The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] In the preceding lectures, it has been shown to what extent the external world appears as an illusion, concealing the spiritual world behind it. When the observing consciousness penetrates the veil of illusion, it enters the spiritual world. And those who have this experience can then say that the outer veil of the senses has become transparent to them and that they can see through it into the spiritual world. One could say that this is the one path to the spiritual world. However, it has also been shown how everything that we call thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as the more complex phenomena of our inner soul life, such as conscience, etc., are a kind of veil that conceals the spiritual world. And when the seeing consciousness penetrates through this veil, it returns to a spiritual world. These two different paths into the spiritual world have been known at all times. People who sought initiation knew that one encounters the spiritual world when one penetrates the outer veil on the one hand and the inner veil on the other. That is why we find among the ancient peoples of the earth the distinction between higher gods and lower gods; and in the mysteries of all ages it was said that at a certain stage of initiation one steps before the lower and higher gods; but the world of the higher gods and the world of the lower gods were always treated in a completely different way. One can understand that this assumption of two paths into the spiritual worlds is justified when one considers the following: In the way in which the outer world confronts man, in the colorful tapestry of color impressions, heat impressions, and so on, that is, in the colorful tapestry of the elements of fire, air, water, and earth, man is initially without influence. In the morning the sun rises; it sends its rays of light over the various things on earth, and according to the various conditions that develop there, the outer sensory world appears; and when human beings penetrate these conditions, they enter the spiritual world. Human beings are therefore incapable, because they have no influence on the outer sensory world, of corrupting this sensory world that surrounds them through their own content; it is, as it were, placed before them by the spiritual beings that reveal themselves in it, and they cannot spoil it through their own power. So when a person is initiated, it is a matter of penetrating the veil of the sensory world, but he must leave the veil of the sensory world as spiritual beings have created it.

[ 2 ] When it comes to one’s inner world, the situation is different. How a person perceives and feels, how they will, how they think, and how they develop their sense of conscience depends on whether they are more or less perfect, and whether they have worked more or less on their inner life. A person cannot, so to speak, produce a good and a bad red or green in the dawn or in a plant; but by corrupting their own inner life, they can generate senseless perceptions and evil moral judgments within themselves; a person can more or less surrender to the voice of their conscience; they can, in relation to their perceptions, surrender to the beautiful and the ugly, to true and false thought-forms. Thus, the veil that our soul spreads over the spiritual world in its inner life is altered by the person through their own behavior. And since, ultimately, what we see behind the veil of our own inner life depends on whether this veil itself is sound or corrupted, it is easy to see that with a corrupted, imperfect, underdeveloped inner life, distorted images can be created even when ascending into the spiritual world or descending to the lower spiritual beings— false, absurd, and unnatural ideas and forces.

[ 3 ] This is why, throughout all ages, a distinction was made between ascending to the higher gods and descending to the lower gods, and why descending was regarded as something much more dangerous than ascending to the higher gods, and why, for this reason, particularly high demands were made of the pupils of the mysteries, of the secret science, on this path into the spiritual world.

[ 4 ] This had to be mentioned because these two paths into the spiritual world indeed play a major role in human evolution, and because the opposition between the Orient and the Occident can only be properly understood and the relationship between the “children of Lucifer” and the “brothers of Christ” comprehended by keeping these two paths in mind. In the outer world, which can very often appear to the human eye as a colorful jumble of the most diverse facts, there is nothing that is not guided in a wise way, nothing in which spiritual beings, spiritual forces, and spiritual facts are not at work; and one can only understand everything that happens there if one learns to see how spiritual events have grouped themselves under the guidance of those powers that have been characterized from various sides. If one wants to understand why a certain form of wisdom flourished in the East and why, in turn, the future of Christianity depends on the development of Western forces, one must look to the origin, to the historical development of the two worlds.

[ 5 ] From various lectures you have heard from me, you know that our entire present spiritual life originates from that region we call ancient Atlantis; that an ancient spiritual life developed in a region in the West between present-day Europe and America; and that what we encounter in Asian, African, and American culture are ultimately descendants of the ancient Atlantean culture. There we must seek the father and mother soil of all our cultural life. Before that tremendous catastrophe which changed the face of the earth so completely that it took on its present form, there existed within ancient Atlantis human beings who were quite different from those of today, guided by highly initiated leaders of humanity. A culture developed there which was essentially under the influence of an ancient clairvoyance, so that the people of that time had the instinctive ability to see through the outer veil of the sensory world to the higher spiritual world, as well as to look through their own soul life to the lower gods. That was natural at that time. Just as it is natural for people today to see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and so on, so it was natural for people at that time not only to see colors, hear sounds, and so on outside in the world, but also to see spiritual beings behind the colors and sounds and so on. Likewise, it was natural for them not only to hear the voice of conscience, but also, for example, what the Greeks called the Erinyes. They perceived these as spiritual beings. Thus, the ancient Atlanteans were instinctively familiar with a spiritual world.

[ 6 ] It is the meaning of human evolution that human beings gradually emerged, so to speak, from this ancient instinctive but spiritually perceptive consciousness and advanced to what is characteristic of our present age. Human beings had to pass through this stage of life on the physical plane. Now, it would not have been possible to guide the entire development of humanity from the spiritual world simply by sending a stream of humanity from ancient Atlantis across the regions of Europe and Africa into Asia, and having everything develop in a straight line, so to speak. —- Development never consists merely in something forming itself out of a germ and then progressing in a straight line; wherever there is development, something else must also come into play. You can first see from a very ordinary example that development is never a straight-line progression, so that one thing always drives another forward, but that something else is also involved in development. Consider the plant! You throw the seed into the earth and you see how the organs of the plant sprout from this seed, the leaves, how later the sepals emerge, stamens, pistils, and so on. Now, in normal plant life today, if development is to proceed, something else is necessary, something that is not, so to speak, in the straight line of progress. Fertilization is necessary for fruit formation. The fertilizing substances must flow from one plant to another so that the flower can develop into fruit, and the fruit cannot develop in a straight line from the flower; rather, a stream of influences must come from outside so that, through this influence coming from the side, development can proceed. What you can see in the plant is a picture of the entire life of the world, and this also gives you an indication of what spiritual life is like. It is completely wrong to believe that one can achieve one's goal in spiritual life by assuming that a cultural stream emerges somewhere and that it always brings forth something new and new only from itself. This may continue for a while, but it would not be enough; it would produce just as little as a flower could produce fruit without fertilization. At a certain point in development, there must always be a lateral influence, in human development, so to speak, a spiritual fertilization. When a cultural current has propagated itself in a straight line for a while, some influence must come from the side. Just as the female and male elements develop separately in plant life, so too in the progressive development of human beings since Atlantis, a single current did not form, flowing from west to east. but essentially two main currents had to move from ancient Atlantis to the East, developing separately for a while and then, after a certain time, coming together and fertilizing each other so that the right thing could happen. And we can trace these two currents of human development if we examine the records of spiritual vision in the right way. There we have a current of human evolution that came about when certain peoples moved from the old Atlantean land more toward the north, so that they touched the regions that today comprise England and northern France, then moved on to present-day Scandinavia, Russia, and as far as Asia, down to India. A stream of peoples of the most diverse kinds moves along, carrying a certain spiritual life. Another stream of human development takes a different path; it moves more to the south, so that today we would have to trace its path from the Atlantic Ocean through southern Spain, through Africa to Egypt, then to Arabia. Two streams, like great migrations of peoples, pour out of ancient Atlantis toward the east. Each of these cultural streams initially follows its own path until they fertilize each other at a later point in time.

[ 7 ] What is the difference between these two cultural streams? It is that the stream that moved more to the north included people who were more suited to using their outer senses and outer perception, who were more inclined to focus their gaze on the carpet or veil of the environment. These people who moved more to the north had initiates who showed them the way to those spiritual worlds that were called the higher gods, those gods that are found when one penetrates the veil of the outer sensory world. Such are the beings that are worshipped as Germanic-Nordic gods. Odin, Thor, and so on are names for such divine-spiritual beings that are found when one penetrates the outer veil of the sensory world. The people of the other ethnic group had a different organization. These people, who migrated from ancient Atlantis to Asia in a southern region, had more of an inclination to immerse themselves in their soul life, in their inner being. One might say — and please do not take this word with a derogatory connotation — that the northern peoples had more of a talent for looking out into the world, while the southern peoples had more of a talent for brooding over their own soul life and seeking the spiritual world through the veil of their own soul life. Therefore, it will not surprise you that the descendants of the southern peoples had gods who belonged, so to speak, to the underworld, who ruled more over the soul life. You need only think of the example of the Egyptian Osiris. Osiris is the deity that man finds when he passes through the gate of death. He is the god who cannot live in the outer sensory world. He lived there only in ancient times; and when the new times approached, he was overcome by the powers of the sensory world, by the evil Seth; and since then he has lived in the world that man enters after death, that is, in a world that can only be found by immersing oneself in that that is immortal and enduring in human beings, that passes from incarnation to incarnation; into that which is the inner life of human beings. That is why people felt that this inner life was connected with Osiris.

[ 8 ] That was the difference in the character traits of the northern and southern peoples. There was only one community that, in a certain way, united both traits in the first epoch of the post-Atlantean period after the great Atlantean catastrophe. This people was especially chosen to follow both paths that lead into the spiritual world and to find something fruitful and right for that time on both paths. While the northern peoples looked into the world of the outer sensory carpet and the southern peoples brooded within their own inner soul life, there was a community of people who had the ability both to penetrate the outer sensory world and ascend to the spiritual worlds behind it, and to live within their own inner being, into the deepest depths of mystical contemplation and find the spiritual worlds through the veil of their own soul life. This was an ability that was present in all human beings in the ancient Atlantean era, at least in its early stages. However, this ability to find one's way outward and inward is connected with another experience, an experience that is quite unique in human life. Those who only have the ability to penetrate the outer veil of the sensory world and find the spiritual world, the higher gods, and then hear that there are other deities somewhere else on Earth, do not really understand the latter. But those who combine these two abilities, who can penetrate the veil of the outer sensory world just as they can penetrate the veil of their own soul life, ultimately make an eminently important discovery, namely that what we find when we penetrate the veil of soul life is essentially the same as what we find when we penetrate the veil of the outer sensory world. For a unified spiritual world reveals itself to us, sometimes from without, sometimes from within. If we get to know the spiritual world in both ways, we recognize its unity. Those who advance to the spiritual worlds through inner contemplation find them behind the veil of the soul life; and if they also have the ability to penetrate the veil of the outer sensory world through the development of supersensible powers, then they know that what they have found within is the same as what they have seen outside. The ancient Indian community was in this position to have this great experience of the unity of spiritual life. When the supersensible gaze of the ancient Indian was directed outward, he saw the external spiritual beings that held together and shaped the phenomena of the world. When they turned inward, they found their Brahman through this mystical contemplation within themselves; and they knew that what they found behind the veil of soul life was the same thing that, with the great mighty wingbeat that swept through the cosmos, had also created and ordered the outer world.

[ 9 ] This is the powerful and mighty force that has been influencing us since ancient times, that something has been preserved here that existed as an ancient culture in the old Atlantean era and has survived as a remnant into the post-Atlantean era. However, development does not progress through the transformation or preservation of the old, but through the emergence of new currents of development that then fertilize each other. If we follow the northern stream of development, which passed from ancient Atlantis through Europe to Asia, we find in the ancient Indian people the most advanced outpost, which, after uniting with other elements, formed the ancient Indian culture. But if we go a little further north, to the region of the Persians, we find the original Persian culture, which we encounter in later historical times as the Zarathustra culture. When we examine this Zarathustra culture with the means of supersensible perception, we already see that peculiarity that people looked more toward the outer world and sought to penetrate the veil of the outer world in order to advance to the higher spiritual world. From this peculiarity of the Persian national character, you will understand that Zarathustra, the leader of this ancient Persian culture, initially placed less value on inner mystical contemplation, that he even stood in a certain opposition to it; but that he directed his gaze more toward the outer sensory world, initially upward toward the sensory sun, in order to make people aware that behind the sensory sun there is something like a spiritual sun being, that behind it stands Ahura Mazdao. Here you already have the path taken by the initiates of the northern peoples fully developed. And it was precisely in the ancient Persian culture, under the leadership of the oldest Zarathustra, that the highest form of this view of the spiritual world developed outwardly. This form of external perception became all the more imperfect the further the peoples lagged behind the ancient Persians, so to speak. ^{2This does not refer to the historical Persians, but to ancient prehistoric peoples in the area that later became Persia.} which had advanced as far as the Near East. Other peoples in Asia and Europe had remained behind the ancient Persians. All these peoples, however, had the peculiarity of looking more outward. All the initiates of these peoples chose the path of pointing their fellow men to the spiritual world that lies behind the veil of the sensory world. Within Europe, if we examine it with the means of spiritual research, we still find, in that wonderful culture which lay, so to speak, at the foundation of all other European cultures, in Celtic culture, the remnants of all that arose through the interaction of the national spirit and the research of the initiated; that which is now largely lost and can only be sought, through spiritual vision, by those who know the ways can still be somewhat unraveled from the outer sensory world through spiritual insight. Everything that we can call the ancient Celtic element—wherever it shines forth as the foundation of other European cultures—is an echo of even older European cultures that in a certain sense remained behind the great, sublime Zarathustra culture, but which essentially followed the same path according to the character of the peoples. The peoples had been distributed in such a way that, depending on their external spread, they could follow the path to the spiritual in different ways. Depending on the different places where these peoples lived, they followed this path in a more or less perfect manner.

[ 10 ] Now you must realize that the contact that human beings have with the outside world, whether it be the spiritual or the sensory world, has an effect on them; that experiences are not something that exist, so to speak, like a mirror of the world, merely for the purpose of giving human beings knowledge, but that what happens in this way is there to enable human beings to advance in their development in a very specific way. What, then, is a human being at a certain time? He is what the world forces living in his environment organize him to be. We are the result of what the world forces have formed us into. We are formed according to how these world forces penetrate us. Those who breathe healthy air not only develop their organs in the appropriate way, but those who take in this or that kind of spiritual life also form their spiritual organism, and because the physical organism is only the effect of the spiritual, they also form their physical organism in the appropriate way. Human beings are constantly developing. You will therefore find it understandable that among all the peoples of this Nordic current, because the forces of the external world flowed into them preferentially, it was also the external physical characteristics that developed preferentially, everything that can form human beings from the outside. The external forces developed what could also be seen externally in human beings and felt as effective. You will therefore find not only warlike characteristics developed in these peoples, but also an increasingly perfect instrument for penetrating the external world; the brain itself becomes more and more perfect under the influence of external forces. Therefore, the seeds for understanding the external world are present in the people of this ethnic group. Only from this stream of peoples could that emerge in spiritual life which finally led to the mastery of the external forces and powers of nature. One might say that these masses of peoples placed the main value on making the external instrument of the human being, that which can be seen outwardly, ever more perfect, not only physically, but also intellectually, morally, and aesthetically. More and more of the spirit was poured into the outer physicality. Physical physicality was made more and more perfect, so that when the individual soul lived from one incarnation to another, it could generally find a better physicality in its next incarnation, not only in the physical sense, but also in the moral sense. Thus, what spiritualizes the human being outwardly, what spiritualizes his physical body, could develop under such influences.

[ 11 ] If we now ask ourselves what must have developed in particular among those peoples who took the other path, you will say: Among them, the refinement of the soul life had to unfold. Try, therefore, to find the concept of conscience in ancient times among those masses of people whom I have just characterized, who spiritualized, so to speak, the outer physical body. You will not find the concept of conscience among them. It appears among the peoples who followed the southern path. Among them, the finer experiences of the soul appear; there, the inner soul life is enriched with concepts and ideas, so that it could finally develop into that wealth which is still so admired today, into the ancient, mysterious hermetic science of the ancient Egyptians. The wisdom of the Egyptians, so revered by all who know these things, could only develop because the inner life of the soul came to development within this stream of peoples. All the arts, all the wisdom that had to be developed from within the human being, all of this came to the fore in this stream of human development. We see, then, that within this human stream, less value is placed on spiritualizing the outer physicality, but all the more value is placed on spiritualizing the inner forces of the soul, developing them more and more finely.

[ 12 ] Take a look at Greek sculpture! When it sought to depict the spiritualized, ennobled physical body, it depicted the members of the northern stream of peoples. All the figures of Zeus, Aphrodite, and Pallas Athena are, in their external configuration, of the racial type of the northern peoples. Where it was necessary to point to the inner development of the soul life, there was a need to show that the forces that develop do so invisibly in the soul; so they created a figure such as Hermes, Mercury. He is shaped differently from the other gods; he is shaped like the African peoples. He has completely different ears, different hair, and slanted eyes instead of Nordic eyes. It was known that this type of human being was the bearer of scientific knowledge, wisdom, and everything that affects the human soul. This was associated with the concept of the messenger to the lower world of the gods, with Hermes or Mercury.

[ 13 ] The difference between the two peoples' traditions can be characterized in the following way: the northern peoples' tradition works toward creating an outer human being who, in his outer physicality, lives out the spirit as in an image; the other peoples' tradition was concerned with shaping the invisible soul, that which can only be perceived when one turns one's gaze inward. Thus, the northern stream of peoples created the image of the deity in the human being as it appears externally; the southern stream of peoples created the soul image of the deity, the invisible soul image of the deity working and weaving within. Initially separate, like the male and female fertilizing substances of plants, these two streams of peoples developed; one stream of peoples as far as it could go toward internalization, the other as far as it could go toward the expression of the spiritual in the external world. And then, when the right time had come, these two streams of peoples had to fertilize each other. We may consider one or the other stream of peoples, but everywhere, even in what confronts us externally and historically, we will find confirmation of what has just been said.

[ 14 ] Thus, the gods of the southern peoples remained more or less invisible gods with whom one connected within oneself, gods whom one could fear and dread in a certain sense, but before whom one could also stand with a certain human confidence. It has been suggested that we see these gods of the inner world as we see ourselves. If we are morally upright, we encounter the moral qualities of the inner world of gods, and these gods reveal themselves in their true form; their essence flows into us, and we feel inwardly enlightened and transfigured by them. If one is immoral, if one is endowed with bad, untrue, ugly ideas, then the image of this world of gods becomes distorted, then it appears in terrible, demonic forms, just as the most beautiful face can appear distorted and caricatured when viewed in a mirror that is like a garden ball. When they stood before the gods they saw within themselves, people could have the feeling: Oh, these are our good friends, our most intimate spiritual companions, these are the ones we look up to, and who pour their powers into the innermost depths of our soul life; this is something that belongs to our innermost being. — And enlightened and strengthened and transfigured, people could feel themselves through these divine beings. But when they saw them through their own qualities in distorted images, they could also look at them with horror and terror; they could torment them, pursue them, drive them into the wildest excesses of life, because they showed themselves in the distorted image of their lower passions. From this you can gauge how it was viewed that no human being in an unprepared state, but rather, where access to the spiritual world was opened to human beings, the strictest requirement was made for a spiritual and moral perfection that was still in progress, an extraordinarily good preparation; and people never tired of warning against approaching the gods in a state of spiritual weakness.

[ 15 ] If we now survey this spiritual world, which we first encounter among the peoples of the southern stream, if we want to characterize it in its entirety, according to its rulers, so to speak, then we call it, because it is the divine-spiritual world that illuminates human beings inwardly with that light that cannot be seen outwardly, with that light which he must fight for through his own perfection, the world of Lucifer, the world of the light-bearer. This southern stream of peoples found the world of Lucifer in this way.

[ 16 ] The other stream of humanity led to the goal of enabling the outer human being—the person who lives between birth and death in a physical body—to become as faithful a likeness of the deity as possible in terms of outward form. What could the ideal of human development be in this realm? This ideal could only be to create the highest of its kind; it could only be to do everything that would, at least once on Earth, produce an outer body so perfect and so imbued with spirit that it was capable not only of becoming a likeness of the Deity, but also of receiving the Deity itself. In other words: The ideal in this other stream of peoples had to be this—to cause a human individuality to perfect, spiritualize, and ennoble itself to such an extent, in regard to everything that a human being possesses between birth and death, that this outer body might be a noble vessel for receiving the highest spiritual. And to the one who pointed in the most perfect way to the spiritual world that lies behind the veil of the sensory tapestry, Zarathustra,^{3By “Zarathustra” here, of course, is not meant the well-known historical figure, but an ancient prehistoric ancestor. The underlying idea here is that the descendants of a great individuality adopted his name over long periods of time. For such was the custom in ancient times.} It was to him, too, that the great thought first occurred: An outer physicality must be created through such moral, intellectual, and spiritual power that this physicality is as spiritualized as it can possibly be. Because this thought first occurred to Zarathustra, he ensured that he perfected himself from incarnation to incarnation so that with each incarnation he dwelt in a nobler, more moral, more aesthetic, and more intellectual body. Thus we see the individuality that first appears as Zarathustra in ancient Persia working upon itself in such a way that it appears in ever nobler physical bodies, until it has brought this refinement of physicality so far that the body provided the noble vessel which was not merely a reflection of the divine spiritual world, but into which the divinity sank, which one has otherwise seen only behind the veil of the outer sensory world. That which the ancient Zarathustra pointed to as the world of the sun spirits standing behind the physical sun, that which he pointed to as the hidden spirit of the Good, Ahura Mazdao—this was to find a place by drawing ever closer to the Earth, where it could dwell as in a perfect, spiritualized physical body. Thus did Zarathustra appear in one of his incarnations in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; and the body of Jesus of Nazareth was so thoroughly spiritualized, so thoroughly ennobled, that it could take into its outer physicality that very spirituality which was otherwise found behind the veil of the sensory world. This spirituality was able to pour itself into this body.^{4One can see from this how foolish a distortion it is to say that the speaker of the above lecture ever identified the Christ with Zarathustra. He did this no more than he declared him to be one with Buddha.} The human body, which has always been cultivated—especially within the northern cultural tradition—through the direction of the gaze out into the spiritual world, had been prepared to become the very bearer of that spirituality which lies hidden behind the outer sensory world. Thus had the great, momentous event been prepared: to have the spiritual world—hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, which cannot be seen anywhere with the ordinary eye, but only with the spiritual eye—to have this spirituality present in a body, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, for three years on Earth. Thus, over the course of three years, that spirituality took shape as the Christ principle within the prepared body of Jesus of Nazareth.

[ 17 ] Thus, in the northern stream of humanity, it was not merely a matter of perceiving what lay behind the outer sensory world; rather, the possibility had been prepared to allow this spiritual reality to flow into the earthly world, so that what had previously been seen only behind the sun might also walk among our earthly humanity for three years. Thus, Lucifer had, so to speak, entered humanity through the southern stream of peoples, and Christ had entered through the northern stream of peoples, both in accordance with the character of these streams. And we live in a time in which these two streams of peoples must unite, just as the male and female fertilizing substances must interpenetrate one another. We live in a time when Christ, who entered from without as an objective being into the ennobled body of Jesus of Nazareth, must be understood through the soul’s ever-deepening immersion within itself and its union with the spiritual world found within, with the world that originates from the realm of Lucifer. Thus the fertilization of these two streams of humanity will take place little by little. It has already begun; it began at the very moment indicated to us by the account of how the sacrificial blood of Christ, which flowed from the cross, was collected in the holy Grail; how this holy Grail was brought over to the West from the East, where people had prepared themselves to understand the Christ event by cultivating the light of Lucifer in a very specific way. And so the union of these two currents, which are present within humanity itself, will proceed more and more progressively. Whatever people of the present may intend to do, it will be fulfilled in the future for the salvation of humanity, so that within the culture in which these two currents converge, the great Christ Being, who guides the development of the world and humanity, will be understood through the light that the soul receives from within, from the realm of Lucifer,^{5Based on past experience, one can say that the above passage will give rise to the misjudgment: I see in the human soul a connection between Christ and Lucifer. If one projects onto this what one personally imagines Lucifer to be, this misjudgment will amount to a falsehood. Only by referring to the Luciferic force—which, in the context of these lectures, I myself have in mind—will one arrive at the correct understanding, and thus have no cause for suspicion.} Christ will provide the substance; Lucifer will provide the form. And from what the two become together will come the influences that will sink into the spiritual development of humanity and bring about all that the future will bring for the salvation and blessing of humanity.