The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ 1 ] In addition to the question posed at the end of the previous lecture, there would probably be a lot more to say on the subject of our lectures, but it is simply not possible to talk exhaustively about all our worlds in ten lectures. Therefore, before I move on to our question, please allow me to make a few more comments, which in a sense will also be related to our final consideration. The first comment I have to make is something that is difficult for a present consciousness to understand, one might even say, not at all. But it is good to know that something like this exists. The question is: how do these planetary formations actually disappear? In the spiritual realm, it is clear to you how evolution takes place: the beings ascend to higher levels, and in ascending they must leave the old arena, the old dwelling place, which has served them for a while to develop certain abilities that they would not otherwise have been able to develop. When, in the course of evolution, the time we call the old Lemurian time approached, man had progressed so far in the course of his overall development that he had repeated everything that could be achieved through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. Now he appeared in our Earth evolution, which had only just formed for his further development. He developed through the Lemurian and Atlantean periods into our time, and he will develop into the future as we know it, progressing from incarnation to incarnation. But after some time he will have to leave the earth again because it will have nothing more to give him, because it will no longer offer him any opportunities for development. Now you could imagine that our earth would become a desolate heap of rubble, so to speak, when man leaves it; you could compare it to a city being abandoned by its entire population. You know what such a city looks like after a short time, how it gradually becomes a kind of mound of earth. The sight of old cities being absorbed by the soil, so to speak, provides a sufficient picture of this. This is indeed the case today. But it will not be so in the future of the earth. The following observation can lead us to an answer to the question of what will happen to the earth in the future: What do people like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael or other great geniuses in this or that field actually mean for the development of the earth? What does it mean for the development of the earth that Raphael or Michelangelo produced those wonderful works of art that still delight thousands upon thousands of people today? But perhaps one or other of you, my dear friends, has felt a certain melancholy when looking at Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, when he had to ask himself in front of the painting in Milan how long it will last with this miracle of Leonardo da Vinci. For one should not forget that, for example, Goethe was still able to see this work of art in its full glory on his first Italian journey and that we can no longer do so to the same extent. So since Goethe's time until today, this work of art has come to be within the external material world that it evokes this wistful feeling. It will no longer even be there for people who live so much later after us as we do after Goethe. This is the case with everything that people create on earth and that is embodied in physical matter on earth. But it is also the case with the earth itself, and even with human creations of thought. Imagine for a moment that people have become spiritualized and ascended to higher spheres. Thoughts in today's sense - I do not even want to say scientific thoughts, because after three hundred to four hundred years they will no longer have any meaning - but thoughts of people in general, as they have a meaning for the earth now, as they emerge from a brain, they naturally have no meaning for the higher worlds, but only for the earth. But man has left the earth. What has become of all that people have created on our earth over the course of centuries and millennia?

[ 2 ] What comes into consideration spiritually first is, of course, the evolution of an individuality. Leonardo da Vinci has risen higher through what he has achieved – that is his ascent. But we ask ourselves: do the great thoughts, the great impulses that the mighty creators impress on the earthly material, do they mean nothing for the future of the earth? Will the future crumble the earth to dust and what man has made of the earth, will that disappear with earthly existence? You admire the Cologne Cathedral. Certainly, after a relatively short time not one stone will be left upon another; but does not the fact that man once expressed this idea of the Cologne Cathedral in stone mean anything for the whole earth? So we disregard what people take from the earth; we look at the earth itself. You see, a planet actually becomes smaller and smaller in the course of its development, it contracts. That is the fate of the planet's matter; but that is not everything, that is only something that the physical eye and physical instruments can observe on the planet. There is also a development of the material beyond this point.

[ 3 ] And now let us consider this development of the material beyond this point, and I come to what I said would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for a contemporary mind to grasp. It is now the case that the earth is constantly contracting. This causes matter to push towards the center from all sides. And now I say, of course with full consciousness, that there is a law of the conservation of energy, but also in full consciousness of the facts known to every occultist: Matter pushes itself more and more together towards the center, and the peculiar thing is that matter disappears at the center.

[ 4 ] To make it quite clear: Imagine you have a piece of matter that is pushed more and more into the center - in the center it disappears; it is not pushed over to the other side, it actually disappears into nothing in the center! So you can imagine that the whole earth will one day disappear into the center as the material parts are pushed together towards the center. But that is not all. To the same extent that it disappears into the center, it appears in the surrounding area. It reappears out there. Matter disappears in one place in space and reappears from outside. Everything that disappears into the center comes in again from the periphery, is drawn in, and in such a way that everything that the beings who worked on the planet have imprinted on the matter is now worked into it; not in its present form, of course, but in a form that is given to it by this transformation. Thus you will see the Cologne Cathedral, with its material particles disappearing into the center, arrive again from the other side. Nothing, nothing is lost from what is worked on a planet, but it comes again from the other side.

[ 5 ] That which arrived at the beginning of our evolution on earth before the Saturn evolution, we would have to place outside, outside the zodiac. In ancient wisdom it was called the Crystal Heaven, and in this Crystal Heaven were deposited the deeds of the beings of an earlier evolution. They formed, so to speak, the basis on which the new beings began to create.

[ 6 ] As I said, this is extremely difficult for a present-day mind to grasp because it is accustomed to considering only the material, because it is not accustomed to realizing that at one point in three-dimensional space the material can disappear and at another point, after passing through other dimensions, come back again. As long as you remain in three-dimensional space with your imagination, you cannot grasp it, because it goes out of three-dimensional space. Therefore, it cannot be seen until it enters three-dimensional space again from the other side. In the meantime, it is simply in another dimension. This is one of the things that we now have to grasp, because the things of our world's origin are connected in the most diverse ways, and something that is in one place is sometimes connected in a very complicated way to something else that is in a completely different place in three-dimensional space.

[ 7 ] We have said that our planetary formation began with the old Saturn. That is exactly how it began. Then it progressed to Jupiter. When all of creation began with Jupiter, as you know, all the beings of the surrounding area were also active there. But just as the beings within the entire planetary system work and develop, so do the beings outside, who work from the surrounding area. Just as certain entities withdraw from within, so do certain entities withdraw from those who are outside in space. And just as Jupiter was compressed, so too was something else compressed by the withdrawing entities. This has nothing to do with our evolution, but rather, with the entities withdrawing, it became first Uranus and then, during the evolution of Mars, Neptune. The names Uranus and Neptune are, of course, no longer chosen in the way that the ancients chose their names to suit the occasion, although there is still some meaning in the name Uranus. It was given when people still had a slight idea of the correct naming, so what lies outside our circle has been summarized under the name Uranus.

[ 8 ] So we see that the two planets, which our present-day astronomy regards as completely equivalent to the other planets, are on a completely different footing, that basically they have nothing special to do with the evolution of our world. They represent the very worlds that came into being when beings who still had something to do with us during the Saturn age withdrew and formed residences outside. From this you will be able to derive many other facts, for example that these planets have retrograde moons and much more.

[ 9 ] So we have sketched out the development of our solar system and asked ourselves: What is the actual position of man in relation to these beings of the higher hierarchies, which were basically his human ancestors? We can start with the highest, with the seraphim, cherubim and thrones, and their characterization will give us a good idea of human beings. If we were to go up beyond the seraphim, we would enter the realm of the divine Trinity. What is it that makes the seraphim, cherubim and thrones so very special compared to all other beings in the world? They have what has been called “unmediated vision of the Godhead.” What man must seek for little by little through his development, they have from the very beginning. We human beings say: We must start from our present point of view in order to attain ever higher powers of knowledge, will and so on; in this way we will come ever closer and closer to the Godhead, the Godhead will be ever more present to us. But we say to ourselves: we are developing upwards towards something that is still veiled from us, towards the Godhead. This makes the difference between the seraphim, cherubim, thrones and man: that from the very beginning of our development, these highest entities of the spiritual hierarchies are immediately around the divine entity, around the divine Trinity, that they enjoy the sight of the Godhead from the very beginning. What man is to develop into, they have from the very beginning. So it is infinitely important to know that these entities, when they arise, behold God, that they, by living, continually behold God. What they now do, what they accomplish, they do it out of their vision of God, God does it through them. They could not act differently; it would be impossible for them to ever act differently than they do, because the vision of God is such a strong force, it has such an effect on them that they carry out what the Deity instructs them to do with immediate certainty and impulse. Something like deliberation, like judging, does not exist in the circle of these entities; there is only a beholding of the orders of the Deity, in order to have the immediate impulse to also do what they have beheld. And in doing so, they see Divinity in its original, true form, as this Divinity is. But they see themselves only as the executors of the Divine Will, of Divine Wisdom. So it is with the highest hierarchy.

[ 10 ] If we descend to the next hierarchy, to those entities whom we call lordships, powers and authorities, or also spirits of wisdom, of movement and of form, we have to say : they no longer have such direct vision of the Godhead; they no longer see God in the direct form in which He is, but in His revelations, in the way He shows Himself, if I may put it like this, through His countenance, through His physiognomy. It is, of course, unmistakable to them that it is the Godhead; it is an immediate impulse for them to follow the revelations of the Godhead, as with the seraphim, cherubim and thrones. The impulse is no longer so strong, but it is still an immediate one. It would be impossible for the seraphim, cherubim and thrones to say that they would not carry out what they see as prescribed by the deity; that would be unthinkable because of the closeness with which they are related to the deity. But it would also be completely out of the question for these dominions, powers and authorities to undertake something that the deity itself does not want.

[ 11 ] Therefore, in order for the evolution of the world to proceed at all, something very special had to occur. We come here to a realm that has always been difficult for people to understand, even for those who have progressed to a certain degree of mystery wisdom. But in the ancient mysteries it has been tried to make it understandable through the following. At a certain level of initiation into the mysteries in the ancient mysteries, the person being initiated was led before hostile forces that looked outwardly cruel and terrible and that also performed terrible deeds before the eyes of the person being initiated. And those who performed these deeds were no other than masked priests, masked sages. In order to bring about the necessary temptations, priests had to disguise themselves as horrible demons, as horrible entities that performed terrible deeds, more horrible things than humans could ever invent. What was the reason for this? In order to show the person being initiated how greatly development can stray from the straight path, the initiate himself, the priest, was presented in the mask of the evildoer, in the mask of evil. He was to have the illusion that evil was standing before him, and only when the unmasking occurred did he see the truth. Then the illusion was removed from him, and he saw that it was a test. In order to make him strong and to arm him against evil, it was presented to him in its most frightening form, presented by the priestly sages, who of course did not stray in truth. That was only a reflection of what really took place in cosmic evolution.

[ 12 ] In the interval between the evolution of Jupiter and Mars, if I may express myself in a trivial manner, a number of entities were detached from the sphere of the Powers; they were placed in the course of evolution in such a way that instead of leading evolution forward, they placed obstacles in its path. That is what we have come to know as the conflict in heaven. So the deeds of, if we may say so, the detachments of powers were thrown into the development, for the ruling world powers of the hierarchies had to say to themselves: What is to come into being can never come into being if the path continues straight ahead. Something greater must come into being.

[ 13 ] Imagine you have a cart to push. By pushing it forward, your strength develops to a certain extent. If you now load the cart with a heavy ballast, you have to push harder, but your strength develops more strongly. Imagine that the Deity had left the evolution of the world as it was, beyond Jupiter: certainly, people could have developed well; but humanity could become even stronger if obstacles to its development were placed in its path. For the good of humanity, certain powers had to be called upon. These powers did not become evil at first, they need not be conceived as evil powers, but it can even be said that they sacrificed themselves by placing themselves in the way of development. These powers can therefore be called the gods of obstacles, in the broadest sense of the word. They are the gods of hindrances and obstacles that have been placed in the way of the path of development; and from now on the possibility was given for all that was to take place in the future. These powers, which had been ordered away, were not evil in themselves, on the contrary, they were the great promoters of development by storming against normal development. But they were the creators of evil; for by storming against the normal development, evil gradually arose. The path of development of these “detached” powers naturally took a completely different course than that of their brothers. Their work was quite different, and the result was that during the lunar evolution these powers became, in a certain respect, the seducers of those entities whom we call the angels. The angels are undergoing their stage of human development on the Moon. There were angelic beings on the moon who, so to speak, saw how the obstacles of evolution worked and said to themselves: We could now set about overcoming these obstacles, plunging into the full stream of lunar evolution, but we will refrain from doing so, will not descend, we will remain above with the good gods. At a certain point in the evolution of the moon, these angelic beings, so to speak, snatched themselves away from the powers that were throwing obstacles into the evolution of the moon. On the other hand, there were others of the angelic beings on the moon who said to themselves: We will not follow them; if we were to follow them, the development would now be reversed, nothing new would be incorporated. Precisely because these obstacles were there, something new was added to the development of the moon. Those entities that said to themselves: I want nothing to do with what is going on down there, I will remain with the powers that do not want to be touched by all that is low - they withdrew from the moon mass during the old moon development and became beings of the following of all that is in the sun. They did not concern themselves with what was happening in the moon that had been hurled out, in which the obstacles were. But the others, the submerged ones, these beings now had to absorb into all their physicality, into all that they had taken from the moon, whatever obstacles to development were present; they had to harden themselves more, so to speak, than would otherwise have been the case. Their physical forms became denser than they would otherwise have done; the consequences of the Powers' deeds were embodied in them. But the actions of the Powers were well-founded in the divine plan of the world, and we must always bear this in mind. And a further consequence was that when the evolution of the Moon passed over to the evolution of the Earth, the whole thing was repeated to a certain extent, in that those entities which had plunged into the full tide of the evolution of the Moon remained behind compared with those who had wanted to know nothing about it, and that others still remained further behind, who were attracted by the retrogressive evolution. All this had led to the fact that during the development of the earth there were both advanced and backward angelic beings. The more advanced angelic beings approached man at the time when he matured in Lemuria to receive the germ of the human ego, and left it up to him, so to speak, to ascend now already into the spiritual worlds and not to get involved in that which had been mixed into the course of world development since the Moon. And it was those beings, who had remained behind at that time and whom we call the luciferic entities, who set about the human astral body - they could not approach the I - and implanted in this astral body all the consequences of the conflict in heaven. So while the powers were assigned to the conflict in heaven, while they were only created as gods of obstacles, the consequences of their actions now crept into the human astral body, and there they signify something different: they signify the possibility of error and the possibility of evil. Now man had given the possibility of error and the possibility of evil, but at the same time the possibility of rising above error and evil through his own power.

[ 14 ] Now bear in mind that such entities as the powers belonging to the second hierarchy would not have had the power to become evil in the first place through their own efforts - they had to be commanded. And only the beings of the third hierarchy, and only those who are closest to man, the angels, could follow or not follow the restraining powers, so to speak. The ones that did not follow are repeatedly depicted in pictures that are supposed to sensualize the victories that were fought in heaven; that are supposed to express what happened during the moon's development when man progressed to the incorporation of the astral body, that is, to the human animal. There, the angelic beings who had remained good, so to speak, escaped this moon-like state, rising from what was down there on the moon. And this image appears in many forms before the soul of man. It is what originally meant Michael's dispute with the dragon. You can also see this image in the image of the Mithras bull, and there it is particularly vivid. Of course, it was not meant to say that these angelic beings had withdrawn from their task, but they were presented as an ideal of the future. These beings, it was said, preferred to ascend to the spiritual world. You have descended; with you have descended other entities that have followed the Powers of Obstacles. Now you must assimilate what you have taken up with them and carry it up into the spiritual world; you must, so to speak, become such a Michael, such a Taurus-conqueror, on your re-ascent. For each such symbol can be used in this twofold sense.

[ 15 ] Thus we see that in a certain respect it is only through the fact that the Powers were ordered to do so that man was given the possibility of reaching out of himself that goal which even the highest Seraphim cannot reach out of themselves. That is the essential point. They cannot act otherwise, the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, than to follow directly the impulses given by the Godhead. The Lordships, the entire second hierarchy, cannot act otherwise either. A number of the powers were detached; so these powers too, which, so to speak, threw themselves into the path of evolution, could not act otherwise than to follow the commands of the Godhead. Even in what could be called the origin of evil, they too only fulfill the will of the deity; by making themselves servants of evil, they only fulfill the will of the deity, who wants to develop the strong good through the detour of evil. And now let us descend to those entities that we call the powers: They could not have achieved this through their own efforts. Nor could they have become evil through themselves; not even the spirits of personality, nor the fire spirits. For when these were on the sun as human beings, the powers had not yet been assigned, there was no possibility of becoming evil. The first ones who had the possibility to become evil were the angels, because this possibility only existed from the development of the moon onwards. There, from the sun to the moon, the dispute in heaven took place. A part of the angels has now rejected this possibility, has, so to speak, not allowed itself to be seduced by the forces that were supposed to lead into the obstacles; they remained with the old nature. So that we have such entities of the spiritual hierarchies down to the angels, and even in some of the angels, who absolutely cannot help but follow divine will, for whom there is no possibility of not following divine will. That is the essential.

[ 16 ] And now we come to two categories of entities: First, there are the angels who plunged into the chaos that the powers had caused during the battle in the sky. These were the entities that we call Luciferic entities precisely because of their further actions. These entities then approached the human astral body during the process of earthly development and gave the person the possibility of evil, but also the possibility of developing out of their own free will. So that within the entire hierarchy, we only have the possibility of freedom with some of the angels and with human beings. The possibility of freedom begins, so to speak, in the middle of the angelic hierarchy; but in the human being it is only fully developed. When man first came to earth, he was indeed at first subject to the great power of the Luciferic spirits. They permeated the human being's astral body with their powers, and the ego was thereby drawn into these powers; so that during the Lemurian and Atlantean evolution, and even afterwards, we have the ego as if in a cloud, as if shrouded in a cloud, which has been brought about by the influences of Lucifer. Man has only been saved from being overwhelmed by the forces pulling him down because earlier entities overshadowed him, because the angels who had remained above and the archangels above embodied themselves in special individuals and guided him. And this happened until that time when something very special occurred, when an entity that had only been connected to the solar existence until then had come so far that it could now not only enter the physical body, etheric body and astral body of a person, as earlier entities of the higher worlds had done, but it could penetrate into the person, right into the I.

[ 17 ] Do you remember how I explained that in earlier times, higher beings descended and animated the human physical body, the etheric body and the astral body? Now, in a special time that was called for it, an individual arose who took upon himself the highest essence, which was initially connected to our solar existence and which had an inspiring effect on the ego, on all the powers of the ego.

[ 18 ] The I finds expression in the blood. Just as the blood as a material substance is the expression of the I, so the warmth of the blood, the fire of the blood, is, so to speak, the remnant of the ancient fire of Saturn, the expression of the I in the elements. This being had to express itself physically in two ways: first in fire. It announced itself in the fire to Moses: in the burning bush and in the lightning on Mount Sinai; for it is the same essence that could then enter into the human ego, that spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, out of the lightning and thunder on Mount Sinai. And She prepares Her coming and then appears in a body that carries blood, in Jesus of Nazareth: in this way the Being of the Sun enters an earthly individual. As the I becomes more and more imbued and permeated with the power that once entered it, the I will acquire the ability to rise up more and more out of its own strength above all influences that can pull it down. For this being, which penetrates into the ego, is of a different nature from the other entities that previously descended to earth and which animated the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body.

[ 19 ] Take the ancient holy Rishis. In their etheric body, as we have seen, was the spirit of a higher being, for they had inherited this etheric body from great Atlantean ancestors in whom this higher being was. This was transferred to them; they could not follow with their astral body and I what emerged from the inspiration of the etheric body. And so it happened from epoch to epoch. People were inspired. There was always something like a force within them when they were inspired; it was something that captured them by force. From what was man's fate – to be left to himself – he was drawn away from something in order to be able to improve: He was inspired with a better Being. This was the case with all founders of religions: a Being was incorporated in them that was still exalted above the quarrel in heaven, so that they were not completely abandoned to themselves. In Christ an Entity of a completely different nature appeared, an Entity that at first did nothing at all to bring people over to Itself through any kind of compulsion. And that is the essential point. If you take the whole spread of Christianity, it will be a living proof that the Christ did not actually do anything in his life that happened to spread Christianity. Look at the religious founders of the past. They are the great teachers of humanity, they teach from a certain time of their development, and their teachings have an overwhelming effect on people. Look at Christ. Did He work fundamentally through His teachings? He is not understood by those who believe that the teachings are the main thing. Christ did not work primarily through His teachings, but through what He did. And the greatest deed of Christ was the one that ended in death, was death. That is the essential thing, that the Christ worked through an act, in the spreading of which throughout the world he was no longer even to be physically present. That is the great difference between the work of the Christ and that of other founders of religions. This difference is almost not understood at all, but it is the essential thing.

[ 20 ] You can follow all the teachings of Christianity, everything that is preached as a teaching in Christianity, and you can find every Christian teaching in another religious system. That cannot be denied. You can say: All the essentials of Christian teachings are contained in other systems. But did Christianity work through the content of its teachings? Who did the most to spread Christianity in the first place, and did he rely on the teachings? Look at him, the Apostle Paul! Did he allow himself to be transformed from Saul to Paul by what is written in the Gospels? He persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus. He persecuted them until the One who died on the cross appeared to him in the clouds, until he, Paul, had his own personal occult experience that the Christ lives. The effect of the death, the effect of the deed, that was the impulse for Paul, and that is what matters. Other religious systems work through their teachings, and their teachings are the same as in Christianity; but in Christianity it is not about the teachings, but about what has happened, about the deed. And this deed is such that it has no other effect on any person than when he himself decides to let it have an effect on him, that is, when it is compatible with the absolutely free character of his individual ego. For it is not enough that the Christ should be present in the human astral body; but if He is to be truly understood, He must become present in the human ego. And the ego must freely decide to receive the Christ. That is what matters. But it is precisely by connecting with the Christ that this human ego takes in a reality, a divine power, not just a teaching. Therefore, it can be proved a hundred times that all the teachings of Christianity can already be found here or there; but that is not the point. The point is that the essential thing in Christianity is the deed, which can only become one's own possession through a voluntary ascent into the higher worlds. Thus man receives the power of Christ by voluntarily receiving it, and no one can receive it who does not receive it voluntarily. But this has only become possible for man because the Christ was incarnated on earth, because he was called to become man on earth.

[ 21 ] The fallen angels, who have lived themselves over to Earth as Luciferic beings, are in a different situation. They should have become human on the Moon. They have remained behind in their development, and so they can enter the astral body, but initially they cannot approach the I. Now they are in a strange situation, in a situation that we can actually only describe graphically, even if it looks pedantic. Let us assume - leaving aside the etheric body and the physical body - that during the Lemurian development the human astral body would be this circle, and the I would be enclosed in this astral body;

[ 22 ] I has gradually moved into the astral body. What happens now? During the Lemurian evolution, the luciferic powers crept into the astral body of man everywhere and permeated him with their deeds, which, however, present themselves in him as lower passions. That through which he can fall prey to error and evil is seated in the astral body; the luciferic spirits have injected it into him. If they had not injected it into him, he would never have had the possibility of error and evil; he would have been raised to where he receives his ego, untouched by all inhibiting influences. This continues, only the great leaders protect people from sinking too low, as far as is necessary.

[ 23 ] Now the event of the Christ occurs. Let us take a person who voluntarily accepts the Christ within himself. Christianity is only just beginning, but let us take the ideal: the human ego would have voluntarily allowed the power of Christ to flow into it. When this ego is so far advanced that it has permeated itself with Christ, then the power of Christ also radiates into the astral body. Into the same astral body the power of Christ radiates from within, into which the luciferic powers had previously injected their deeds. And what happens in the future? Through the fact that we, with the help and only with the help of Christ, extinguish all those qualities in man that come from Lucifer, we thereby gradually free the luciferic powers along with us as human beings. And the time will come when the Luciferic powers, which during the evolution of the moon had to sink to a certain lower evolution for the benefit of human freedom and did not have the opportunity on earth to experience the power of Christ for themselves, will experience the power of Christ through man and be redeemed. Man will redeem Lucifer when he receives the power of Christ in the appropriate way. And through this man will again become stronger than he would otherwise have become. For consider, had man not received the powers of Lucifer, then the power of Christ would radiate forth, but would not meet with the obstacles of the powers of Lucifer, and man would never have been able to advance in the Good, in the True, in Wisdom, as far as he can advance when he has these opposing powers to overcome.

[ 24 ] Thus we have in man a link in our hierarchies that we see is very different from the other links. We see that man stands differently from the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, from the dominions, principalities and powers, also still from the spirits of personality and from the spirits of fire, as a part of the angels. He can say to himself when he looks toward the future: I am called to seek in my deepest inner self that which gives me the impulses for action, not from beholding the Godhead, as the seraphim do, but from the deepest inner self. And the Christ is a God who does not work in such a way that His impulses must be followed unconditionally, but only when one sees them, only in freedom. He is therefore the God who can never hinder this individual, free development of the ego in this or that direction. The Christ could say in the highest sense: You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. And those beings of the next hierarchy who had the opportunity to do evil, the Luciferic beings, are in turn redeemed and liberated by the power of man.

[ 25 ] Thus we see how world evolution does not simply repeat itself, but how something new occurs. For such a humanity as man experiences has not yet existed, not with the angels, not with the archangels, not with the elemental forces. Man has a completely new mission to fulfill in the world, a mission that we have just characterized. And for this mission he has descended into the earthly world. And as a free helper, the Christ has arisen for him in the world, not as a God who works from above, but as a firstborn among many.

[ 26 ] Only when we understand this can we comprehend the full dignity and significance of the human being within the ranks of our hierarchies. As we gaze up at the glory and grandeur of the higher hierarchies, we say to ourselves: However great, wise and good they may be, and however little they may stray from the right path, it is still man's great mission to bring freedom into the world, and with freedom that which is truly called love. For without freedom, love is impossible. A being that must follow an impulse will follow it; a being that can also act differently has only one force to follow: love. Freedom and love are two poles that belong together. If love was to enter our cosmos, it could only happen through freedom, that is, through Lucifer and his conqueror, and at the same time through man's redeemer, through the Christ. Therefore, the earth is the cosmos of love and freedom, and it is essential that we learn to enumerate the hierarchies in the way they have always been enumerated within our Western esotericism, without tempting man to be immodest. Seraphim, cherubim, thrones follow the immediate impulses under the contemplation of the Godhead; dominions, principalities, powers, are still so bound to the higher powers that they have to be delegated so that the development towards man can progress. Even archangels and spirits of personality cannot be absent, and thus cannot voluntarily descend into evil. That is why the spirits of the immediately higher hierarchy were called messengers and archmessengers, to indicate that they do not carry out their own missions, but those of those who stand above them. But in man a hierarchy will mature that carries out its own missions. Through the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan developments, the human being will mature into the implementer of his own impulses. Even if he is not yet ready today, he will mature into it.

[ 27 ] So we may say: What are the hierarchies? We begin with: seraphim, cherubim, thrones; the dominions that exercise their dominion only by working in the sense in which the impulses are given to them by the gods. Then come the powers; they exercise their power only by receiving it from above; the same applies to the authorities. If they become evil, they must become so according to divine counsel. We come to the spirits of personality, to the archangels and messengers, and have descended to the very edge of humanity. And how can we describe man when we include him in the hierarchies? After the archangels and angels, the arch messengers and messengers, we will have to add the spirit of freedom or the spirit of love to the series of hierarchies. This is the tenth hierarchy from above, which is indeed developing, but it belongs to the spiritual hierarchies.

[ 28 ] It is not a matter of repetition in the universe, but rather, each time a cycle is completed, something new is added to the evolution of the world. And it is always the mission of the corresponding hierarchy, which stands at the level of its humanity, to insert this new element.

[ 29 ] Thus we have tried to fathom the meaning of man from the meaning of our cosmos. Today, to a certain extent at least, we have asked ourselves spiritually about the meaning of man, and we have tried to fathom this meaning of man, the point in the middle of the universe, according to the Mystery Instruction, by trying to unravel the point, man, from the surrounding - the point from the surrounding! But in doing so, our knowledge is placed in reality. And that is the essential thing: that all true spiritual-scientific knowledge is real, concrete, real knowledge, that is, spiritual-scientific knowledge itself directly gives a picture of the cosmos and the spiritual hierarchies.

[ 30 ] We are at the center of the world. Everything around us loses its meaning for us because we say to ourselves: the external world of the senses cannot solve the riddles for us itself. It is as if everything were drawn together at one point. But then, when everything contracts, the solution to the riddle of the world comes back from the periphery as truly real as matter, which is a reflection and likeness of the spiritual, itself behaves. It contracts, disappears into the center and reappears from the periphery. That is reality. And our knowledge is real when it presents itself to us as the structure and process of the whole universe. Then it is not speculation, not madness, then it is born out of the cosmos. And we should develop this feeling: wisdom should be an ideal for us, born out of the cosmos and filling us with the strongest power, with the power for our own destiny, for our own great world ideal and thus also for our next human ideal.