The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] In our last reflections, we allowed a number of facts concerning the evolution of humanity to pass before our minds in detail. I have attempted to show how human beings developed during that period of Earth's evolution which extends approximately from the moment when the sun emerged from the earth until the time when the moon also left the earth. There is still something to add to these facts, which we can call facts of occult anatomy and physiology. But in order to understand everything correctly, we must now shed some light on a few other facts of spiritual life, for we must not forget that the aim is actually to show the relationship between the Egyptian myths and mysteries, and indeed between the entire Egyptian cultural period and our own time. It is therefore necessary for us to be completely clear about how development continues through the various epochs.

[ 2 ] Let us once again consider what has been described as the effect of the sun and moon spirits, namely the Osiris and Isis forces, through whose effects the human body first came into being and was built up. Let us consider that this happened in a distant past, when our Earth had barely crystallized out of the watery Earth, and that a large part of what has been described actually took place in this watery Earth. At that time, human beings existed in a state that should once become quite clear to our souls, so that we may gain a clear understanding of what human vision itself was like during the course of human evolution on Earth.

[ 3 ] I have described how the lower limbs of the human being, the feet, lower legs, knees, and so on, arose as physical forms, so to speak, from the moment the sun began to move out of the earth. But we must remember that it has always been said that all this would have been visible if a human eye had been there to see it. But there was no such eye. It only came into being much later. While the human being was still in the watery earth, he perceived exclusively with the organ that has been described as the pineal gland. Perception with the physical eye only came about when the middle of the human hips had formed. One can therefore say that the lower part of the human form was already present in the human being, but there was nothing in the human being that could have seen the human body. At that time, humans could not see themselves. Humans only gained the ability to see their own being when their body, forming from below, had passed the middle of the hips. When it was formed up to the sign of Libra, the human eye was opened; then humans began to see themselves in a misty form. Only then did the ability to see objects develop. Thus, until this development of the middle of the hips, all human perception, all seeing, was clairvoyant, astral-etheric seeing. At that time, human beings could not yet perceive the physical, for human consciousness was still dull, dim, but clairvoyant, dreamlike-clairvoyant.

[ 4 ] And then human beings passed over into the state of consciousness where sleeping and waking alternated. When awake, human beings saw dimly what was physical, but as if shrouded in mist and surrounded by an aura of light. In sleep, however, man rose to the spiritual worlds and to the divine-spiritual beings. His state of consciousness alternated between a clairvoyant consciousness, which became weaker and weaker, and the daytime consciousness, the ever brighter and brighter object consciousness, which is the main consciousness today. At that time, the ability of clairvoyant perception gradually disappeared, and with it, increasingly, the ability to see the gods in sleep. And to the same extent, the clarity of daytime consciousness set in, and with it, self-consciousness, the sense of “I,” and self-perception became stronger and stronger.

[ 5 ] When we look back to the Lemurian epoch, to the time before, during, and after the Moon left the Earth, we first see a clairvoyant consciousness in human beings, who had no inkling of what we now call death. For when human beings left their physical bodies at that time, whether through sleep or death, when they wandered out, their consciousness did not sink, but they even attained a higher, more spiritual consciousness in a certain relationship than when they were in their physical bodies. At that time, human beings never said to themselves: I am now dying — or: I am falling unconscious — that did not exist in those days. Human beings did not yet build on their own sense of self, but they felt themselves to be immortal in the bosom of the Godhead, and they knew everything we describe today as self-evident facts.

[ 6 ] Let us imagine the following. Let us imagine that we lay down to sleep, the astral body moved out of the physical body, and all this happened during a full moon. So we have the physical body with the etheric body lying in bed, the astral body floating above it, and all this in the light of the full moon. Now, the situation is not such that an astral cloud simply becomes visible to the clairvoyant, but rather he actually sees currents flowing from the astral body into the physical body, and these currents are the forces that remove fatigue during the night and provide the physical body with compensation for the wear and tear of the day, so that it feels refreshed and invigorated. At the same time, however, one would see spiritual currents emanating from the moon, and these currents permeate astral forces. One would see how spiritual influences actually emanate from the moon, permeating and strengthening the astral body and influencing its activity on the physical body.

[ 7 ] Let us assume that we were now people of the ancient Lemurian time. Then the astral body would have perceived this inflow of spiritual forces, would have looked up and said: That is Osiris who is strengthening me, who is working on me; I see how his effect is passing through me. And we would have felt safe during the night in Osiris; we would have lived, so to speak, with our ego in Osiris. We would have felt that I and Osiris are one. If we had been able to put into words what we felt at that time, we would have characterized it something like this when we returned to the physical body: Now I must go back down into the physical body that is waiting for me down there; this is a time when I submerge myself in my lower nature—and we would have looked forward to the time when we could leave the physical body again and ascend and rest in the bosom of Osiris or in the bosom of Isis, where we would reunite our selves with Osiris.

[ 8 ] The more the physical body developed, the more it attached itself from below, and the more, after the development of the upper limbs, the human being was able to see physically, the more the human being was able to perceive the objects in the physical world around him, the longer the human being had to remain when he immersed himself in his physical body, the more interest he gained in the physical world, the darker his consciousness of the spiritual world became, the clearer his consciousness in the physical body became, and the more he became estranged from the spiritual world. Thus, human life developed more and more in the physical world, and in the states between death and a new birth, consciousness became darker and darker. During the Atlantean period, human beings increasingly lost their sense of belonging to the gods, and when the great catastrophe was over, a large part of humanity had completely lost the natural ability to see into the spiritual world during the night. Instead, they gained the ability to see more and more clearly during the day, so that the objects around them gradually appeared in clearer outlines. It has already been pointed out that the gift of clairvoyance was still preserved among those humans who had remained behind while the post-Atlantean cultures developed. Until the time when Christianity was founded, there were still stragglers of this clairvoyance, and even today there are still people, albeit very few, who have retained this clairvoyance as a natural gift, but it is a completely different clairvoyance from that gained through esoteric training.

[ 9 ] In Atlantis, therefore, night gradually became dark for human beings, while daytime consciousness began to brighten. Night became unconscious for the people of the first post-Atlantean culture, which we have tried to characterize in all its greatness, in the spirituality that came in through the holy Rishis, whom we have brought before our souls in the previous lectures, and which we must now characterize from another side.

[ 10 ] Let us place ourselves in the souls of the disciples of the holy rishis, in the souls of the people of Indian culture in general, let us say in the time immediately after the last traces of the great Atlantean water catastrophes had disappeared. It still lived there in the soul as a kind of memory, a memory of the old world, of that world where man experienced the gods working in his body and had seen how Osiris and Isis were active in him. Now he was out of that world, out of the bosom of the gods. Formerly, all that was there for him, just as the physical is there for him today. Like a memory, it passed through the mind of the Indian man who belonged to the first post-Atlantean culture, through the mind of the Indian man to whom the Rishis could still tell how it really was, for he knew that the Rishis and their disciples could see into the spiritual world. But he also knew that for normal people, for members of Indian culture, the times when they could look into the spiritual world were over.

[ 11 ] Like a memory, like a painful memory of the old, true homeland, it passed through the soul of the old Indian as he saw himself transported into the physical world, which is only the outer shell of the spiritual world, and he longed to escape from this outer world. And he felt: The mountains are untrue, the valleys are untrue, the clouds in the air are untrue, even the starry sky is untrue, everything is only like a shell, like a physiognomy of the being. And the truth that lies behind it, the gods and the true form of man, we cannot see. What we see is Maya, is untrue; the truth is veiled. And this feeling became ever more vivid, that man, who sprang from truth, has his home in the spiritual; that the sensual is untrue, is Maya, that the physical world of the senses clouded him.

[ 12 ] Those who feel so strongly the contrast between the spiritual and the untrue physical will lose interest in the physical world and increasingly turn their minds to what the initiated see and what the holy rishis can tell us about it. The Indian longed to escape from this reality, from the harsh reality that was nothing but an illusion to him. For the true is not what the senses perceive; he felt the true only behind it. And the first post-Atlantean cultural period took little interest in what happened outwardly on the physical plane.

[ 13 ] It was different in the second cultural period, among the Persians, from which Zarathustra, the great disciple of Manu, emerged. If we want to characterize in a few strokes what the transition from Indian to Persian culture consisted of, we can say: The member of the Persian culture did not feel the physical merely as a coincidence, he felt it as a task. They still looked up to the regions of light, they looked up to the spiritual worlds, but they turned their gaze back to the physical world, and before their souls stood everything as it was divided into the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The physical world became a field of work for them. The Persian said to himself: There is the good light, the deity Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, and there are the dark forces under the leadership of Angramainyush or Ahriman. From Ahura Mazdao comes the salvation of mankind, from Ahriman the physical world. We must transform what comes from Ahriman, we must connect ourselves with the good gods and defeat Ahriman, the evil god in matter, by transforming the earth, by becoming beings who can work the earth. By defeating Ahriman in this way, we make the earth a means for good. The first step toward redeeming the earth was taken by the members of the Persian culture, and they had the hope that the earth would one day be a good planet, that it would be redeemed, and that the glorification of Ahura Mazdao, the highest being, would come about.

[ 14 ] This was the feeling of those who did not see the sublime heights like the Indians, but who had their feet firmly planted on this physical world. But this was not the thinking of the members of the Indian culture, who lost the solid ground beneath their feet.

[ 15 ] And the conquest of the physical plane continued in the third stage of culture, in the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean culture. There was hardly anything left of the ancient aversion with which the physical world was felt as Maya. The Chaldeans looked up at the starry sky, and the light of the stars was not merely Maya for them, but the characters that the gods had imprinted on the physical plane. And on the paths of the stars, the Chaldean priest-wise man traced the way back to the spiritual worlds, and when he was initiated, when he got to know all the beings who inhabited the planets and the stars, he raised his eyes and said to himself: What I see with my eyes when I raise my gaze to the starry sky is the outer expression of what occult vision, initiation, gives me. When the initiating priest grants me the grace of seeing God, then I see God. But everything external that I see is not merely illusion; in it I see the writing of the gods.

[ 16 ] This is how such an initiate felt, as we feel when we are facing a friend, then separated from each other for a long time, and then receive a letter from him and see the letters of the distant friend before us. We see that it was his hand that formed these letters, we perceive the feelings of the heart that are expressed in them. This is roughly how the Chaldean and Egyptian initiates felt who were initiated into the sacred mysteries and who, while in the mystery temple, saw with their spiritual eyes the spiritual beings connected with our earth. And when he saw all this and then went outside and saw the world of the stars, it seemed to him like a letter from the spiritual beings. He heard the writing of the gods when the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled; in the stormy wind he heard a revelation from the gods. The gods had manifested themselves to him in everything he saw externally. Just as we feel about a letter from a friend, so he felt about the external world, so he felt when he saw the world of the elements, the world of plants, animals, mountains, the world of clouds, the world of stars. All of this was deciphered as a divine writing.

[ 17 ] And because the Egyptians trusted in the laws that man could find in the physical world, through which man can control matter, geometry and mathematics arose. With their help, man was able to control the elements because he trusted in what his mind could find, because he believed that the spirit could be imprinted on matter. This enabled them to build the pyramids, the temples, and the sphinxes. This was a huge step toward conquering the physical plane, which was accomplished in this third cultural period. And with that, humans had finally come to truly respect the physical plane; the physical world had now become something real to them. But what kind of teachers had they needed before?

[ 18 ] Previously, human beings had needed teachers; even the initiates needed teachers, let us say in ancient Indian times. What kind of teachers did the initiates need? It was necessary for the initiate to be artificially guided to see again, in the states of initiation, what human beings had previously been able to see in their dull clairvoyant consciousness. The initiate had to be led back. He had to be led back up into the spiritual world, into his former spiritual home, so that he could convey to others what he had experienced. For this he needed teachers. Thus the disciples of the Rishis needed teachers who showed them what happened in ancient Lemuria, what happened in ancient Atlantis when human beings were still clairvoyant. And it was the same with the Persians.

[ 19 ] It was different with the Chaldeans, and especially with the Egyptians. Oh, there were teachers there too who helped their students develop their powers so that they could see into the spiritual world behind the physical world through clairvoyance. These were the initiators who showed what lies behind the physical. But a new teaching, a completely new method, became necessary in Egypt. In ancient India, little attention had been paid to how what goes on in the spiritual world is inscribed in the physical plan, to the correspondence between gods and humans; little attention had been paid to this. In Egypt, however, something else was needed: not only that the student saw the gods through initiation, but also how they moved their hands to write the star script, how all physical forms had developed. The ancient Egyptians had schools, very much like those of the Indians, but they also learned how spiritual forces correspond with the physical world. Now they had a new subject to teach. In India, the student would have been taught about spiritual forces through clairvoyance; in Egypt, they also showed what physically corresponds to spiritual acts. They showed which spiritual work corresponds to each part of the physical body; for example, they taught how the heart corresponds to spiritual work. And the founder of the school, through which not only the spiritual was shown, but also its work on the physical, the founder of this school was the great initiator Hermes Trismegistos. Thus, in him, the thrice-great Thoth, we see the first who showed human beings the entire physical world as a writing of the gods. Thus we see, piece by piece, our post-Atlantean cultures incorporating their impulses into the evolution of humanity. Hermes appeared to the Egyptians as a divine messenger. He gave them what had to be deciphered as the deeds of the gods in the physical world.

[ 20 ] With this we have characterized a little the three cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean time. People had learned to appreciate the physical plane.

[ 21 ] The fourth cultural period, the Greco-Latin period, is the epoch in which human beings come into even closer contact with the physical plane. During this period, human beings progress to the point where they not only see the writing of the gods in the physical world, but also place their own selves, their spiritual individuality, in the objective world. Artistic creations such as those in Greece did not exist before. The fact that humans expressed themselves outside themselves in sculpture and pictorial works, that they created something like their physical selves in these works, was achieved in the fourth cultural period.

[ 22 ] During this period, we see the inner, spiritual essence of human beings emerge from within them onto the physical plane and flow into matter. We see this union between the spiritual and the material in its purest form in the Greek temple. For anyone who can look back on it, this temple is a marvelous work of art. Greek architecture is archetypal architecture. Every art has its peak somewhere. Architecture reached its peak here. Sculpture and painting also reached their peak somewhere. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most wonderful thing in architecture was created in the Greek temple. For what has been achieved in it?

[ 23 ] Those who have an artistic sense of space, that is, who can perceive how a horizontal line relates to a vertical line, may feel a faint echo of this. And a whole sum of cosmic truths comes to life in the soul, which can merely feel how the column supports what lies above it. One must be able to feel that all these lines already exist invisibly in space. The Greek artist saw the column as if with clairvoyance and added only matter to what he saw. He saw space as pure life, he saw it permeated by living forces. How could modern man even begin to understand the vitality of this sense of space?

[ 24 ] We can see a faint echo of this in the old painters. We can still see depictions where, for example, angels are seen floating in space, and we have the feeling that the angels are holding each other up. Little of this feeling of space remains today. I have no objection to Böcklin's use of color, but he lacks any occult sense of space. A being such as the one above his Pietà — one does not know whether it is meant to be an angel or some other creature — must inevitably give the viewer the feeling that it is about to fall down onto the group below. This must be emphasized if one wants to point out something that is difficult to imagine today: the Greek sense of space, which must be expressly emphasized as being of an occult nature. A Greek temple was something as if the space had been born from its own lines. The result of this was that divine beings, whom the Greeks knew as clairvoyants, for whom the temple was built, really did descend into the temple and really felt at home there. And it is true: Pallas Athena, Zeus, and so on were really inside the temples; they had their bodies, their material bodies, in these temples. For since such beings could only incarnate themselves in an etheric body, they found in these temples a real dwelling place in the physical world. Their physical body could become such a temple in which their etheric body felt at home.

[ 25 ] Anyone who understands the Greek temple knows that it differs significantly from a Gothic cathedral. This is not meant as a criticism of Gothic architecture, for the Gothic cathedral is also a sublime work of art. But anyone who looks into things can well imagine that a Greek temple, even when it stands there in its solitude, when there is no one far and wide, when it is completely alone, stands there as a whole. A Greek temple is complete even when no one is praying inside it. It is not soulless, it is not empty, for God is in it, it is inhabited by God.

[ 26 ] But a Gothic cathedral is only half complete, it is not complete when there are no believers, no worshippers inside. Those who understand this cannot imagine the Gothic cathedral as standing there lonely, alone, without the faithful crowd moving into it with their thoughts. And all the Gothic forms and decorations belong to what emanates from it. No God, no spiritual being is present in the Gothic cathedral unless the prayers of the faithful are within it. Only when the praying congregation is gathered is it filled with the divine. This is expressed in the word “cathedral,” which is related to the German word “tum” in “Deutschtum” (German spirit) and “Volkstum” (folk spirit), which always has a collective meaning, and the word “duma” is even related to it. The Greek temple is not a house of the faithful. It is shaped like a house inhabited by God himself; it can stand alone. In the Gothic cathedral, however, one only felt at home when the faithful crowd filled it, when the devout congregation was gathered, when the sunlight shone through the colored window panes and the colors split on the fine dust particles, and then, as often happened, the preacher in the pulpit said: Just as light splits into many colors, so too does the one spiritual light, the divine power, divide itself among the multitude of souls and into the many forces of the physical plane. The preacher often said something like this. When perception and spiritual experience flowed together in this way, the cathedral was something complete.

[ 27 ] As it was with the great temple buildings, so it was in all artistic endeavors among the Greeks. The marble of their sculptures took on the appearance of living beings; the Greeks expressed in the physical realm what lived in their spiritual realm; a marriage of the spiritual and the physical existed among the Greeks.

[ 28 ] The Romans, however, went one step further in conquering the physical plane. The Greeks had the ability to bring the soul and spirit into their works of art, but they still felt themselves to be members of a whole, the polis, the city-state; they did not yet feel themselves to be individuals. This was also the case in earlier cultures: the Egyptians did not feel themselves to be individual human beings, they felt themselves to be Egyptians, members of a people. In Greece, too, we find that people did not attach any importance to feeling themselves to be human beings, but that their highest pride was in being a Spartan or an Athenian. Being a personality, being something in the world, was felt for the first time by the Romans.

[ 29 ] That a personality is something in itself only became true for the Romans. The Romans invented the concept of “citizen,” which gave rise to the foundation for jurisprudence, the law, which has rightly been called a Roman invention. Only today's lawyers, who have no idea about these facts, have had the bad taste to say that there was already a law in this sense before. People talk nonsense when they refer to Oriental lawgivers such as Hammurabi. There were no legal precepts before; there were only divine commandments. One would have to use harsh words if one wanted to speak objectively about this science; one would have to use terribly harsh words if one wanted to be fair, and any criticism is merely pitying criticism. The concept of the citizen was only truly understood in ancient Rome. There, man had brought the spiritual into the physical world to the point of his own individuality. In ancient Rome, the will was first invented; there, the will of the individual personality became so strong that it could even determine what should happen to its possessions, its property, after death. Now the individual, personal human being was to be decisive. In doing so, man had brought the spiritual down to the physical plane in his own individuality. That was the lowest point of development.

[ 30 ] Man stood at the highest point in Indian culture. The Indian still hovered at a spiritual height, at the highest point. In the second culture, the ancient Persian culture, man had already begun to descend. In the third culture, the Egyptian culture, he descended even further. In the fourth culture, human beings descended completely to the physical plane, into matter. There was a point where human beings stood at a crossroads; either they could descend deeper and deeper, or they had to gain the opportunity at the lowest point to work their way back up again, to return to the spiritual world. But for this to happen, a spiritual impulse had to come to the physical plane itself, a powerful jolt that could lead humans back to the spiritual world. This powerful jolt was provided by the appearance of Christ Jesus on Earth. The divine-spiritual Christ had to come to humans in a physical human body, had to go through physical appearance in the physical world. Now that human beings were completely in the physical world, God had to descend to them so that they could find their way back to the spiritual world. This would not have been possible before. Today we have traced the development of the cultures of the post-Atlantean period to their lowest point; we have seen how the spiritual impulse came through Christ at the lowest point. Now human beings must ascend again, spiritualized and permeated by the Christ principle. We will thus see how, for example, Egyptian culture reappears in our time, but permeated by the Christ principle.