The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday we spoke of two spiritual currents, carried by different peoples who moved eastward from ancient Atlantis. We spoke of how they developed in different ways and thereby prepared themselves to bring forth what was to happen in later times; how, in particular, the southern peoples deepened their knowledge of the spiritual world that lies behind the soul world of human beings; how, in the other spiritual current, the gaze was directed outwards into the surroundings of the human being on earth in order to recognize the spiritual world hidden behind the veil of the sensory world. It was spoken of how, in the southern migration, precisely those qualities developed which led up to those spiritual beings belonging to the Luciferic principle; how then, from the other side, one could say that the royal, ruling spiritual being that stood behind the solar world drew ever closer to the earth in order to finally appear embodied in a physical body as an individuality that, through incarnations, had spiritualized this physical body to such an extent that the divine not only had an image within it, but could embody itself in it. This was the great event that can be called the incarnation of Christ, the Sun Spirit, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, who developed in the characterized northern stream of peoples. Attention has also been drawn to the fact that while these two streams of peoples were moving formally toward each other, but then began to fertilize each other, in the early period after the great Atlantean catastrophe in southern Asia, the Indian people arose, who in a certain sense represent the human soul, which can both look out into the outer sensory world and look within itself to find the spiritual, which from the outset felt the unity of the spirit outside in the world and the spirit within the human being. If we want to characterize more precisely how these different views and feelings related to each other, both among the peoples and among the initiates, we can do so as follows.

[ 2 ] One can imagine how the ancient Indian soul felt when it looked out into the sensory world of the earth, into what is on the earth in mountains, forests, plant cover, the animal and human world, and so on. When the soul of the ancient Indian looked out, still seeing to such a high degree spiritually, it looked through all this to a spiritual world whose beings appeared to it as etheric forms that did not descend to the condensation of physical life. Outside, where one saw the mountains, the trees, the stars, there were not only the dense elements, but also the finer etheric, and one saw all this formed into the outer world of gods. Of course, one should not imagine that these spirits consisted only of ether, but just as human beings have their physical body and within it the etheric, astral, and ego principles, these spirits did not have the physical body as their densest part, but they had the etheric body as their lowest link and the other higher principles ascending toward the higher worlds. The Indian soul looked into this world. How did it feel when it looked in? How did the basic feeling toward this whole world affect the soul? This feeling can be described in the following way. The Indian felt: I stand here on Earth; I, as a human being, have developed over long, long periods of time from the first human germ of ancient Saturn to the Earth period. I had to descend into dense physical matter in order to gain self-awareness within it. When I speak to myself, I speak of myself as an I-being. I was a companion of all the spiritual beings that are visible around me when I look up from the etheric world. I grew out of them and condensed accordingly. All the perfections of human beings are found in these worlds into which I look; and not only those which human beings possess; there are also perfections and qualities which human beings must first attain. But there is one thing that no being can attain unless it descends to the physical plane. There are other high perfections in the universe than the memory of a human consciousness; there are other kinds of consciousness. But in order to develop that peculiarity of consciousness which human beings develop on earth, a being must descend to this earth and be embodied in dense matter through a number of incarnations. May therefore, said the Indian consciousness, these spiritual beings into whose world I look have infinitely higher perfections than the human beings who stand on earth: there is one thing they do not have in their world, for that was the purpose of the earthly world, to give it to a type of being, the human being; there is one thing they do not have: human ego-consciousness. To say “I” to oneself, as human beings do, is not native to these worlds into which I am looking. I myself am from this world; everything that lives in this spiritual world out there also lives in me, only it is summed up in me as my human self-consciousness. Therefore, it makes no sense to say: Out there in the spiritual world there is a human self-consciousness. To apply the word “I” in the human sense to what is in these worlds has no meaning, no content. Only a word that excludes this I can be applied to everything that spreads spiritually in the environment, a word that is not touched by this I, which is used in such a way that one can say: In this world is everything that is in me, but I must not designate what is out there with my I; I must designate it with a word that excludes the I.

[ 3 ] And Indian consciousness called that which spreads out there “tat,” “that,” in contrast to “I.” And to express that human beings are of the same nature as this “tat,” as this “that,” as this “it” — that they have developed into the I only by descending to earth — they pronounced this judgment: I am this “Tat” — You are it [Tat twam asi]. That out there is you yourself. Thus, man summarized his relationship to the spiritual environment, to this seeing penetration of our world in the highest sense, in the words: It is, but that out there is you yourself.

[ 4 ] But this ancient Indian soul knew at the same time that the same essence that spreads outwards and which it called “Tat” can be found by looking into one's own inner being, that it appears only once from the outside and once from within. So when I descend into my soul, I find the same original spiritual essence that I call “action” outside. But then I relate what lives inside me as my source, which is veiled by the physical life of the soul, in the right way when I express the judgment differently, when I say instead: That is you yourself — I am Brahman, I am the All [Aham brahma asmi]. — And the two judgments: That is me and I am the All, basically said, when put together: When I look out into the world of “action,” I find a spiritual world; when I dive into my own soul experience, I find a spiritual world; and the two are one. - That was the basic feeling in the first epoch of post-Atlantean spiritual culture. The two spiritual worlds were perceived as completely unified.

[ 5 ] That is one thing; but the other developed in a different place. In ancient India, on the one hand, the feelings of the unity of the outer and the inner formed in the basic mood of the soul; and one must assume that the other extreme will consist in turning the gaze outward, seeing through the carpet of the sensory world, looking at what lies hidden behind it as the spiritual world. And this is indeed the case with people of another people. They see the outer spiritual world, but they are so constituted that they cannot determine from the outset that this outer spiritual world is the same as the inner one. It is therefore not surprising that religious views and philosophical ideas arise which fervently turn toward the gods and spirits beyond the sensory world; that the people are given mythical or other names for such divine-spiritual beings that are out there behind the veil of the sensory world; when, in the corresponding mysteries, the pupils are led into that spiritual world itself which lies behind the world of the senses. And it will not be surprising if, alongside such mysteries and such folk gods, there is something else, if at the same time there are mysteries which lead people through the inner life of the soul, the path to the foundations of this inner life of the soul. And indeed, one finds a cultural area in the post-Atlantean period where these two types of mysteries exist side by side, where on the one hand the so-called Apollonian circle of belief and the Apollonian mysteries are formed, and on the other hand the Dionysian circle of belief and the Dionysian mysteries. One finds this division in ancient Greece.

[ 6 ] On the one hand, there is the path that is shown—both to the people and to the initiates—out into the spiritual world, toward that which lies beyond the senses, toward that which is summed up as the spiritual world that lies beyond the sun. To the extent that the Greeks can perceive it, they designate it by the name of the Apollonian beings. Apollo, the sun god, was the representative of these divine-spiritual beings that lie beyond the veil of the sensory world. Then there was a kind of mystery that pointed the way through the life of the soul into the spiritual depths of that life, of which it was already said yesterday that one should enter them only with careful preparation and maturity. Therefore, this second type of mystery was more protected against immaturity than the Apollonian one. And for the broader populace, there was the Apollonian circle of gods, while the spiritual beings that could be found on the path through the inner world were virtually reserved for those who first matured through special intellectual and moral training of their inner life. This second type of religious circle and mysteries was summarized under the name of the Dionysian Mysteries, and the being who stands at the center of all this is Dionysus. No wonder, then, that in Dionysus, the spirit standing at the center of this inner circle of gods, one found a being who was close to the human soul, who was, so to speak, something like a human being, but who was perceived as a human being who does not ascend to the physical world, but whom one found when descending from the physical world to the foundations of soul life. Here lie the true, deeper causes for the division of Greek spiritual life into an Apollonian and a Dionysian aspect. In more recent times, a sense of this began to emerge in various quarters—that such a thing had existed in Greece. In the circles around Richard Wagner, one sensed that such a thing had existed, even if there was no clear awareness of where the spiritual foundations of the matter lay. And Friedrich Nietzsche, emerging from Wagner’s circle, based his first remarkable, brilliant work, *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*, precisely on this division of Greek spiritual life into an Apollonian and a Dionysian aspect. All of this was a sense of what can be increasingly recognized through spiritual deepening. In many places today, it is as if the modern spirit is yearning for such deepening. Everywhere there is a sense that this deepening alone will provide the answer to what people so deeply yearn for. Thus we see how, in ancient Greece, these two—so to speak—divine-spiritual worlds stand side by side. There they appeared in their coexistence. In ancient India, they appeared in their interpenetration, in their mutual permeation.

[ 7 ] And now we look at the development itself. We said yesterday that only from the most advanced position of the northern peoples' stream, from the ancient Persian Zarathustra culture, could the ideal emerge of creating a body in which the essence approaching humanity and the earth from outside could be embodied. And Zarathustra himself ensures that he goes through incarnation after incarnation in order to be reborn in a body so spiritualized that it could later take in the high sun god in his full form, in the form of Christ. Zarathustra was reborn as Jesus of Nazareth, and through his various incarnations he matured to become the bearer of the sun spirit for three years. How, then, does Apollo relate to Christ? This question must be weighing heavily on your mind. When the Greeks pronounced the name Apollo, they were indeed referring to the spiritual realm that stands behind the sun. But we make a certain distinction in our understanding of a being or thing, depending on our capacity to do so. Those who have cultivated a richer life in their souls are also capable of seeing things that others also see in a truer form, so that we have to say that when the Greeks uttered the word Apollo, they were indeed referring to the being who was later to reveal himself as Christ, but that they perceived this being only in a kind of veiled form as Apollo. It is like a garment of Christ, which in its forms is similar to the being who is inside it, when we say Apollo and Christ. It was necessary, as it were, for layer after layer to fall away from the form that people had placed before their souls as Apollo, in order to make Christ comprehensible and visible to human beings. Thus Apollo is indeed an indication of Christ, but he is not Christ himself.

[ 8 ] What, then, in a certain sense, is the most fundamental characteristic of Christ for our cycle of development? When we look at all the divine-spiritual beings, the spiritual entities that ancient people looked up to as the higher gods behind the veil of the sensory world, whom they saw as the rulers and masters of the regions of the world and of world activities, we must say of all these beings: It is their peculiarity that they do not penetrate in truth into the physical world; they only become visible to the seeing consciousness that goes beyond the physical world, to the seeing of the etheric. Then Zeus, Apollo, Mars, all these beings, which are indeed realities, became visible as Wodan, Odin, Thor, and so on. But we could also say: These spiritual beings did not have the peculiarity of descending to the physical world, at most they showed themselves temporarily in some physical embodiment, which is spiritually indicated in the myths by momentary humanizations or other forms of Zeus or others who descended to humans to perform this or that. However, we cannot speak of a permanent physical embodiment of these spiritual beings that stand behind the sensory world. We can therefore say that Apollo is a figure who is not capable of descending to physical embodiment. This requires more power than Apollo had; it requires the power of Christ. Christ had the qualities of all the other beings in the world outside, all the qualities that were visible to the seeing consciousness, and he also had the one quality of breaking through the boundary that separates the world of the gods from the world of humans, and entering into a human body, becoming human in a physical human body that had been prepared for this purpose on Earth. Only Christ had this gift in the divine-spiritual world. Thus, a being, mind you, a being of the divine-spiritual world, descended to the point where a dwelling place is taken up in a human body within the sensory world, where one lives as a human being among other human beings. That is the great, mighty event of Christ. That is how we must understand it. So while all gods and spirits can only be found above the physical world by the seeing consciousness, Christ is found within this physical world, even though He is of the same kind and essence as the divine-spiritual beings. Outwardly, therefore, only the other gods can be found; he is the One who at the same time lives within the human being, who, so to speak, leaves the outer worlds of the gods and enters the human being. This was a very significant event in the development of the world and of humanity. If one had sought a god within, one would previously have had to descend to the subterranean gods hidden behind the veil of soul experiences; in Christ, one has such a god who can be found both externally and internally. This is the essential thing that occurred in the fourth period of the post-Atlantean era, after the Indian, Persian, and Egyptian periods. What was thought and seen more abstractly in ancient India, that the divine-spiritual world is a unified whole, that “tat” and Brahman, which flow from two sides of the soul, are one, became living life through the Christ event. Previously, one could say: The divine that one finds on the path outward and the divine that one finds on the path inward are one. Now one could say: One need only descend into the human interior. If one participates in Christ, one finds a being that is Apollo and Dionysus in one entity.

[ 9 ] But now another question arises. We have seen that the spiritual beings who exist in the outer world as divine-spiritual beings are, as it were, represented for human beings by the most powerful of these beings, by Christ, who, as an outer being, simultaneously becomes an inner being. What, then, of the other beings whom we described yesterday, in a certain sense, as Luciferic beings? Could one perhaps also say that the beings who were thus under the guidance of Dionysus develop in the same way into human soul life, and that, from the other side, some Dionysus, a Luciferic being, has incarnated as a human being? Can one say the same thing? No, one cannot say that. This is precisely the experience of spiritual development: that one cannot say the same about this world. And here we come to something that is fundamentally and essentially connected with the entire development of humanity and the worlds. If we were to go back to very, very ancient times in the development of humanity and the world, we would find that the soul looks outward and sees the divine-spiritual world outside; that it looks inward and sees the divine-spiritual world within; that the soul finds the Apollonian world outside and the Dionysian world within itself, to use Greek terms. If we then move forward in the development of humanity and the world, we see a different result. In the very earliest times, when the vast majority of people were clairvoyant, the situation was as I have just described. Outside one saw the higher gods, inside the lower gods; and one had these two paths into the spiritual world. When we consider later times, we have before us a humanity that has become weaker in terms of its visionary abilities. People have increasingly lost the original, ancient, dim, twilight vision. But let us take a time in which few people still possessed natural vision. These people—we need not go very far back; we find such people even in the Chaldean-Egyptian world—saw, when they penetrated through the veil of the sensory world, the higher gods, and when they descended into their own inner being, the lower gods. These impressions were clearer and more powerful for those who were initiated to a certain degree. It should be noted that in every age there were also such initiates who fully recognized the unity of the two worlds. But these are the pinnacles of humanity.

[ 10 ] So, centuries before Christ appeared on Earth, there were people who still had the old way of seeing things, and initiates who could walk one path and find the higher gods, and others who could walk the other path and find the lower gods. But then a time came when the world we could call the world of the lower gods withdrew more and more from human life, and it became difficult even for those who were a little bit initiated to reach it—a time when it was relatively easy to reach for those who were a little bit initiated, but a time when it was difficult for those who were a little bit initiated to reach it. and more withdrew from human life, in which it was difficult even for a slightly initiated person to reach them — a time, however, in which it was relatively easy to reach, with a low degree of initiation, what we call the higher gods, who lie behind the outer world of the senses. Take, for example, someone who was initiated in the ancient Jewish-Hebrew world. It was precisely those who were initiated into this world who, unless they were particularly highly initiated, were able to experience that with their limited vision they were looking into a world in which Yahweh was not merely a concept, an idea, but an ethereal reality, a being who spoke to them like a human being to the seeing eye. So while Yahweh was a proclamation for the people, something that one only said was there, he was a reality for the initiated. On the other hand, it would have been more difficult for someone initiated into the ancient Hebrew world to find something when he delved into his own soul life, when he sought the realm of the lower gods. He would have had to say to himself: Yes, I cannot get to the bottom of this;

[ 11 ] I find my soul life everywhere, I cannot penetrate the dense crust of my soul life to reach the lower gods. Thus, the lower gods had withdrawn into a certain unknown darkness. It was the time of Christ's descent to earth, when the Luciferic spirits had withdrawn into darkness to a certain extent. And in outer humanity, all that could be heard in those times was: There are mysteries; those who are initiated into the mysteries attain the ability to penetrate into the Dionysian world through the forces of the soul life. People had a vague sense of something that could be explored in the deep secrets of the mysteries. But it was only something that was hinted at, something that very few people had a clear idea of during the time of expectation of Christ. They had much clearer ideas about the outer gods. There were many people who still had a living experience of these outer gods. But now humanity is advancing in its development. And what is the result of this advancement?

[ 12 ] There will be a history for outer humanity, and there will also be a history for the mysteries in the future. Outer humanity will transform its spiritual culture, and Christ will become more and more at home in outer humanity. But even in the mysteries, people will recognize the nature and essence of Christ, whom they have hardly begun to understand today. The God who could be seen at the time of Zarathustra, when one turned one's gaze toward the sun and became seeing, and who descended to earth, this God will be grasped more and more intimately by the human soul. The God who was the ruler of the outer world will become more and more inward. Christ is passing through the world in such a way that he is becoming more and more a mystical God who has descended to earth from a cosmic God, and who can be experienced by human beings in the inner life of the soul. That is why, at the time when Christ descended, it was possible to realize what his disciples described when they said: We have laid our hands in his wounds, we ourselves have heard his words on the mountain. One could refer to something external. The essential thing was that Christ was there externally. At that time, it was not possible to experience him mystically within oneself; it was not possible to grasp his Dionysian nature; one had to experience him first as the external, historical Christ. But this is the progress in the Christ consciousness of humanity, that it descends ever deeper into the soul, that people will be able to see more and more inwardly, that they will increasingly experience their own soul experiences mystically within themselves and will increasingly experience the external Christ as the Christ in their own souls, the mystical Christ. Consider how, in the so-called mysticism that appeared in the early days of Christian development through Dionysius the Areopagite, who was a friend and disciple of Paul, Christ was initially recognized through external occult abilities. And all descriptions of this first Christian occult school are such that Christ is essentially described according to those qualities that He unfolds in the outer worlds, which could be experienced through the outwardly directed, instinctively seeing gaze. And let us ascend a few centuries in human development and see what has become of it. Consider the medieval mystical development, the deep inner experience of a Meister Eckhart, a Johannes Tauler, and so on, up to our more recent mystics—there are people who look down into their own inner being. Just as in ancient times people looked inward in order to see through this inner being and reach Dionysus, so the newer mystics penetrate inward and can say, like Meister Eckhart: “The historical Christ is indeed a fact; he did indeed develop in history, but it is possible to descend into one's own inner being and find the inner, mystical Christ.” Thus the human soul develops to find the Dionysian nature of Christ, the mystical Christ, not only in the outer world but also within itself. First there was the historical Christ, then through the work of the historical Christ such effects on the human soul developed that a mystical Christ became possible within humanity. Thus, for the more recent times, we can also speak of an inner mystical experience of Christ; but we must understand that Christ was a cosmic being before his entry into the earth. If one immersed oneself in the inner soul life at that time, one did not find Christ, but Dionysus. Today, if one has developed in the appropriate way, one finds an inner Christ being. Christ has become transformed from an outer divinity into an inner divinity, which will increasingly take hold of the human soul the more the soul approaches this Christ through its soul experiences.

[ 13 ] Here you have an example of how a reversal takes place with what develops through the world as principles. When people today say that there is a mystical Christ within them, they should not forget that everything in the world has developed and that mystical consciousness is not the same in all ages, but that it too has become what it is. When the ancient holy Rishis looked up into the spiritual worlds, they spoke of Karman and had in mind the same entity as the later ones, as a cosmic entity, which Zarathustra also meant when he spoke of Ahura Mazdao. It was the Christ essence. Today it can also be found within us as the mystical Christ. That it is so is the deed of Christ himself on earth. This is how the cosmic, astronomical Christ truly relates to the mystical Christ. Thus, the outer God gradually became an inner God.

[ 14 ] But because everything that happens in the outer physical world is an effect of the spiritual, this Christianization of the soul also has an effect on the other life. This effect will first show itself in the mysteries and has already shown itself in part since the founding of the Western mystery schools of the Rosicrucians. When one had deepened into the soul through the training of the ancient mysteries and had risen to the lower gods, one found Dionysus, which is only another name for the wide world of the Luciferic deities. But even the seeing consciousness, if it had not risen to the highest degrees, disappeared into darkness as Christ approached the earth in his glory; the Luciferic being disappeared. Only the highest initiates were still able to descend to the Luciferic gods. The other people had to be told: If you descend there uncleansed and immature, these Luciferic beings will appear to you only as wild demons in their distorted images, tempting you to do all kinds of evil in their transformed characteristics. Hence all the terrible descriptions given of this underground realm, hence the fear of the name Lucifer at a certain time. And because everything is inherited by people who do not progress with evolution, this fear still lives on today in those who have inherited these feelings, the fear of the name Lucifer. But the fact is that the Luciferic world reappears to the seeing human being after the Christ principle has permeated the soul for a while. Once Christ has worked in the soul for a while, that soul, having been permeated by the Christ substance, becomes mature through its Christianization to penetrate once again into the realm of the Luciferic beings. At first, only the initiates of the Rosicrucians were able to do this. They endeavored to understand and see Christ in such a form that he also entered their souls as the mystical Christ, that he lives in them, that they are, so to speak, strong through this Christ substance within themselves, and that this Christ substance is their defense and weapon against all attacks. Thus, this Christ substance within them becomes a new light that now illuminates them inwardly, an inner astral light. The historical experience of Christ in his truth illuminates our soul experiences in such a way that we become capable of penetrating once more into the Luciferic realm. At first, the initiates of the Rosicrucians were able to do this, and little by little these initiates of the Rosicrucians will carry forth what they are able to experience about the Luciferic principle, and they will pour out upon the world that great spiritual marriage which consists in the fact that Christ, who poured Himself as substance into the human soul, is now understood with those spiritual abilities which mature through the inflow of the Luciferic principle in a new way into the spirit of each individual human being.

[ 15 ] Let us first consider an initiate of the Rosicrucians. Such an initiate prepares himself first by directing the feelings, sensations, and thoughts of his soul toward the great central figure of Christ, by allowing, for example, the Gospel of John to work upon him; that monumental, immensely significant figure who is described to us in the Gospel of John. And when we enliven this with other documents of Christian education, our soul is increasingly permeated by the spiritual substance of Christ, purified and cleansed in the Christianization. And if we continue to enliven this through other documents of Christian education, then our soul is increasingly permeated by the spiritual substance of Christ, purified and cleansed in Christianization up into higher worlds. This purifies and cleanses our mind in particular. We either learn to feel Christ in such a universal way as Meister Eckhart and Tauler did, or we learn to experience him in such a delicate way as Ssso and others did; we feel at one with what has flowed in from the great heavenly worlds through the Christ event on our earth. Then one becomes ripe to be initiated as an initiate of the Rosicrucians into those worlds which in ancient times could be called the Dionysian worlds and which are now called the Luciferic worlds. What effect do these initiations into the Luciferic worlds have on today's Rosicrucian initiates? If the mind becomes warm and filled with enthusiasm for the divine when it is Christianized, then on the other hand our other spiritual faculties, through which we understand and comprehend the world, are illuminated, permeated, and energized by the Luciferic principle. In this way, the initiate of the Rosicrucians ascends to the Luciferic principle. In doing so, his spiritual faculties are sharpened and refined through initiation, so that he can not only feel Christ mystically in his soul, but can describe him, can tell what he is like, can grasp him in thought images, in spiritual images, so that he is not only felt and experienced in a dark way, but stands before him in concrete contours as a figure of the outer world, of the outer sensory world with concrete contours. Experiencing Christ as soul substance is possible because human beings direct their gaze to the Christ figure as he appears to them in the Gospels. To describe and understand Christ in the same way that one understands other phenomena and experiences in the world, and thereby to comprehend his greatness, his significance for the world, and his causality for world events, is only possible if the Christian mystic continues to ascend to the knowledge of the Luciferic realms. Within the Rosicrucian Order, Lucifer thus gives us the ability to first describe and understand Christ. One can imagine how evil will or misunderstanding, according to the usual use of the word Lucifer (light bearer), slanders what is presented here; but that cannot deter us from this presentation. Those who understand what is meant here by Lucifer must see things differently.

[ 16 ] What centuries have been able to do is to propagate the Gospels, to reproduce the word that flows from the Gospels, to let their hearts be warmed by these Gospels, to fill their souls with the warmth and enthusiasm that flow from the Gospels. Today we are facing a development of humanity for which it can no longer be enough to simply preserve the Gospels in the old way; today people demand something else. Those who do not want this something else will have to bear the karma of resisting the introduction of the Luciferic principle into the interpretation of the Gospels. May there still be many people among us who say: Oh, come now, we want to accept the Gospels as Christians, we feel satisfied with them; Christ speaks from the Gospels, he speaks from the Gospels even when we receive them as they have been handed down through the centuries in the traditional religion. Such people may believe that they are Christians; they may repeat over and over again in their own way: Keep your spiritual knowledge away from us; we have Christ in the Gospels; we want nothing to do with your work on the Gospels. Let these people repeat this, let them imagine that they are good Christians; in truth, they are enemies of Christ. They are those who, out of their own egoism, because they can still declare themselves satisfied with everything that is offered in the traditional interpretation of the Gospels, brush aside what full Christianity will bring to glory in the future. Those who today often believe themselves to be the best Christians are the strongest eradicators of true Christianity. Those who understand the development of Christianity today think in a completely different way, saying: We do not want to be egoists and say: the Gospels are enough for us, we want nothing to do with your abstractions! It is not at all such an abstraction as spiritual science offers. Those are the true Christians who know that humanity today needs something other than the Christianity of the egoists who say: We know that the world can no longer exist with the old tradition of the Gospels; we know that it is necessary in the world for the light from Lucifer's realm to fall upon the Gospels. These people hear the teachings that emerge from the initiation centers of the Rosicrucians, where spiritual abilities have been sharpened through the Luciferic principle in order to penetrate ever more deeply into the Gospels. And for these initiates it has become clear: indeed, the Gospels have such infinite depth that one must not believe that they can be exhausted by this or that. But now the time has come when the Rosicrucians must let their teachings flow out into the world, when the mysteries of the Rosicrucians are called upon to drop what they have gained in sharpening their spiritual powers from the Luciferic world onto the Gospels. It is Western spiritual knowledge that the light which shines forth can be gained from Lucifer's realm and cast upon the Gospels. Spiritual science must become an instrument for interpreting the Gospels; and the greatness, power, and substance of the Gospels will become visible when the light from Lucifer's realm falls on these Gospels by way of the detour gained through the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Thus it is part of spiritual scientific work to introduce people to the joyful messages of the Christian essence that permeates the world; to let the light that is gained from Lucifer's realm on the path of initiation through the Rosicrucians fall upon the Gospels. Thus we see that Christ, who became the mystical Christ from a God who lived in the outer world, through his ennoblement of the human soul brought it back into that realm which had to remain closed for a while, which was called the Dionysian in ancient times, and which will be reconquered in the times toward which humanity is moving in the future. The explanation of Christ through the spiritual abilities heightened and enlightened by Lucifer is the inner core of the spiritual stream that must flow in the West. And what I have said is the mission of the Rosicrucians for the future. ^{2Compare the corresponding explanations in my “Secret Science.”}

[ 17 ] So what is actually happening in the evolution of humanity? What happened and is happening is that Christ and Lucifer, one as the cosmic God and the other as the inner God of humanity, walked side by side in ancient times, so that one was found, so to speak, in the upper regions and the other in the lower regions; that then the world progressed and for a time, far from the earth, knew Dionysus, Lucifer; but that in return one had the experience that the cosmic Christ was penetrating more and more into the earth, permeating the soul more and more, but that now Lucifer was again becoming visible, again recognizable. The paths taken by these two divine-spiritual beings are as follows: they approach from two different sides of the earth; Lucifer becomes invisible when he crosses paths with Christ; he is, as it were, outshone by the light of Christ as the other light. In the past, Christ was found as a cosmic being and Lucifer as an inner human being. They crossed paths. Christ enters the human soul, becomes the planetary spirit of the earth, and increasingly becomes the mystical Christ in human souls, deepened and recognized through inner experiences. The soul thereby becomes increasingly able to see the other being, who has taken the opposite path, from the inner to the outer. Lucifer becomes a cosmic god out of an inner human being, a purely earthly being, where he was sought in the mysteries that led to the lower realm. He will shine more and more in the world we see when we look through the veil of the sensory world. The view of human beings is reversed. Once one has seen Lucifer behind the veil of the inner soul world, once one has seen Christ, like Zarathustra, behind the outer sensory world, one will in the future be able to recognize Christ more and more through contemplation and internalization into one's own being. One will find Lucifer when one directs one's gaze outward into the cosmic region.

[ 18 ] Thus, we see a complete reversal of human knowledge in the course of human development: Christ has become from a cosmic God to an earthly God, who is the soul of the earth in the future. Lucifer has become from an earthly God to a cosmic God. And if human beings want to ascend again in the future to the outer spiritual world hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, if they do not want to remain with what is external and only gross material, then they must penetrate through the things of the sensory world into the spiritual world; they must allow themselves to be carried into the light by the “light bearer.” And no abilities to penetrate there will arise in man if he does not create these abilities from the forces that flow to us from Lucifer's realm. Humanity would sink into materialism, remaining forever in the belief that everything is only the outer material world, if it did not ascend to inspiration through the Luciferic principle. If the Christ principle is called upon to make our inner being stronger and stronger, then the Lucifer principle is called upon to sharpen and develop our abilities that should penetrate the world in its full extent. Lucifer will make us stronger and stronger in our understanding and recognition of the world, and Christ will make us stronger and stronger within.