul is eternal; it returns again and again.

[ 18 ] But it was quite different in the ancient schools of initiation. There, it was the power of thought that influenced the physical body in a relatively short time. The mystery student could work his own organization up to the human level. So at that time, one could take a student from normal humanity; one only had to give him the right impulse. The student did not even need to think for himself; thoughts were incorporated into his soul through a kind of suggestion. A very specific spiritual form had to stand before his soul, into which the student always had to immerse himself. Everywhere, the Atlantean initiate gave the student a thought form into which he had to immerse himself again and again. What was this image? What was the student supposed to think? What was he meditating on?

[ 19 ] Reference has already been made to the original state of the earth; the entire development has already been outlined; and there has also been mention of the light figure in the primordial dust. If one had looked at the atom clairvoyantly at that time, the archetype of today's human being would have emerged. It grew out of this speck of dust, this primordial atom. Not the form of the human beings of ancient times, not the Atlantean human being, but the form of the human being of today grew out of this primordial atom. And what did the Atlantean initiate do? He presented this archetype, this human archetype that arises from the primordial seed, to the souls of his students. The students had to meditate on this archetype. The initiate of Atlantis placed the human form as a thought form before the seeing eye of the disciple, with all the impulses and sensations that were in it. And whether the disciple possessed the lion type or another, he had to hold before himself the thought image of what man was to become in the post-Atlantean era. This thought image was always given to him as an ideal. He had to want this thought: My physical body shall become like this image. And through the powers of this image, which the student had to learn, the body was influenced in such a way that it then differed from other human beings. Through the powers of this image, certain parts were transformed, and gradually the most advanced students became more and more similar to the human beings of today.

[ 20 ] Here we look back on strange secrets; here we look into the mysteries of the Atlantean era. And something else will also strike us. However people were formed, one thing hovered before their souls as an image that already existed as a spiritual image when the sun was still united with the earth. And this image emerged more and more as the meaning of the earth, as that which lies spiritually at the foundation of the earth. And this image did not appear to them in this or that form, as the image of this or that race, it appeared to them as the general ideal of humanity.

[ 21 ] This is the feeling that the student should have developed in relation to this image: the highest spiritual beings wanted this image, this image through which unity comes into humanity. This image is the meaning of Earth's development. To realize this image, the Sun separated from the Earth, and the Moon emerged. This enabled human beings to become Mersch. This is the one thing that should ultimately appear as the high ideal of the Earth. And into this high ideal flowed the feelings that animated the student in his meditation.

[ 22 ] This was roughly around the middle of the Atlantean epoch, and we will have to follow how this image of meditation, which stood before the disciple as a human figure, transformed into something else, and how this was carried over after the Atlantean catastrophe. This is what revived in the Indian initiatory teaching, what can be summarized in the ancient sacred name: Brahma. What the world deity wanted as the meaning of the earth was the most sacred thing for the ancient Indian initiates, and so they spoke of Brahma. From this later arose the teachings of Zarathustra and the Egyptian wisdom, which will be discussed later. Tomorrow we will see how it transforms from Brahma into Egyptian wisdom.