The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we concluded our consideration with a discussion of an extraordinarily important event in the inner life, in the actual spiritual life of the human being. We tried to bring before our soul an impression that the Atlantic initiate had at the beginning of the last third of the Atlantic cultural epoch. We saw before our soul how an ideal human figure stood before the soul of the initiate, a thought image on which he had to concentrate in meditation, and how this filled the life of imagination, feeling, and will of the Atlantic initiate. This thought image was to become more and more the model for the future human being.

[ 2 ] Now we must once again visualize what this thought image actually looked like. It was not quite similar to the human being of today; it was not like that. If we imagine a kind of combination of man and woman, with everything that is base removed, if we imagine a kind of double figure of which only the upper part of the body is clearly discernible, then we have the actual sensual-supersensory image that stood before the meditator at that time. This image had such a powerful effect that those who were to be initiated really made their outer bodies more and more similar to this image.

[ 3 ] Now, one circumstance is very important, namely that the meditating initiate had a kind of human figure standing before him, facing him in his inner being. When the initiate had been prepared to see this image vividly before him, he had to realize the following when he saw this image appear before him: As I look at this image, I place myself in the original state of Earth's development, when the Earth, Moon, and Sun were not yet separate. At that time, the earth consisted of its primordial atom, but in this atom the clairvoyant could see the image that now appears before me. The image already existed in the primeval time of the earth, when there were no animal, plant, or mineral forms. At that time, the earth consisted only of the human atom, of the reawakened human beings. However, the first animal forms had already begun to develop during the lunar phase of the Earth; the animals were already there. But we also know that when a planetary system disappears, it enters a pralaya, in which all forms are dissolved. Even though the old moon was already populated by animal forms, the Earth did not initially have animals and plants; these came later. Only after the separation of the sun did animals gradually appear. In its primeval state, the earth was merely human.

[ 4 ] The initiate thus looked upon this primeval state of the earth. He saw in the primordial atom the ideal image of the human being. The initiate had this human form before him, and now it became clear to him: I will place myself in the primeval state of the earth. That which lives in the earth, the ideal image, the ideal form of the human being, tells me the following: The deity works from eternity to eternity; it has poured itself into these forms and breathed this human archetype out of itself. Now he said to himself: Where did the animals, plants, and other beings come from?

[ 5 ] The initiate saw, as it were, the archetype of the deity in his mind, and he saw the animals as secondary forms, and the plants as secondary figures that had come into being later. Everything that lives here in the lower realms, the Atlantean initiate saw as having first emerged from the human form. We can get an idea of this thought when we think about how coal came into being. Think of the great primeval forests that existed and thrived at that time and are now coal. They have been left behind, they have developed from a higher to a lower realm. There we see how the plants have turned to stone, have hardened.

[ 6 ] This is how the Atlantean initiate saw everything, the entire environment emerging from the human form. This impression was conjured up in the soul of human beings in ancient times, and these impressions were retained in memory throughout the time of the flood, and the ancient Indian initiators also evoked this image of the primordial human being in the soul of the student, the image of the primordial human being who had been breathed out by the eternal Self. When the Indian disciple had this image before him, he felt that everything had arisen from this image, that what was present in this archetype like blood had become the waters of the earth, and so on. And so this image expanded to become the primordial ground of the universe. Now the following was presented to his soul. He was told: You have two things before your eyes in this archetype, first the archetype itself, but then also that which shone forth in you as your innermost essence when you contemplated the image. Outside is the macrocosm, and then that which you feel within yourself as an extract, so to speak, the microcosm.

[ 7 ] And when the Greeks advanced into India during Alexander's campaigns and heard the last echoes of what the disciple had felt at that time, they felt the following. They said: When the disciple contemplates what is spread out in the great world as human beings, he has Heracles before him. The Indians called that which lives as the forces of the universe Vâc. But in human beings they felt, as it were, the Brahman as the extract of the whole. This is how the Greeks explained the echoes of what was going on in the soul of the disciple in the ancient sacred Indian culture. This was the fruit of a journey to India undertaken by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. It was precisely from this basic feeling that the ancient sacred Indian teaching of the initiated developed, which appears as a spiritual image of that primordial state of the earth when the earth still had within itself the forces of the sun and high beings, whose sublimity was later longed for. Therefore, it was a high feeling of spiritual life when the student was initiated, when he could bring forth within himself what is understood as Brahman. It was an immense process in the human soul. It was an elevation into higher worlds. There was no other way to be initiated and attain true vision than by rising to the highest worlds. The world that surrounds us is the physical world. Around it and within it surges the astral world. Higher up is Devachan, the world of the gods, and the student had to be transported to the highest regions of Devachan if he was to feel Brahman, the primordial self, in the macrocosm. The student was then in the highest Devachan, in the world of the gods, from which comes the noblest thing that man has within himself. It was a realm of the highest, most perfect order into which the student was transported, a realm that offered much more in the way of knowledge, for what has been described here was not the only thing.

[ 8 ] But before we describe anything further, we must also get to know the teachers. You have all heard of the holy Rishis, the original founders of the ancient sacred Indian culture, who themselves had Manu as their teacher. Who were these seven great teachers of ancient India? We must clarify the nature of the holy Rishis a little, as far as possible. To do this, we must once again look at the great world. We must be clear that what we can perceive with our physical senses, our eyes and so on, is a consequence of the spiritual. If we think of the entire environment that we see as spiritual, we can compare it to an ethereal primordial nebula. This nebula gradually became denser, descended into the state of matter, and various world bodies formed: the sun, the moon, and the earth separated.

[ 9 ] But why did the other planets split off? For this also happened during the individual separations. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury split off. Why did this happen?

[ 10 ] We will understand this when we tell ourselves that something similar to what happens in our ordinary, trivial lives also happens in the great universe. It is not only students who fail in high school, but also in the great cosmos there are beings who lag behind and cannot keep up. Let us make this very clear. There was a group of higher beings who could not keep up with the pace of the Earth, who took the finest substances and formed the sun as their dwelling place. These were the highest beings connected with our evolution. But they had also undergone a process of development. So there were beings who were in the process of becoming sun spirits, and there were those who had been left behind, who were lower than the sun spirits but higher than humans, who could not participate in the development of the sun spirits because they were not as mature as they were. They could not go out with the sun; the sun would have scorched them. But they were too noble for the Earth, so they took special substances that were between the Sun and the Earth in terms of fineness and corresponded to their nature, and formed dwellings between the Sun and the Earth. Thus Venus and Mercury split off. So we have two groups of beings that had not risen as high as the sun spirits, but were further than humans. They became Venus spirits and Mercury spirits. These beings are responsible for the formation of these two planets. Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn had already formed earlier, for other reasons. These in turn became dwelling places for certain beings.

[ 11 ] Thus we see how spirits are the causes of the formation of the planets. Now, one must not believe that these beings, who inhabit the various bodies of the solar system, are not connected with the inhabitants of the earth. We must realize that physical boundaries are not real boundaries, that even beyond these boundaries there are many possibilities for the beings of other heavenly bodies to exert magical influences on the earth. Thus, the effects of the spirits of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, and so on extend into the Earth. The latter two are closer to the Earth; they helped humans, when the Sun emerged, to prepare the Earth as we now have it before us.

[ 12 ] I would like to add something here, because misunderstandings have crept in regarding the naming of the planets. In all occult nomenclature, what is today called Mercury in astronomy is called Venus, and conversely, what is called Venus in astronomy is called Mercury. Astronomers who are concerned only with the external do not know that there are secrets underlying this, because deep, esoteric names were not to be revealed. This was done in order to conceal certain things.

[ 13 ] All these spirits of the other planets now have an effect on Earth. All planets have an effect on human beings. However, these effects first had to be communicated to human beings, and this was done by the great Manu, who initiated the seven Rishis so that each individual Rishi understood the secrets of one of these planets in their effects. And because there were seven planets, these seven Rishis were, in their togetherness, what represents a seven-membered lodge that could convey the teachings of the mysteries of our solar system to their disciples. We therefore find references to this in some ancient occult writings. For example, it says: There are secrets to be sought beyond the seven, which are those that the holy Manu himself preserved about the time before the division of the planets.

[ 14 ] What the planets preserved as forces was what was hidden in the secrets of the seven Rishis. And so this choir of the seven Rishis worked together, in complete unity with Manu, in the wonderful wisdom that was imparted to their disciples. If we wanted to characterize this, we would have to say: This original teaching contained approximately what we know today as the evolution of humanity through the planetary states of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The secrets of evolution were hidden in the seven limbs of the Lodge, each of which represented a stage in the progress of humanity.

[ 15 ] The disciple saw this. He not only saw it, he even heard it when he rose into the Devachan, into the Devachanic world: for this world is a world of sound. There he heard the spherical sound of the seven planets. He saw the image in the astral world; in the devachanic world he heard the sound, and in the highest of the worlds he experienced the word. So when the Indian disciple rose into the upper Devachan, he perceived through the music of the spheres and through the word of the spheres how the primordial spirit Brahma is structured through evolution in the sevenfold chain of planets, and he heard this from the primordial word Vâc. This was the name of the primordial sound of creation that the disciple heard; in it he heard the entire evolution of the worlds. The word divided into seven members, the primordial word of creation, worked in the soul of the disciple, the primordial word that he described to the uninitiated in much the same way as we would describe the evolution of our worlds today. What he perceived is described in elementary terms in my “Theosophy,” “And we find this description again first in the ancient sacred religion of the Indians, in what was called the ‘Veda’ or, in English, the ”Word.”

[ 16 ] This is the real meaning of the Vedas, and what was written later is only the last remembrance of the ancient sacred teaching of the Word. The Word itself has only been passed down from mouth to mouth, because writing it down violates the ancient tradition. Only from the Vedas can one still sense something of what flowed into this culture at that time. When the student experienced this in his memory, he could say to himself: What I experience as Brahman in my soul, what I have as the primordial word in my soul, was already there on ancient Saturn; the first breath of the Vedic word already sounded on Saturn.

[ 17 ] Now the development had continued through the sun and moon to the earth. The word had become denser and denser, had taken on denser and denser forms, and the image of man in the original seed of the earth was already a condensation of the state in which the primordial word was on Saturn. What had happened now?

[ 18 ] The word of God, the original human being, had wrapped itself in ever new shells, and it depended on what shells the word took on within the evolution of the earth. The student knew that nothing repeats itself completely in the universe and that every planet has its mission. What he saw taking shape on the old Sun as life, what was instilled on the old Moon as wisdom at the foundation of all things, was followed on Earth by what is the task, the mission of Earth, which is to develop love; this was not yet present on the old Moon. Thus, that which existed on the previous planet in a much more spiritual but also much colder form, the archetype of the human being, clothed itself in a warm astral envelope. That which was to become human had been clothed in an astral shell on the moon, and it is this part that enables the inner life of human beings on earth to develop love from the lowest to the highest form.

[ 19 ] The Indian disciple could clearly perceive the human form, the archetype, in the higher Devachan. Then it enveloped itself in the lower Devachan with an astral envelope that had within it the powers to develop love. Love, Eros, was called Kama. Thus Kama acquires a meaning for earthly evolution. The divine Word, Brahman, clothed itself in Kama, and through Kama the primordial Word resounded to the disciple. The garment of love was Kama, the garment of the primordial Word Vâc, the Word Vâc, which is the basis of the Latin “vox.” And so the disciple felt in his innermost being that the word of God had clothed itself in an astral garment of love, and now he said to himself: The human being, who today consists of four members, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, this human being has the I as his highest member. And this I descended into the garment of love and formed Kama-Manas. That was the innermost being of the human being; it was Kama in which Manas clothed itself: that was the I. But we also know that this innermost being will develop three higher members, which transform the lower members, transform the physical body as well, and just as manas becomes the astral sheath, just as budhi corresponds to prana on a higher level, so the physical body, when it is completely spiritualized, will become Atma. All this was already germinally present in the Vâc, and a Vedic saying still reminds us how the disciple expressed the secret of the innermost being.

[ 20 ] We know that the physical body originated on Saturn, the etheric body on the sun, the astral body on the moon, and the I on the earth. But the true, original human constitution, the primordial word Vâc, already contained the following three members. Man still has three higher members to look forward to, and only then will he be a true image of the creative word, the primordial word. And the student should be pointed out that only the initiated could understand the true nature of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. Today, man is only himself when he utters his “I am,” when he contemplates what is wholly his own. Only then is he wholly human. The other elements are also apparent, but there he is still unconscious. But in the fourth, the Vâc has become apparent: “In the fourth, man speaks!” That was the sentence of the Veda. When the word “I” sounds, the fourth part of the Vâc sounds. The Vedic sentence was: “Four quarters of the Vâc are measured; three are kept hidden and do not move; only the fourth quarter is spoken by humans.”

[ 21 ] Here we have a wonderful description of what we have heard so often. This stood before the spiritual gaze of the student. His gaze was directed back to the state where nothing was yet separated, where there was still a primordial earth, where the full Véc spoke. This is expressed in another Vedic sentence: “Before, I did not know what this ‘I am’ is; only when the first-born of the earth came upon me was the spirit filled with light, and I had a share in the holy Vâc,” the wisdom. This reflects a vision that the initiate had.

[ 22 ] This is only a hint at some of the experiences of the ancient Rishi disciples, of the wonderful teachings that flowed into Indian culture, were passed down to subsequent ages, and were transformed according to the needs of other peoples. But all of them understood the primordial word Vâc.

[ 23 ] We will understand many things better if we consider a secret in its entire context. We must imagine that in those days the effect of the teacher on the disciple was quite different from what it is today. Today, such an effect is only possible to a certain extent when the disciple has already been brought to a certain level of initiation. At that time, the forces of the teacher that were transferred to the student were much stronger. We can imagine these forces when we say: It was not only what the teacher was able to convey through words or writing that had an effect. All of that actually only affected the intellectual soul, but in addition, magical, mysterious forces from the teacher affected the student, and it was essentially the forces of the teacher that were able to fill the images that the teacher presented to the student's soul with brightness and living power. This peculiar effect was only lost in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Greek-Latin culture. Forces change. It was quite different when an ancient Egyptian stood before a young person than when a teacher stands before a student today. Completely different forces acted from the elderly to the young. Anyone who wants to understand what is still described in ancient Greek culture must know this. Socrates actually had telepathic powers, which he passed on to his students while he taught them. Such things can no longer work in our time. Such things are hinted at in Plato's writings. Today, it would of course be a reprehensible vice, whereas at that time it was entirely justified. Changes are taking place; no one has the right to copy that today. Present-day phenomena want to invoke it, but the same would be reprehensible today.

[ 24 ] Back then, in ancient times, forces flowed from the teacher to the student. Even in ancient Egypt, there were still a large number of people who were capable of receiving forces in this way. If a person was particularly receptive and stood opposite someone who had learned to strengthen their thoughts, then a strong thought would have such an effect that it would appear as an image in the soul of the receptive person. In ancient Egypt, therefore, such telepathic effects were possible to a high degree, and thought transmission was very common. This was especially the case when a strong will faced an unstrengthened one. Thus, in Egypt, it was still possible to control and guide another person through thoughts to an extent that is unimaginable today. Today, of course, such powers would be seriously abused. Essentially, the initiations in ancient Egypt were based on similar powers. This was also possible in ancient India and Persia. These powers reinforced the method which, if one wanted to express it exoterically, could also be called medical. This is not, of course, to be understood as the official medicine of today. The Egyptian physician and initiate would have laughed at what people today call medicine. The ancient Egyptian physician knew one thing: he knew that the conditions that originally existed in Atlantis, and which could be perceived during initiation, could still be reawakened in a certain sense. The consciousness in which people lived in Atlantis was a dull clairvoyant consciousness. There was a time, said the Egyptian initiate, when spiritual beings exerted a much greater power over people. Today, when people sleep, they know nothing of the higher worlds; but the Atlantean human being still lived in a dim clairvoyant consciousness with the gods. And just as it has a much better effect than all moral teachings when people today can rise to become ideal human beings, so the Egyptian initiate worked on his pupils through forces and images of higher spiritual processes. This did not merely have an external effect, but a deep internal effect, resulting in a very specific process.

[ 25 ] Let us imagine a sick person who is ill because certain functions are not working properly. Where does this come from? Those who are occultly trained know that it does not come from outside when the physical body functions irregularly; rather, everything that is present in the form of illness and does not come from outside can be traced back to the fact that the etheric body is not in order. But the etheric body is sick because the astral body is in disorder. Now, if there was a danger in the Atlantean human being that some disorder could arise in the distribution of fluids, then very soon provision was made to restore order. During sleep, the human being received such a force from the spiritual worlds that the disturbed forces and functions were restored through sleep, and the human being recovered. In a sense, he restored his healthy forces by falling asleep. The ancient Egyptian physicians used something similar. They artificially dimmed the patient's consciousness to a kind of hypnotic sleep, and then they were masters of the images of the spirit world that arose around the patient. And they directed these images in such a way that they had the power to act back on the physical body and make it healthy. This was the purpose of temple sleep, which was used for internal illnesses. The sick were not given medicine, but were allowed to sleep in the temple. Their consciousness was dimmed and they were allowed to look into the spiritual worlds. Their astral experiences were then guided in such a way that they had the power to restore health to the body. This is not superstition, it is a secret known to the initiated: that they brought the spiritual into the experiences of the sick. In medicine, which we therefore find so closely connected with the principle of initiation, the Atlantean state was artificially restored during healing. And because the person did not resist through their daytime consciousness, the forces necessary for healing were able to work. This is how temple sleep worked.

[ 26 ] In Egyptian culture, the principle that prevailed in India among the wise Rishis, who themselves directed things, who themselves were the mediators of the planetary forces, the disciples of Manu, the great teacher of the first sublime culture, still prevailed. In the first culture of the post-Atlantean period, it was the rishis who brought that sublime teaching, a teaching that led human beings into high, sublime, spiritual worlds, up to the upper Devachan world. What was seen there was brought down in the following cultural periods to the physical plane, until in the fourth post-Atlantean period the entity sank into the physical plane which we have come to know as the Brahman of the Indian cultural period, which we call Christ, who no longer has the spiritual to impart, but became human himself in order to radiate the mysterious power of the primal word over all human beings.

[ 27 ] Thus, the primal word descended in order to bring human beings back up again. And human beings must understand how this happened in order to form an instrument out of themselves through which they can work in the future. We must learn what has worked before us so that we ourselves can cooperate in the ever higher formation of what is around us.

[ 28 ] We must create a spiritual world in the future. To do this, we must first understand the cosmos.