The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] From what has been said in the last two lectures here, you will gather that there are certain facts in the development of humanity that are hardly noticed in outer life, but through their neglect much is misunderstood that is taking place in the spiritual foundations of this development. You can see from the conclusion of yesterday's lecture that what can be called the mystical Christ experience, the experience that human beings can have when, through contemplation within themselves, they permeate their soul experiences with what we have called the Christ substance, was not always there, but developed over time. Yes, one can see that the historical event of the descent of Christ was necessary as a prerequisite for the presence of the mystical Christ in the soul, so that one cannot say that the mystical Christ experience would always have been possible for human souls in pre-Christian times; a Meister Eckhart or similar personalities with their inner mystical experiences are only possible in the Christian era, not before. Abstract thinking will not understand this at all from the outset; only concrete, spiritually realistic thinking that goes to the facts will understand it. Even what has been said about the relationships between the Luciferic beings and the Christ Being can only be understood if one assumes that a change in the entire human organization, imperceptible to the outer senses and the outer intellect but no less radical for that, took place during the millennia before the appearance of Christ and during the centuries after it. Human beings have changed significantly since the Atlantean catastrophe. And if, in the present cycle of human evolution, everything in external life experience depends on human beings perceiving the world through the instruments available to them in the three bodies—the physical, etheric, and astral—when they enter into incarnation, then it depends on the changes which changes the organization of these sheaths that determine how they perceive the world in successive epochs. There is no absolutely true view for all times. People can only see the world in accordance with their organization.

[ 2 ] Let us now consider the most radical change in human nature that has taken place since the Atlantean catastrophe, through the first great human culture in the post-Atlantean era, through ancient Inderism and Primitive Persia, through the Chaldean-Egyptian and Greek-Latin cultural epochs, right up to our own time. You know that before the Atlantean catastrophe, the entire relationship between the individual members of human nature was different than it was later. The interaction between the etheric body and the physical body was not the same before the great Atlantean catastrophe as it was afterwards. The etheric body of the head, for example, was more powerfully developed than the physical head and more loosely connected to it. This is precisely what the further development expresses, that the connection between the etheric body and the physical body becomes ever more intense and that both become ever more similar to each other. Now, all the forces for the organization of the physical body, for the joining and harmonization of the members of the physical body, lie in the etheric body. One can therefore say that in the Atlantean humanity, the situation was such that the forces that constructed the physical body acted from outside, from an etheric body that was located outside the physical body, particularly in relation to the head. Then these forces drew themselves into the space of the physical body and today they work more internally, animating and stimulating. But this only developed gradually. The etheric body slowly slipped into the physical body. And if we want to understand ancient Indian culture, we must be clear that things were different then than during the Chaldean-Egyptian period. In the people of the Greek-Latin period, however, a complete interpenetration of the etheric body and the physical body had already been achieved, so that for the clairvoyant consciousness, the etheric body did not extend far beyond the physical body at any point in the human organization.

[ 3 ] This was not yet the case with the Indians. There, the clairvoyant gaze would have seen everywhere how the etheric body still protruded beyond the physical body, especially in relation to the head. This is why the members of the ancient Indian people saw the world differently from the members of the Egyptian people. The members of the Greek-Latin people essentially saw things as we do today; they saw the world spread out as a tapestry of colors, sounds, forms, and so on. However, this entire world, spread out before us in our present-day sensory perceptions, was finely interwoven, for the Indian mind of the earliest times, with what might be called misty clouds of an etheric nature, rising from all things as if they were burning and a fine misty smoke were streaming out of every form. One saw an ethereal element that was laid over all things like fine dew or frost. This peculiar way of seeing was natural at that time. Today, the human soul can only acquire it through spiritual scientific exercises. This is the meaning of the further development of humanity through the various cultural epochs, that the etheric body descends deeper and deeper into the physical body. This changes human perception, since it depends on the way the etheric body is organized. And this in turn is connected with the fact that the Luciferic beings of the kind that reveal themselves within the earth and within the soul ascend to cosmic levels of existence, and that the Christ being, which is previously cosmic and descends to incarnation in the human body, now becomes one that reveals itself within the earth and within the soul. This interpenetration of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles, this passing over of the Luciferic and Christ beings, as it were, was only made possible by the change in the human organization. But this change was not only necessary for the assessment of the past, but also for the preparation of the future. We are now indeed living in an age in which the most intimate interpenetration between the etheric body and the physical body is already behind us; we are now already living in the opposite direction of development. We are living in a time in which the etheric body is slowly withdrawing from the physical body. It is normal human development into the future that the etheric body gradually leaves the physical body again; and times will come when the human organization will look again as it did in ancient times, so that we will again feel how the etheric body protrudes above the physical. We are in the midst of this process, and many of the more subtle symptoms of disease in the present day would be understandable if we knew this. But all this corresponds to great cosmic laws. Human beings could not reach their goal of development if they did not undergo this kind of cross-fertilization of their organizational members. But everything that is within us is permeated by our entire environment; it is permeated by the divine-spiritual beings that are in the spiritual world and send their streams into us, just as the physical elements of the earth send their streams into our physical organism. At that time, when the etheric body was outside the physical body, currents flowed continuously into this etheric body, which human beings consciously perceived and experienced as cosmic revelations. Human beings felt this as something that revealed itself to their inner being. What sank into the etheric body from the spiritual world in these streams was also what worked on the formation of the physical body.

[ 4 ] If we now characterize what has been said here in recent days from the outer point of view, we can say that what had sunk into the etheric body of the human being and what the human being experienced as the innermost element were the influences of the Luciferic world. Since the ancient times of pre-Atlantean development, human beings had brought with them a legacy: the Luciferic influences that flowed into their etheric bodies. The fact that these Luciferic influences became obscured, that human beings, especially at the time of Christ's appearance, are unaware of them unless they are highly initiated, can be explained by the fact that the etheric body moves more and more into the physical body, becomes one with it, and learns more and more to use the physical organs. Therefore, it was necessary for the divine Being who was to appear on earth to appear in a physically perceptible form, physically embodied like other physical beings on earth. The humanity of that time could only understand a God appearing in the body because they had been accustomed to calling true that which could be seen through the instruments of the physical body. This had to be so in humanity so that those who were around Christ could speak in confirmation of what had happened: We have laid our hands on his wounds and our fingers in the marks of the nails. This sensory certainty had to live in people as a feeling, like a feeling that, when present, contributes to the truth of the matter. A person in ancient Indian times would not have given anything for this; he would have said: The spiritual, perceived with the senses, does not mean much to me; if you want to perceive the spiritual, you must ascend to some degree of intuitive knowledge. So the understanding of Christ had to develop first, like everything else in the world.

[ 5 ] But what man had as the Luciferic influence in his etheric body, what he brought with him from ancient times, when his etheric body did not yet live entirely in the physical body, when it was still outside and received the influences of Lucifer through the outer parts, that disappeared, that was gradually used up. With the etheric body slipping into the physical body, human beings lost the ability to perceive the higher worlds with their etheric organs. Thus, looking back to a certain time, we can say of our human ancestors: They still looked into the higher worlds; what they saw is preserved in the scriptures. — One can point to an ancient wisdom. But later on, this was no longer directly accessible because, to the same extent that the etheric body moved into the physical body, human beings could only use their physical senses and their physical intellect, and the power of vision was paralyzed. The possibility of looking into the spiritual world is then only possible for the initiated, who ascend to the supersensible worlds through systematic training.

[ 6 ] Now I told you that the reverse process is now taking place. Humanity is entering a stage where the etheric body is, in a certain sense, forming itself out of the physical body again; but you must not believe that it now receives everything it brought with it from the past as an old inheritance. If nothing happened, the etheric body of the human being would simply withdraw from the physical body. It would contain none of the forces it once had. In the future, it will be born out of the human physical body. If the human physical body gives it nothing, then it is empty, then it is barren. This will be the future of human evolution, that human beings will, so to speak, release their etheric body from their physical body and eventually be able to send it out empty. What would that mean? The etheric body is the carrier of forces, the initiator of everything that goes on in the physical body. It must not only supply the physical body with forces when it is completely within the physical body, it must supply it at all times; it will also have to supply it when it is once again partially outside the physical body. If you leave the etheric body empty, give it nothing, then it cannot act back on the physical body, for then it has no power with which to act back. After passing through the physical body, the etheric body must gain its forces within the physical body. From there they must be given to it so that when it is outside it can act back upon the physical body. It is the task of the present humanity to take into itself what can only be taken up within the activity of the physical body. What is worked out within the physical body goes along with the development, and when human beings live in future incarnations in such organizations where the etheric body is released to a certain degree from the physical body, then it will live in consciousness as a kind of memory through the partially freed etheric body.

[ 7 ] Now one may ask: What is it that enables the physical body to pass something on to the etheric body as an inheritance? What enables human beings to send forces into their etheric body so that they will one day be able to carry such an etheric body, which in turn sends certain forces from outside? If human beings had lived only from, say, 3000 BC until that time, and again for three millennia after Christ, and nothing had happened to them beyond what existed before the Christ event, then human beings would have experienced nothing in their physical bodies that could pass on as a force to the etheric body when it detached itself from the physical body. What human beings can take with them is what they can gain through the Christ experience within the physical world. All connection with the Christ principle, with the experiences that can be had of the Christ appearance, sinks so deeply into the experiences of the soul within the physical world that this soul, and with it everything physical, is prepared in such a way that it can pour into the etheric body what it will need in the future. The Christ experience had to come, it had to permeate the human soul so that human beings could understand their development in the future. What is in the physical body today sends forces out into the etheric body; and when this is nourished, as it were, by what the physical body experiences in the appearance of Christ, it receives the forces to become brightly radiant again and to have the life force to sustain the physical body in the future. What people experienced in Christ through this reversal of principles has a positive meaning for the future of human development.

[ 8 ] But this event alone would not suffice. For remember that by going through the Christ experience in your own soul, by becoming ever more familiar with Christ, by growing ever more and more together with your own soul experiences, you do indeed influence the etheric body, pouring streams of energy into your etheric body. But if this etheric body now moves out and enters a wrong element, if it does not encounter forces outside that can in turn sustain and enliven what has been drawn into it as the Christ principle, then the etheric body, when it becomes partially free, will indeed have the Christ force, but it will penetrate into an element where it cannot live. It would be destroyed by the outer forces. Because it is permeated by Christ, it would meet its destruction in an element unsuitable for it and have a destructive effect on the physical body. What is the second thing that is necessary? It is that this etheric body must make itself suitable to receive the light from Lucifer's realm again. Thus, whereas man formerly saw Lucifer emerge as an inner experience through the veil of his soul life, he must now prepare himself so that he can experience Lucifer as a cosmic being in his environment. Lucifer becomes a cosmic deity from an underground deity, and human beings must prepare themselves to equip their etheric bodies with such forces that Lucifer can be a fertilizing, promoting element and not a destructive one. Human beings must go through the Christ experience, but in such a way that they become receptive to seeing in this world the spiritual foundations, the foundations of the spiritual events from which the world has sprung. So man goes through the Christ experience, and it is justified in the whole nature of evolution that spiritual scientific training prepares people to understand once again the light from Lucifer's realm, because only in this way can the human etheric body receive its corresponding life forces. Human beings were already influenced by Christ before he appeared on earth. Even when Zarathustra pointed upward to Ahura Mazdao, the power of Christ was shining down. And from the other side, the power of Lucifer was shining. This will be reversed. In the future, the power of Lucifer will shine in from outside, and Christ will live within. The human organization must once again be influenced from two sides. The ancient Indian felt on the one hand: That is you — and on the other hand: I am the universe; he felt that what he saw outside was the same world as what he saw inside. This was felt in ancient India as an abstract truth; it will then be experienced as a concrete experience on earth when the time is ripe, when, in a new form, through the appropriate preparations, what was previously proclaimed in ancient India will come to life again. Such is the course of human evolution in the post-Atlantean era.

[ 9 ] Now we can see from this that the development of humanity is not linear, but proceeds in a similar way to everything else in nature. I gave you the example of the plant that grows but cannot bear fruit unless its development receives a new impulse. Here you have a picture that shows you that other influences must come from the side. There is no straight-line development. The Luciferic and Christ principles had to overlap, so to speak. Those who seek development in a straight line will never be able to understand the real development of the world; only those who grasp the separate currents and then see how they fertilize each other can truly understand what is developing. In the time when, during the ancient Indian culture, people were still organized in a certain way that was different from later times, this human way of seeing was different. Only those who acquire it through the methods of spiritual scientific research appropriate to the present time can have a certain experience of what this human way of seeing was like at that time. Today, this can only be acquired artificially; in the past, it was a natural ability. Even for a well-prepared student of spiritual science, it is difficult to understand how soul experiences were different in ancient Indian times than they were later, and one can only attempt to describe in approximate terms how they were different.

[ 10 ] When people today look out into the world, they perceive it through their various senses. We cannot go into everything that modern science has to say about sensory perceptions. That need not interest us today; we can remain with the common idea that human beings perceive the external world through their various senses and synthesize the various impressions with the mental faculty that is connected to the physical brain. If you think about it, you will realize that there is a tremendous difference within the sensory perceptions in terms of their entire nature. Compare, for example, hearing, the sensation of hearing, with the sensory perception of sight. Isn't it quite obvious that, when we look for the corresponding facts in the external world, there is a form of movement of matter, namely regularly moving air, that corresponds to what we hear? We find this outside; when we hold the instrument of our hearing up to this regularly moving air, we experience what we call the sensation of hearing. But the inner experience of hearing and what we perceive outside as moving air are two completely different things. If you take the sense of sight, you will see that the matter is not as simple as it is with hearing. Modern physics has made it easy for itself. It has thought analogously: Let us assume a finer substance that moves in the same way as the air outside. — The big difference for the realistic thinker is that it is very easy to convince oneself of what is vibrating outside in relation to the ear. It is easy to conclude that something is really moving outside—when it comes to the process of hearing—if you place small pieces of paper on a string and pluck the string. But no one can convince themselves of the existence of what vibrates in the ether; that is a hypothesis, it only exists in physical theory. For realistic thinking, it does not exist. The sensory perception of the face is something fundamentally different from that of the ear. When we speak of light perception, what we perceive is, so to speak, much more objective than what we perceive through the sense of hearing. We perceive light as color, we perceive it spread out in space, but we cannot go out into the external world in the same way and look for objective processes as we do with sound. It is differences like these that modern man so easily overlooks. With his more refined awareness of the entire external world, the ancient Indian could not overlook such things. He perceived all these subtle external differences.

[ 11 ] I just wanted to point out that there are characteristic differences between the individual sensory areas in terms of their essence. If you observe the German language, you may notice that the same word is used to describe an inner soul experience and—I admit that this also happens in imprecise speech—an impression that in a certain way comes from outside. That is the word feeling. You know that when we speak of the five senses, we count sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling; in the trivial sense, feeling means the sense of touch, but we speak of feeling and count what this sense experiences as external sensory experiences — we call it feeling. However, in a much more spiritual way than is usually thought, the genius of language also describes an inner experience of the soul as feeling. When you experience joy or pain, you describe it as a feeling. This feeling we are talking about now is an intimate experience of the soul; in the other case, which is mediated by the sense of touch, there is always an external object that is the cause. The other feeling may be connected to the external object, but you can already see from this that it is not the only cause, because it can occur differently in one person than in another. The genius of language, I said, really works brilliantly here. We have two experiences: one as something connected to the external senses, and one as something connected to the inner self. The two seem quite distant from each other in today's experience. That was not always the case. And here we come to a different view of what we characterized earlier from the outside. We characterized the slipping in of the etheric body and its slipping out. This is connected with the fact that something is also happening inside the human being. Today, these two experiences, the emotional experience within and the emotional experience that we also describe with the word “feeling,” which is caused by the external object with the help of the sense of touch, are two things that are separate from each other. The further back we go in the development of humanity, that is, the further the etheric body is outside the physical body, the closer these two experiences come together. Today they are far apart for human beings. In Indian times, this difference was not justified in the same way as it is today. Then the inner emotional experience and the outer were still infinitely closer together. How so?

[ 12 ] If you encounter a person today who harbors negative thoughts toward you, let us say that you are not appealing to them, and they express their feelings accordingly, then, if you are initially equipped only with your external senses and your physical brain, you will generally not notice much of their feelings, sympathies, or antipathies. If they hit you, then you will notice it, your sense of feeling will notice it. In ancient Indian times, this was different. People were still organized in such a way that they not only perceived what affects our crude sense of touch today, but also what has already withdrawn into the inner self; they could still feel what another person was feeling inside. An experience arose in their soul similar to what you have today through your sense of touch, through the sympathy that lived in the other person. They felt what was going on physically and emotionally. However, in those times, what we call our inner emotional life was not yet developed in such an inner way; it was still more connected to the outer world. People did not yet withdraw into their inner selves as they do today. They experienced pain and joy that in many respects corresponded more to the events of the outer world than ours do today; they could not withdraw into their inner selves as we can today. Today, the inner soul experience is much more torn away from the whole environment than it used to be. Today, people can even reach a point where they are surrounded by circumstances that could not be better; but because their inner soul life is torn away from their environment, they may feel inner pain because of the way they relate to the world, without really having any reason to do so. This would have been impossible during the ancient Indian cultural epoch. At that time, what was going on inside was a much more faithful reflection of what was happening in the external environment. People lived much more with their feelings in their environment. How did this come about? It was because in those ancient times, people had a completely different relationship to light, for example, due to their organization. The light that surrounds us does not only have its physical exterior; everything that is physical also has a soul and spirit within it. Now, human development progressed in such a way that the soul and spirit of the outer world withdrew more and more from human beings in these experiences, and only the physical became more and more perceptible. Human beings now perceived light in its effect on the eye. In earlier times, they perceived it as if it were sinking into their organization from all sides like a fluid, and they felt the soul within the light flowing through them. Today, the soul of light stops at the human skin. The Indian organism was still flooded with what lives as soul in light, and human beings perceived what flooded the light as the soul of light. This was the carrier of what could be perceived as sympathies and antipathies in other beings, which today withdraw from human beings with the soul of light. This was connected with other experiences. Today, you breathe in and out. At most, you get to know your breath through its mechanical effects. If it has any effect that causes it to cool down, you see it becoming watery. That is a mechanical way of seeing the breath. As unlikely as it may sound to people today, it is nevertheless true that, for example, spiritual scientific research today has established that most people in ancient India perceived their breath in a completely different way. The soul of light had not yet withdrawn from what was happening around the people of that time, so they perceived the air they breathed in and out in different shades of light and dark colors. They saw the air flowing in and out as if in rays of fire. So you can say that, basically, even the air has become something completely different for human perception because of all the changes that have taken place. Today, air is something that humans basically perceive only mechanically through the resistance it offers them, because they do not perceive directly the soul of light that permeates the air. Man has also emerged from this last remnant of instinctive perception. The ancient Indian would therefore not have simply called what is breathed in and out “air,” but “fire air,” because he perceived it in varying degrees of fiery radiance. This, however, also gives you the opportunity to understand that the entire environment of the air circle was something completely different for the ancient Indian than it is for modern man. Modern humans see the air as transparent; they do not see the surrounding content of the air. When a draft of air passes through a room, they perceive it only through the resistance it offers them. The ancient Indian consciousness saw fiery masses passing through the air.

[ 13 ] Here you have another example of how even in external experiences the transformation of the human organization in the course of evolution is revealed. These are the intimate processes of human development, and we can never understand what is written in the Vedas unless we know how the words are used. If we read the words there and do not know that they describe what was seen at that time, the words lose all meaning and we interpret them completely wrongly. One must always take realities into account when approaching ancient documents.

[ 14 ] What lives in the human soul changes over time. And now you will understand a fact which, if you do not have these prerequisites, which are completely independent of the evidence established by physical research, you cannot understand on the mere basis of this evidence. Look around you in the Eastern scriptures and see how the elements are listed there. They are listed as earth, water, fire, air, and ether. It is only from Greek times onwards that we find the other list, which we take for granted today and which we must take as the basis for all understanding, namely: earth, water, air, fire, and the other types of ether. Why is this so? The ancient Indian consciousness saw things just as modern man sees them: those things that manifest themselves through the solid, which we call earth, and those things that manifest themselves through the liquid, which we call water in a spiritual sense. But what we today call air was already fire to them, because they already saw the fire in the air and called what they saw fire. We no longer see this fire; we feel it as warmth. And only when they moved a little higher up in the series of elements did the Indians enter an element where, because everything has changed since the fourth period of the post-Atlantean era, what we now call air, which is permeated by light but does not show light, emerged. In fire and air, the whole view of human beings has been turned upside down. What we have said about Christ and Lucifer, that they crossed over from one realm to another, that Christ became a cosmic being and Lucifer an inner human being, has taken place in all areas of life, so that what what was still in the first post-Atlantean epoch what we call fire is perceived by us today as air, and that what we perceive as fire was then perceived as air. What underlies human evolution is expressed not only in the big picture, but also in the small. These things cannot be attributed to chance. You see how deeply one can look into what is happening in the course of human evolution when one views things from the only real point of view, from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Such consciousness, as the ancient Indians had, is therefore a consciousness that perceived something that lies within the soul and something that lies outside the soul even more as a unity; therefore, the Indians lived even more in their entire environment. The last echoes of this, of their still existing, instinctive way of seeing, are present in the rudimentary clairvoyance of those people who have what we call second sight. If you are walking somewhere on the street and the thought of a person whom you cannot physically see at that moment occurs to you, and you continue walking and after a while he comes toward you, why did you have the thought of him in your consciousness before you saw him? Because the effect of him entered your subconscious and then rose into your consciousness as a finished thought. Today, humans have only a rudimentary remnant of what was once more significant. In the past, there was a more intimate connection between inner and outer feelings. These are just further explanations of what has often been presented to you in such a way that it could be said: Humanity has developed from the old, dull clairvoyance to today's sensory consciousness and will grow into a fully conscious, seeing state. This will be achieved in such a way that human beings will consciously experience it, so that they will know that their etheric body is leaving them and that they can use the organs of the etheric body just as they use the physical organs.

[ 15 ] However, in earlier, more spiritual times, when people were wiser than today's abstract materialistic science, they were always aware that there was an old way of seeing, a seeing through the world, that people had stepped out of this old way of seeing and entered into the present state of affairs. In earlier times, people did not express what they knew in abstract formulas and theories, but through powerful, colorful images; and myths are not invented things, ingenious, fantastic images, as a fantastic scholarship from the green table believes today, but expressions of a deeper, original wisdom acquired through spiritual perception. The awareness existed in ancient times and was expressed in myths that people once had a more comprehensive understanding of the world. The clairvoyance of the ancient Indians was a last remnant of an original, dim clairvoyance. This was known in former times; but it was also known that this clairvoyance — let us call it that for the sake of brevity — was gradually receding, gradually giving way to the outer life, which is limited to the sensory world. It was precisely this fact that was expressed in the authoritative myths. For example, it was known that there were mystery centers — we spoke about them yesterday — where the path led to the underground spirits, and there were other mysteries where the path led up to the cosmic spirits. All of this was sharply distinguished from one another. Those who were not initiated knew nothing of this, just as today those who do not seek the right paths to it have no inkling that there is a mystery wisdom. But more or less, knowledge of this had penetrated into the outer world. It can also be said of the mysteries that the further back we go in time, the more significant their heyday appears to us. The Greek mysteries are no longer the most glorious. The mystery cults were also subject to decline. Nevertheless, people knew that what comes from places where contemplative consciousness still works is connected with the spiritual substance that permeates and animates the world; and they knew that where contemplative consciousness reigns, one can still learn something about world connections that cannot otherwise be known. And even though they were already in a period of decline, the oracle sites were still places where clairvoyant consciousness was cultivated and where people were told things that could not be experienced through ordinary sensory perception and through human perception, which is bound to the senses. But it was also known that human beings evolve, that what could be attained through ancient contemplation was only useful and applicable in ancient times, but not in modern times.

[ 16 ] Thus, the Greeks had a deep awareness that what came from the oracles did indeed stimulate people's curiosity, that people liked to know something about the mysterious connections in the world, but that they had already outgrown the correct handling of such clairvoyant findings; that they now stood in the world in a different way than before and therefore could not do the right thing if they adhere to the results of ancient clairvoyance. It was appropriate for the ancient people, but it is no longer appropriate for the more modern ones. That is what they wanted to say, and they said it in grandiose images. One image, for example, is that given to us in the legend of Oedipus. An oracle, that is, a place where mysterious connections that are hidden from human sight are seen clairvoyantly, tells the father that if he has a son, this son will bring disaster; he will murder his father and marry his mother. He has this son. He even tries to do what might prevent what has been seen clairvoyantly from coming to pass. The son is abandoned and taken to a completely different region. The son learns of the oracle, that is, something enters his soul that can only be explored through clairvoyant vision. The Greek consciousness wanted to say: Although something like this protrudes from ancient times, human organization has already progressed so far that it is no longer suitable for this kind of clairvoyance, that it is no longer of any use to it. Because of this changed consciousness, Oedipus interprets the oracle in such a way that it will certainly come true, that is, human beings can no longer handle clairvoyant consciousness in the right way; the spiritual world has withdrawn from them; the old clairvoyance is of no use to them anymore. But there has always been an awareness that these things will be reversed, that what comes from such worlds will once again become something for humanity, that only for a while, so to speak, a layer of experience will spread over what comes from such worlds. There was also an awareness of this, and the myth-forming forces of human evolution expressed this as well. The Christ event was the decisive factor in human evolution that caused the two forces, the Lucifer principle and the Christ principle, to come into conflict with each other. So there was a decisive turning point when, from another side, from the cosmos, what comes from the spiritual sources was to pour into human evolution like a ferment. It had been lost, but it was to be poured in again like a ferment. What had become harmful to humanity, what had turned it into evil, was to be poured in like a ferment and transformed into good. Evil was to fall into the fruitful spiritual power of human development and contribute to the good. This too found expression in mythology.

[ 17 ] There is another legend that goes something like this: An oracle prophesied to a couple that they would have a son who would bring disaster upon his entire people. This son would murder his father and marry his mother. The mother gave birth to this son. Because of this prophecy, the son was abandoned and placed on the island of Kariot, where he was found by the queen of Kariot. And because this couple had no son, they took him in. Later, however, they had a son of their own. The foundling felt mistreated and killed the real son. He was forced to flee the island of Kariot. He fled and came to the court of Pilate in Palestine, where he was given a position as a supervisor in Pilate's household. He got into a quarrel with his neighbor, whom he knew nothing about except that he was his neighbor. In the quarrel, he killed him and later married his wife. Only then did he learn that the man he had killed was his real father and that he had therefore married his mother. The legend tells us that the man who now saw all this coming upon him did not fare like Oedipus, but that he was overcome with remorse and went to Christ, and Christ took him in; for this was Judas of Kariot. And what lived here in Judas, this evil, is incorporated like a ferment into the whole development of humanity. For the deed in Palestine has something to do with Judas' betrayal; he belongs to the whole, he belongs to the Twelve, who cannot be thought of without him. Here it became apparent that the oracle's prophecy was fulfilled and that its content is incorporated into human development like evil, which is transformed and lives on in a good sense. In a meaningful way, the legend, which is truly wiser than external science, points to the fact that there is such a transformation in human nature over time that one must think of the same thing in different ways at different times. How an oracle is fulfilled cannot be told in the same way when speaking of the time of Oedipus and the time of Christ. The same fact becomes the legend of Oedipus in one case and the legend of Judas in the Christian era in the other. Only when one knows the spiritual facts underlying the development of the world and of humanity can one understand what appears as a consequence of this to the outer eye, to the outer historical view. We understand everything that exists in the sensory world, external sensory impressions or manifestations of the human soul, when we understand the spiritual foundations that underlie them. What the researcher of the spiritual worlds finds, he gladly passes on as inspiration to those who receive it from him, and they investigate the external facts that confirm it. I have often pointed out this connection between spiritual and material research. If what is found in the spiritual world is true, then it is confirmed in the physical world. But every true researcher of spiritual life will tell you this: he gives what he knows from the higher world, and then he asks everyone to examine all external facts in the light of this information. Try to compare what I have said about the reincarnation of Zarathustra, for example, with external history. You will see that what has been said about these facts stands up to any test, if you only look closely enough at the events in external history. The external only becomes understandable when you know the inner, the spiritual.