The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] This lecture cycle will lead us into the high realms of spiritual life, will not only lead us from our earthly dwelling place into the physical worlds of space, but will also lead us up into the spiritual worlds from which the physical world of space originated. But it is precisely a lecture cycle like this that will show you that all knowledge and wisdom is basically aimed at solving the greatest of riddles, the riddle of man. For in order to make man understandable, things must appear far, far-fetched. Now it is indeed necessary that those who want to follow this course be already equipped with some basic concepts of spiritual science, but for the most part all of our honored listeners are. And so we may perhaps take the flight of the Spirit to a particularly high level in this cycle, even though the effort must always be made to make the things appear so far-fetched in order to make them as understandable as possible.

[ 2 ] When we speak of what are called the spiritual hierarchies, it means that our soul's eyes should ascend to those entities that have their existence above that of human beings here on our earth. We can, so to speak, only ascend through entities that represent four levels of a hierarchy: the mineral world, the plant world, the animal world, and the human world. And above the human being begins a world of invisible entities, and through the knowledge of the supersensible, insofar as it is possible for man, it is given to him to ascend a distance to those powers and entities that are the continuation of these four-fold stages within the earth, but in the supersensible, in the invisible world. The knowledge and research that lead us into these areas are, as you all know, not something that has only recently entered human development in our time; there is a — we can call it that — primeval wisdom. For that which man can fathom, what man can know and recognize, what he acquires in concepts and ideas, what he acquires in imaginations and inspirations and intuitions of clairvoyance, all this is, so to speak, only relived by man, and the beings standing above man have lived and known it before. If we may use a trivial comparison, we could say: First the watchmaker has the idea, the thought of the clock, then he makes the clock accordingly. The clock is formed according to the thoughts of the clockmaker that preceded it, and afterwards someone can dissect the clock, analyze it and study which thoughts of the clockmaker originated in this clock. Such a person then reflects on the thoughts of the clockmaker. Only in this way can man, in his present stage of development, behave towards the original world wisdom — the spiritual beings that stand above him. They had them first: the imaginations, the inspirations, the intuitions, the ideas and thoughts, according to which our world, as it presents itself around us, is formed. And man, in turn, finds these thoughts, ideas in this world; and when he elevates himself to clairvoyant vision, he also finds the imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, through which he in turn penetrates into the world of spiritual beings. Therefore we can say: Before there was our world, there was the wisdom of which we are actually speaking. It is the plan of the world.

[ 3 ] So, if we remain within reality, how far back must we go if we want to encounter this primordial wisdom? Do we have to go back to some historical period when this or that great teacher taught? Certainly, we can learn a lot by going back here or there in the historical epochs and becoming disciples of the great teachers. But to encounter the primeval world wisdom in its true, highest form, we have to go back to the time when there was no outer visible earth, no world around us for the senses; for the world arose out of wisdom itself. But this wisdom, according to which the divine-spiritual beings formed our world, was also bestowed upon man afterwards. In his thinking, man was later able to see the thoughts, to perceive the thoughts with which the gods formed the world. And after this primordial wisdom, this wisdom of the creators of the world, had undergone many transformations, it came, in a form known to many of you, after the great Atlantean epoch to the ancient holy rishis of our first post-Atlantean culture, to the great teachers of India.

[ 4 ] This ancient wisdom was present at that time in the great, exalted rishis in a form that present-day humanity can only imagine to a very, very limited extent. For the human powers of thought and feeling have changed a great deal since India's great teachers first taught post-Atlantic humanity; And if much of what was spoken by the holy Rishis were to be spoken today without further ado, most souls today throughout the world would hear little else but words and more words. It requires a different kind of sensitivity than that which humanity currently has, in order to truly understand what came first as wisdom to post-Atlantean humanity. For all that has been recorded of this wisdom, all that has been recorded in the most beautiful and greatest books of this primeval wisdom, is but a faint echo of the primeval wisdom itself. In many respects it is clouded, darkened wisdom. And however beautiful and sublime the Vedas may be, however beautiful the songs of Zarathustra may sound, however gloriously the ancient wisdom of Egypt speaks to us — Everything, which we certainly cannot admire too greatly, that has been written down gives only in a clouded light the great wisdom of Hermes, the great wisdom of Zarathustra or even the sublime knowledge proclaimed by the ancient Rishis. But this exalted wisdom has been preserved for humanity; it has always been available in certain, albeit narrow circles, which guarded the sacred secrets, as these insights are called. In the mysteries of India, Persia, Egypt, Chaldea, in the Christian mysteries and so on up to our time, everything that is the primeval wisdom of mankind has been preserved. Until very recently, it was actually only possible in these narrow circles themselves to hear not book wisdom but living wisdom. For reasons that may become clear in this lecture cycle, our time is marked by an epoch in which what has been preserved in small circles as living wisdom is to be brought out to a greater extent to larger masses of humanity. For it has never dried up, the primeval wisdom of the holy rishis, for example. It has passed through, as through a fountain of youth in time, which we recognize as the beginning of our time. This ancient and sacred wisdom, which flowed to mankind at that time, was continued by Zarathustra and his disciples, by the Chaldean and Egyptian teachers. But it also flowed into the proclamation of Moses, and it emerged anew, as it were, from a fountain of youth, with a completely new impulse through the appearance of Christ on earth. But with that it also became so deep, so inward, that it can only flow into humanity gradually. And so we see that since the times of the Christian proclamation, the original world wisdom has been flowing into humanity slowly and gradually, as a most elementary beginning.

[ 5 ] The messages were there, they are in the Gospels and other Christian scriptures, which contained the wisdom of the holy rishis in a renewed form, as if newly born from the fountain of youth. But how could these messages be understood from the very beginning, especially in the age for whose purification Christianity was created? The very least was understood from the proclamation of the Gospels, and gradually these Gospels only work their way through to a further understanding — or in many respects to a further obscuration. And today the Gospels are basically the books that are still the most sealed for humanity, even in their broadest circles; only a future that can refresh itself with the wisdom of the primeval world will understand them again. But the treasures that lie in the shafts of Christian revelation were preserved — and these are no different from the treasures of Eastern wisdom, but reborn from new forces — and they were again kept in narrower circles, in those narrower circles that then found their continuation in various mystery societies such as the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, and finally in the Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians. There these treasures of truth were kept, accessible only to those who had prepared themselves for the living wisdom through rigorous trials. And so the treasures of wisdom of the East and West were quite inaccessible to the masses of people out in the world for centuries and centuries of development from the beginning of our era. Only a few trickled here and there into the big world; most of it remained a secret of the newer mysteries.

[ 6 ] Then came the time when it was permissible to speak of the content of primeval wisdom in a language that could be understood by the masses. It is the last third of the nineteenth century, for instance, when the wisdom of the Primordial World can be spoken of in a more or less undisguised form. It is only because certain things have just happened in the spiritual worlds that the custodians of the mysteries have been given the opportunity to let some of the wisdom of the Primordial World escape. You all know the course of theosophical development; you know that the ice of theosophical development was first broken, so to speak, by those wisdoms that were revealed in a way that I do not need to describe today, in the so-called stanzas of Dzyan. These stanzas of Dzyan in The Secret Doctrine do indeed contain the most profound and significant wisdom, containing much of what, starting from the teaching of the holy Rishis, flowed down through the wisdoms of the Orient. They also contain much of what then flowed into the European West after the Christian rejuvenation. For not only is such wisdom contained in the stanzas of Dzyan, which would have remained preserved only in the East, but also much that shines in a bright light through the centuries of our era, through the Middle Ages, in the secret schools of the West. And much of what is in the stanzas of Dzyan will only gradually be understood in its depth. For here it may well be said: the stanzas of Dzyan contain such wisdom that it cannot be understood even in the broadest theosophical circles today, and such wisdom that today, with exoteric abilities, it is not even possible to fathom its depths; there is no prospect for any exoteric ability to reveal the foundations of this significant world.

[ 7 ] After the first ice had been broken, the time came when it was permissible to speak from the sources of Western occultism, which is none other than the Eastern one, as it has only continuously propagated itself, taking into account all processes of spiritual and physical life, and where it can also be spoken of as coming from the sources of living occultism, which has been faithfully guarded in the Rosicrucian mysteries. There is no wisdom of the East that has not been incorporated into Western occultism, and in Rosicrucian teaching and research you will find everything that the great sages of the East have ever preserved. Nothing of what can be known from the wisdom of the East is missing in the wisdom of the West. The only difference, if one wants to speak of such a difference, is that the wisdom of the West has to take the entire Eastern teaching, the entire Eastern wisdom, the entire Eastern research, and, without letting anything of it be lost, has to illuminate it with the light that has been kindled in humanity through the Christ Impuls e. So let no man say, when Western occultism is spoken of, that it is in any way not derived from the hidden Rishis of the West, who, to be sure, are not seen by the eyes of the physical body. Let no man say that it lacks even one iota, one tidbit, of Eastern occultism. Nothing, absolutely nothing is missing. He has only to bring forth all things anew from the fountain of youth of the Christ impulse. All the great wisdom that first sounded from the mouths of the holy rishis to mankind about the superhuman worlds, about the supersensible existence, must in turn resound in what is to be said about the spiritual hierarchies and their shading in the physical world. Just as the geometry of the ancient Euclid has not changed, despite being taught and learned with the newer human faculties, so the wisdom of the holy Rishis has not changed, despite being taught and learned with the faculties kindled by the Christ Impulse. Thus, we could easily call a large part of what we have to say about the spiritual worlds Eastern wisdom. For in these matters there must be no misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding lies so close.

[ 8 ] Those who do not wish to advance from misunderstanding to understanding can very easily misunderstand something that was said yesterday in the Easter Festival Lecture, for example. There could be — we have to mention this for our understanding — those who do not want to advance to full understanding and could say: Yesterday you spoke of the great so-called sacred truths of the Buddha. You said that the Buddha taught and revealed the sacred truths of suffering in life: birth is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering, being separated from what one loves is suffering, being united with what one does not love is suffering, not receiving what one desires is suffering. And you, so some might say, told us yesterday: Let us look at those who really understood the Christ impulse in the post-Christian era — and realize that through the understanding and penetration of this Christ impulse, the old sacred truths of the Buddha about the suffering of life would no longer be fully valid, that with the Christ impulse something has been created as a remedy against the life's suffering. You said that someone might say, the Buddha teaches: birth is suffering; but the ones who understand Christ answer: through birth we enter into a life that we share with Christ, and through this sharing in Christ, the suffering of life is extinguished; in the same way, through the healing power of the Christ impulse, illness is extinguished, and illness is no longer suffering for one who understands Christ, and death is no longer suffering for the one who understands Christ, and so on. But then someone might reply: Yes, but I can show you from the Gospels that the same sentences appear in the Gospels as in the holy scriptures of Buddha; and we can also show from the Gospels that it says: Life is suffering, illness is suffering, and so on. And so, on the surface, one could say: Now we have these modern religious documents, but we already find their content in Buddhism, so there is no progress in religion, no development; all religions contain the same things. But you spoke of progress, you showed how, so to speak, the old sacred truths of Buddhism are no longer supposed to be true through Christianity. But anyone who speaks in this way would only express the most terrible misunderstanding. For that was not said; everything, absolutely everything except the last sentence was said. And it is important that one understands this subtle nuance quite exactly. The fanatic can never understand exactly; only the objective man can understand exactly.

[ 9 ] Never will it be said by any one speaking from the source of Rosicrucian wisdom and research that anything is to be opposed in the writings of the great Buddha, that anything is not true in the writings of the great Buddha. Everyone who speaks from the source of Rosicrucianism shares the conviction of Buddha and of all Eastern wisdom; none of it is denied. He says: Yes, what you, great Buddha, have seen through your enlightenment within of the great truths of the suffering of life, is completely true; it is true down to the last tidbit and iota. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is taken from it. Everything remains. And precisely because everything remains, because it is true what Buddha said, that birth is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering, and so on, that is why the Christ Impulse is that mighty and important remedy – because it is He who abolishes this suffering, because it is indeed true that suffering exists if a great impulse does not lift the world above it. Why did Christ work? Because Buddha spoke the truth. Humanity had to be led down from spiritual heights, where the primeval wisdom of the world had worked in a pure form; humanity had to be led to independence, down into physical existence, and with that, life became suffering and illness became suffering; but in the same way, in the further development, the great remedy had to come against these incontrovertible facts. He who says, “Yes, it is true what is said about this reality,” denies any reality. But at the same time we are given the remedy to bring the facts expressed by these truths to a healthy development. Oh, in the heights of existence, where we must seek them, the spheres of the spiritual hierarchies, it is not: Buddhism against Christianity, Christianity against Buddhism, there the Buddha extends his hand to the Christ and the Christ to the Buddha. But any misunderstanding of human development, any misunderstanding of the ascent, is at the same time a misunderstanding of the most spiritual deed that has taken place in our earthly development, the Christ deed. And so there will be nothing that would be negated by the wisdom of the East, which has brought down the wisdom of the holy rishis over such long periods of time and thus the primeval world wisdom. But in these long, long periods of time in which wisdom has always flowed into humanity, it became difficult, so to speak, for the great masses of people who were not able to penetrate to the sources of the sacred mysteries to understand these wisdoms. It was precisely this understanding that became difficult.

[ 10 ] Oh, in the pre-Atlantic times, in the times before the great catastrophe, when the great masses of people were still clairvoyant, in old, dull clairvoyance , looked up to the spiritual hierarchies, they saw differently than later in the post-Atlantic times, when the old clairvoyance had disappeared for the masses of people and only the physical eye could see into the physical reaches of heaven! Therefore, it would not have made sense to speak in the time before the Atlantic catastrophe of those celestial bodies that are now distributed in space. The clairvoyant human eye saw into the far reaches of the heavens, and these were spiritual worlds. It would have been pointless to speak in those days of Mercury or Neptune or Saturn and so on, as our astronomy does; for just as our astronomy speaks of space and its contents, it only reflects what the physical eye sees when it looks up into the heavens. This was not at all the case in Atlantean times with the old clairvoyant human race; when they looked up, they did not see physically limited stars of light at all. What the physical eye sees today is, so to speak, only an external expression of what the clairvoyant saw in those days. Today, when the physical eye looks up, for example through a telescope, to where Jupiter is located, it sees, so to speak, a physical globe surrounded by its moons. Such is the physical eye today. What was it for the man of the old Atlantean time when he raised his still clairvoyant eye to the same point where today man's physical eye looks? What the physical eye sees, the old Atlantean eye would have seen just as little as today your physical eye sees the single light when it looks into a dense autumn fog. It sees something like a nebulous aura around the light, and the light disappears in the colored rings around the light. Likewise, the eye of the Atlantean would not have seen the physical star Jupiter, but it would have seen what is also connected with Jupiter today, but which only people cannot see: the aura of Jupiter, a sum of spiritual beings for which the physical Jupiter is only the expression. And so the spiritual eye of man wandered around in the cosmic spaces before the Atlantic catastrophe, seeing spiritual beings everywhere. One could only speak of this spiritual, because it would have been senseless at that time, when the physical eye was not yet as open as it is today, to speak of physical stars. One looked out into the cosmic space and saw spiritual beings, spiritual hierarchies. One saw spiritual beings.

[ 11 ] And in the further development it was so that we can compare it again with the following: We imagine stepping out into dense fog. We do not see the individual lights. Everything is shrouded in this nebula aura. Then the fog parts, and the individual lights become physically visible. But the auras are invisible. This is only a physical process that is intended for comparison. With Jupiter, however, the old eye saw the aura. It saw the spiritual entities in the aura that belonged to Jupiter from a certain stage of development. Humanity then developed physical vision. The aura remained. People could no longer see it, but the physical body became clearer and clearer; what belongs to it spiritually was lost, and what is physical about it became visible. And the knowledge of these spiritual beings around the stars, the knowledge of those entities that are around the stars, was preserved in the sacred mysteries. All the holy Rishis speak of this knowledge. In times when people already saw only physically, the holy Rishis spoke of the spiritual atmospheres, of the spiritual inhabitants of these globes that are distributed in space.

[ 12 ] And now take the situation that arose. In the seats of knowledge, people spoke of the spiritual beings around the world globes. Outside, where the sensory eye became sharper and sharper, outside, people spoke more and more only of dense physical matter. If the ancient holy Rishis had spoken the word Mercury – which they did not speak, but let's take the word so that we can communicate – did they then mean this physical world body? No, not even the ancient Greeks, when they spoke of Mercury, meant this physical body, but the totality of the spiritual entities of this body. It was spiritual worlds, spiritual entities that were spoken of when one uttered the word Mercury in the places of knowledge. Those who were the disciples of the teachers of the places of knowledge spoke the words: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and by pronouncing such words in the different languages, they designated a hierarchy of spiritual beings. Those who pronounce the word in today's way and refer to a physical body, only refer to the coarsest aspect of what was originally understood by Moon, Mercury, Venus and so on. He does not describe the main thing. Thus the old teacher of wisdom said “Moon”, and with this word he conjured up the idea of a great spiritual world. And when he pronounced the word “moon” and pointed to the place in the sky where the moon is, and in his consciousness had: “There is the lowest level of spiritual hierarchies” - then the one who, through the ever-increasing sensuality of humanity, had distanced himself from this spiritual view, looked up, but saw the physical moon and called it “moon”. One word for two things that certainly belonged together, but which evoke very different ideas in people. And it was the same when the sages of the seats of knowledge looked up to Mercury, the Sun, Mars and so on. The spiritual current used words to describe something completely different from the other, the material current.

[ 13 ] Thus we see that the two currents diverged more and more in humanity. In the mysteries, these words, which then became the designations of our outer world bodies, were always understood to mean spiritual worlds, sequences of spiritual worlds. The outer world has always understood it in a material sense, except for our present-day mythology – I consciously use the word – which is called modern astronomy. Since spiritual science has recognized the full value of the other mythologies, you will understand that modern mythology is also appreciated by spiritual science – up to the mythology that is called modern astronomy, which only sees space and physical globes in it. But for the one who recognizes, this modern mythology is nothing more than a special phase of all mythologies. There is a straight line running from what the ancient inhabitants of Europe said in their legends about the gods, stars and worlds, from what the Greeks and Romans gave in their mythologies, from what the Middle Ages gave in their more or less distorted mythologies, right up to the mythology that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo founded, which is fully adequate and fully justified to be admired. A time will come when people will speak of this modern mythology somewhat like this: There were once people who thought it right to place a material sun at the center of an ellipse, to let planets revolve around it in ellipses, to let them rotate in different ways; they constructed a world system for themselves just as earlier times did. Today, a future time will speak, of course, all this is only legend and fairy tale. Yes, that time will also come, however much the modern age despises the old mythologies and swears by its own, and however impossible it may seem to speak of a Copernican mythology. But that will make it all the more understandable to us, as, so to speak, different and different things were always imagined with the words. Nevertheless, what is primeval world wisdom was passed on and continued over and over again. Only this primeval world wisdom was less and less understood exoterically because it was interpreted and explained in a more material way, because the spiritual aspect was less recognized. And so it came about that, in order not to let humanity lose touch with the original spiritual wisdom, so to speak, when the ancient world wisdom was rejuvenated at the beginning of our era, it had to be pointed out in no uncertain terms that where the human eye is directed and, as a physical eye, only sees the physical, there is spiritual filling space spiritually. And so, with the most emphatic words, the one who was the most intimate disciple of the Apostle Paul, pointed this out in Athens, as Dionysius the Areopagite did in Athens: There is not only material substance out there in space; there is, when the human soul ascends intuitively into the spaces of world existence, spiritual substance out there in the world that stands above man in the evolution of existence. And now he used words that had to be different, for if he had used the old words, no one would have seen anything in them but the material. The Rishis spoke of the spiritual hierarchies, and in their words they expressed what was also expressed in the wisdom of Greece and Rome when they spoke of the world of the moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, which arose before theirs. Dionysius, the disciple of the Apostle Paul, had the same worlds in mind as the Rishis; only he emphasized sharply that one is dealing with spiritual realities, and he used words that he was sure would be taken spiritually: He spoke of angels, archangels, elemental forces, powers, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim. And now, once again, people have forgotten, truly forgotten, what humanity once knew. If one could have understood in context what Dionysius the Areopagite and the ancient holy Rishis saw, then one would have heard, so to speak, the moon being named from one side, and the world of the angels being named from the other mysteries, and one would have known: this is the same. One would have heard the word Mercury from one side and from the other the word Archangel and would have known: This is the same. One would have heard the word Archai on one side and the word Venus on the other, and one would have known: This is the same. One would have heard the word Sun on one side and Powers on the other and would have known: These words describe the same worlds. If one had heard the word Mars on one side, one would have felt: Here one ascends to the powers. If one had heard the word Jupiter on one side, it would have been the same as what was posted in the school of Dionysius when there was talk of dominions. The word Saturn corresponds here to the word Thrones.

[ 14 ] But in wider circles, they no longer knew it, could no longer know it. On the one hand, there was a material science that became more and more material and retained the old names, which had once also meant spiritual, for the material. And on the other hand, there was a spiritual life that spoke of spiritual beings, of archangels, angels and so on, and that had lost the connection with the physical expressions of these spiritual beings. And so we see how primeval wisdom penetrates into the school that Paul had founded through Dionysius, and how it is only a matter of permeating the newly founded school with the old spiritual spirit. But that is the task of modern spiritual science or anthroposophy, to draw the bond that should exist between the physical and the spiritual, between the world, the earth and the spiritual hierarchies. It is incomprehensible to those who do not know where the ideas about the external sensory world actually come from; it is incomprehensible for them to recognize the other side, the spiritual side of knowledge.

[ 1 5 ] This becomes particularly striking when we approach those writings that have emerged from the ancient world wisdoms and which, although they contain a faint echo, can only be truly understood from this ancient world wisdom. Let us cite as an example, with regard to the difficulty of understanding those scriptures that emerged from the primeval wisdom, a passage from the Divine Song, the Bhagavad Gita, a passage that sheds a meaningful light on human life in its connection with the hierarchies. This passage from the Bhagavad Gita, which is found in Chapter 8, beginning with verse 23, reads: “I will explain to you, O truth-seeking man” - this is how it is usually translated - “under what circumstances the God-fearing, when they leave the earth through the gate of death, go to be reborn or not. I will tell you: see fire, see day, see the time of the waxing moon, see the half-year when the sun is high. Those who die at the time of dying in the fire, in the day, in the time of the waxing moon, the high sun, enter through the gate of death into Brahma; but those who die in the sign of the smoke, at night, in the time of the waning moon, in the half-year when the sun is low go, when they depart from the world, through the gate of death only into the light of the moon and return again to this world.

[ 16 ] My dear friends, here you have a passage in the Bhagavad Gita that tells you: The way of man's progress, his rebirth, depends on whether he dies in the sign of light, in the day, in the waxing moon, in the half-year when the sun is high, or whether he dies in the sign of smoke, in the night, when the moon is waning or when the sun is low. That is said, that is the material sense. And of those who enter through the gate of death in the sign of fire, by day, in the waxing moon, when the sun is high, it is said of them that they need not return. Of the others who die in the sign of smoke, at night, when the moon is waning or in the half-year when the sun is low in the sky, it is said of them that they cannot ascend to the heights of Brahma, but only to the height of the moon and must return. There is a passage in the Divine Song of the East which presents the greatest difficulties to all, or almost all, who would explain it within the exoteric life. It can only be explained when it is illuminated with the light of spiritual knowledge, with the light from which it was originally written, with the light that shines in the secret schools, that is passed on, that has experienced its rejuvenation through Christianity, when it is illuminated with the light that allows us to find the connection to the names: Moon – Angel, Mercury – Archangel, Venus – Archai, and so on. And we shall find the key to such passages. Let us choose this one passage as an example of what happens when we place it in the old spiritual light. Our consideration this evening shall start with the explanation of this passage in the divine song, with the explanation of this passage in the Bhagavad Gita, which is impossible in the exoteric life, and then, having found the key, we shall ascend into the spiritual hierarchies.