The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] The facts underlying the Gospels, and particularly the Gospel of Luke, will become increasingly subtle over the next few days. Therefore, I ask that you bear in mind, even more so than usual this time, that the lectures are a continuous series, that the content truly flows from one lecture to the next, and that one cannot understand a single lecture—or even several of them—unless one considers them in connection with the other lectures. This applies in particular to today’s and tomorrow’s lectures; and it also applies that you should wait until tomorrow to ask yourselves how the various points presented there relate to what has already been said in other lecture cycles that touched upon this topic.

[ 2 ] We concluded yesterday by saying: The Nirmanakaya of the Buddha revealed itself to our world at the moment described in the Gospel of Luke as the Annunciation to the shepherds. And we indicated yesterday that the rejuvenation of the Buddhist worldview, which flowed into Christianity and was thus given to the world, came about because that astral womb, which separates from the developing human being upon reaching sexual maturity—and which was thus connected to the child Jesus—was taken up by the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha and became one with it in the twelfth year of Jesus’ . Therefore, from this moment on, we are now dealing with a specific being that is actually composed of the Nirmanakaya, the spiritual body of the Buddha, and that astral womb, which has detached itself like an astral maternal shell from the child Jesus who had grown up to the age of twelve.

[ 3 ] Now we must ask ourselves the following question. In ordinary human life, when this astral womb detaches itself during human development—that is, when the actual astral body of the human being is born—the astral maternal shell is dissolved into the general astral world. Just as is the case with ordinary human beings in our cycle of development, this astral maternal sheath would not be suitable for being incorporated into such a high being as the Buddha was in his Nirmanakaya. There must therefore have been something very special about this astral maternal sheath that was shed and, through its connection with the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya, rejuvenated the entire Buddhist tradition. In other words, there must have been a very special being within the child Jesus; a very special being must have been incarnated in this body of Jesus so that, during the first twelve years of life, those forces could radiate from it, which were then absorbed by the astral mother-sheath, so that the latter could possess those rejuvenating forces to which we alluded yesterday. So it must have been not an ordinary human being, but a very special being that grew up in the child Jesus from birth to the age of twelve and was then able to radiate out into what was shed all the forces that brought about that rejuvenation.

[ 4 ] If we want to form an idea of how such a thing can be at all—that a child affects its physical forms quite differently than is the case in the normal state—we can initially only approach the fact at hand by way of comparison. I will therefore use a comparison to illustrate to you what actually took place at that time.

[ 5 ] If we follow a human life as it develops from birth through the later stages of life, up to the twentieth, thirtieth, and fortieth years, assuming it proceeds normally, we can observe how the individual powers, which are initially only latent in the embryonic stage and at birth, gradually come to the fore. The child grows physically, but the child also grows spiritually. Gradually, its soul powers develop. — You can read about how this happens in my book *The Education of the Child from the Perspective of Spiritual Science*. — Try to picture how the emotional and intellectual powers gradually emerge from the child, how by the seventh, fourteenth, or twenty-first year, certain powers are present that were not there before, or how the existing ones are present on a larger scale, and so on. So try to imagine how this happens in the normal course of human life, and now imagine we were to conduct a “life experiment,” we were to give a person who has just been born the opportunity not to develop quite so normally and averagely as is the case in our developmental cycle and as must also be the case in normal life, but rather we would artificially give a person the opportunity to take in what another person normally learns, for example, from the age of twelve to eighteen, with a certain freshness, so that they do not make it their own in the way it usually happens, but rather so that it seizes the soul with a special freshness, so that the soul does not appropriate it in the way other people do, but can work on things with a certain inventive power. And let us suppose we wanted to artificially make this person particularly productive. We would then not be allowed to let the child grow up the way other children usually do.

[ 6 ] So let us conduct a kind of hypothetical life experiment. But I expressly note that this example is chosen purely hypothetically and is not meant to be carried out immediately; I use it to make a comparative point, and it is not to be recommended as an educational ideal. — So we wanted to shape a person into a particularly inventive mind, one that not only stimulates the ability to think but can also proceed creatively, developing these abilities into greater productivity in later life. Then, above all, we would have to protect such a child from the age of six, or seven, from learning in the same way that other children do, ensuring that it does not begin to study the same school subjects as the other children do, but rather that from this time on it is taught as little as possible of what the other children are taught. We would have to keep them engaged in childlike play until the age of ten or eleven and teach them as little as possible of the school subjects, so that they might not yet be able to add at the age of nine, and might still read poorly at the age of eight. Then we would have to begin with everything that a child would otherwise start at the age of six or seven only in the eighth or ninth year. By then, a person’s powers have developed quite differently; the soul does something entirely different with what is taught to it. Such a child would then retain the childlike powers—which are otherwise suppressed by normal schooling—until the age of ten or eleven, and would then approach the things taught to them with a much more passionate soul-power, grasping them in a completely different way. This would transform their abilities into particularly productive ones. One would therefore have to keep a child childlike for as long as possible; then the clairvoyant would notice that the astral sheath, which detaches itself at puberty, in fact possesses entirely different powers than is usually the case—that it possesses youthful, fresh powers. And this astral sheath would then be usable for a being such as, in our case, the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya. — Through such an experiment, one would not only achieve an extension of youth, but also ensure that certain childlike, youthful powers enter the astral mother-sheath and can then be utilized again in the world, so that a being descending from spiritual heights can nourish itself with these powers and rejuvenate itself.

[ 7 ] However, people should not conduct this experiment. It is not an educational ideal. Certain things must still be left to the gods, so to speak, even today. The gods can do it; humans cannot yet carry it out properly. And if you hear somewhere that a certain personality, who was supposed to have a fruitful influence in a particular field, appeared untalented for a long time, was considered stupid for many years, and that it was only later that the “light bulb went on” for them, then the gods have conducted this experiment, have preserved the childlikeness of such a person beyond those years, and have made them capable of what one would otherwise learn earlier in normal life only at a later stage of life. This becomes particularly evident when bright children grasp easily what is told to them, yet when they enter school, they actually have no desire to learn anything there. It is then that the gods conduct this life experiment with them, of which we have just spoken.

[ 8 ] Something similar, only on an infinitely larger scale, must have been the case with that child who grew up to be Jesus and who was then to provide such an infinitely fruitful astral mother-sheath for the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya. And that was indeed the case. Here we come to a mysterious fact, which everyone is free to believe or not to believe, but which can be presented today to the prepared anthroposophists and which can also be verified. Examine all the facts available to you in the outer Gospel or in outer history, and you will find everything confirmed by the outer facts of the physical plane, provided you approach the facts correctly and do not rush to judgment. What the occultist says—and which are indeed facts conveyed from the higher worlds—he presents to humanity as a pledge; and if he has it from the right sources, then he says: You may examine it as rigorously as you wish; if you examine it in the right way, you will find it confirmed everywhere by what you can learn through written documents or other scientific facts in the physical world. — So, a child of a very special kind had to be born to that couple mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, a child who already possessed youthful vitality and childhood powers of a very special kind and who retained them in the strength with which he was born, fresh and healthy in every respect. That had to happen.

[ 9 ] Under ordinary circumstances, no child and no parental couple could be found in whom those childhood and youthful powers would have been present with such freshness as they had to be at that time. Throughout the entire wide circle of humanity at that time, if one had considered only normal circumstances, one would have been unable to find anywhere the individuality and the parents necessary for such an incarnation, had it not been for something quite special. We can only understand what would have been possible there if we recall various things we already know through our anthroposophical preparation.

[ 10 ] We know that our present-day humanity, through various epochs, goes back to a primordial humanity that we designate as the humanity of the ancient Atlantean era; and this humanity in turn goes back to a humanity we call the humanity of the Lemurian epoch. Spiritual science can reveal to us facts about the course of human development that are quite different from those of external natural science, which can rely only on sensory facts. Spiritual science shows us that humanity has passed through a stage of Greek -Latin cultural development, which was preceded by the Egyptian-Chaldean, the ancient Persian, and the ancient Indian cultural systems. This takes us back to that great, mighty catastrophe that once swept across our Earth and completely transformed its face. Previously, a vast continent existed in the regions where the Atlantic Ocean now lies: that was ancient Atlantis. And the regions now inhabited by the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa were, for the most part, still oceanic territory at that time. Through that great Atlantean catastrophe, which took place within the water element of the Earth, the face of the Earth was altered. Humanity had previously been settled mainly over in Atlantis. There it developed. These were people who were organized differently from people today. This has often been described. As the time of the Atlantean catastrophe approached, the great clairvoyant leaders and priests of humanity foresaw it, and so they guided the people eastward, and in part also westward. Those whom they led westward became the ancestors of the later American peoples. Thus, we must seek the ancestors of our humanity among the ancient Atlanteans. — These people who lived in Atlantis were in turn the descendants of even earlier humans, who in turn looked quite different from the Atlanteans; they lived on a continent between present-day Asia, Africa, and Australia, in ancient Lemuria. You will find a detailed account of this in my forthcoming book *Secret Science*; I therefore wish to highlight here only what I need.

[ 11 ] When we look back through the Akashic Records to the most ancient times, the Akashic Records curiously also provide us with wonderful evidence for everything we otherwise find in the biblical texts, for everything we find in religious texts in general. Only then do we learn to understand these religious texts in the right way. For example, what a question it was for external science as to whether what one reads in the Bible about a “single human couple,” Adam and Eve, from whom all humanity is said to have descended, is really true! This was a question that, from a scientific standpoint, occupied people’s minds particularly during the mid-nineteenth century.

[ 12 ] We know—if we summarize what the Akashic Records tell us—that the Earth has a long prehistory, that even the Lemurian era was preceded by another epoch. We know that the Earth is the reincarnation of other planetary states: the ancient Moon, the ancient Sun, and the ancient Saturn. We further know that the Earth, as it has gradually developed, was destined to add to the three bodies that humanity had gradually formed during the Earth’s earlier incarnations —the physical body on Saturn, the etheric body on the Sun, and the astral body on the Moon—to add the I, the fourth member of the human being, on Earth. Everything that preceded the Lemurian epoch was merely a preparation for this earthly mission. Back then, in the Lemurian epoch, humanity took shape in such a way that it became capable of developing the fourth member, the I. It was then that the first seed began to form, so that within the three members that humanity had gradually acquired, to develop an I. Therefore, we can say: Through those changes that took place on Earth, humanity was influenced in such a way that it could become an I-bearer. Before the Lemurian epoch, the Earth was also populated. Humans existed on Earth in a completely different form. But these were human beings who were not yet bearers of an “I,” who had actually developed only what they had brought over from Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon as physical body, etheric body, and astral body; and we know what the processes throughout the universe are that led to the human being being brought to this stage of maturity in their development.

[ 13 ] We know that at the beginning of our present development, the Earth was united with the Sun and the Moon, that the Sun then separated first, leaving behind a planetary body that encompassed what is now the Earth and the Moon. But we also know that if the Earth had remained united with the Moon, all human beings present there would have become hardened, mummified, and turned into a woody state. To prevent this, everything that existed in the Moon—both substances and beings—had to be expelled first. This saved the human form from hardening; it became possible for the human being to assume its present form, and only after the separation of the Moon was the human being given the opportunity to become a bearer of the I. But all this did not take place at once. We could say, the Sun first separated slowly from the Earth. Thus, while the Moon was still contained within the Earth, there existed a state that did not permit the further development of humanity. Physical matter became denser and denser, so that humanity actually began to harden. What were human souls at a lower stage back then also followed a path similar to that of the human soul today; they too went through incarnations, through successive embodiments, in which the inner being of the human leaves the outer embodiment, passes through a spiritual world, and reappears in a new embodiment.

[ 14 ] But before the Moon had emerged from the Earth, something quite special occurred—a difficult phase, so to speak, for the Earth’s further development. What happened was that certain human souls, having left their bodies, had entered the spiritual world and now wished to incarnate anew, only to find a human substance down below that was too hard, too rigid for them, so that they could not incarnate. A time came when the souls wanted to come down to Earth again, but found no way to reincarnate because the earthly bodies were unsuitable for them. Only the strongest souls could overcome the matter and substance that had hardened in the meantime in order to incarnate on Earth. The others had to return to the spiritual world; they could not come down. Such times existed before the separation of the Moon. But those strong souls capable of mastering matter and populating the Earth became fewer and fewer. Before the Lemurian era, there was thus a time when the Earth became desolate over a vast expanse, as the number of humans on Earth dwindled because the souls who wished to descend could not find suitable bodies.

[ 15 ] What then happened to these souls who could not find bodies? They were carried off to the other planets that had since formed from the common substance. Thus, there were certain souls who were carried off to Saturn, others to Jupiter, Mars, Venus, or Mercury; so that there was a period on Earth during which only the strongest souls could come to Earth during the great Earth winter. The weaker souls had to be taken into the care of the other planets belonging to our solar system.

[ 16 ] During the Lemurian epoch, there was indeed a time of which one can say—at least approximately—that there was a single human couple, a principal couple, who had retained the strength to subdue this unruly human substance and to incarnate on Earth, so to speak, enduring through the entire Earth period. But that was also the time when the Moon separated from the Earth. And through this separation of the Moon, it became possible once more for the human substance to refine itself and make itself suitable again for receiving human souls that were weaker, so that the descendants of this one principal pair were again able to exist in a softer substance than those who had lived before the Moon’s separation. Then, little by little, all the souls that had been carried up to Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so on returned to Earth, and as the human race multiplied from that one original couple, the souls gradually returned from outer space to Earth and took form as the descendants of the first original couple.

[ 17 ] Thus the Earth became populated once more. And during the late Lemurian period and well into the Atlantean period, more and more souls came down who had been waiting on the other planets until the time would come again on Earth to incarnate. Then they descended again into an earthly body. In this way, the Earth was repopulated. And in this way arose that Atlantean population, which was guided by the Atlantean initiates in the Atlantean oracles. I have characterized these Atlantean oracles as follows.

[ 18 ] There were great centers of guidance in ancient Atlantis. They were organized in such a way that one could call some the Mars oracles, others the Jupiter oracles, the Saturn oracles, and so on. Such different oracle centers existed because human beings were, after all, different. For those human souls who had previously waited on Mars, instruction and guidance had to be provided in the Mars oracles; for those who had waited on Jupiter, in the Jupiter oracles, and so on. Only a select few could be instructed in the central, great Sun Oracle during the Atlantean era. These were the descendants closest to that principal couple who had survived the Earth crisis, that strong ancestral pair indicated to us in the Bible under the names Adam and Eve. Here we glimpse through the Bible something that corresponds with the facts of the Akashic Records, so that the Bible proves true even where it presents what seems so improbable. And at the head of the great oracle, which exercised supreme oversight over the others and is called the Sun Oracle, stood the greatest of the Atlantean initiates, the great Sun Initiate, who was at the same time the Manu, the leader of the Atlantean people. He was the one who, as the Atlantean catastrophe approached, had to take on the task of leading the people he deemed suitable to the East and establishing a starting point for post-Atlantean culture. Above all, however, this Initiate, among the various people whom he gathered directly around him, always included those who descended as directly as possible from those ancestral souls who had survived the Earthly Winter—who were, so to speak, the direct descendants of Adam and Eve, the first primordial couple. They were especially cherished and nurtured in the presence of the great initiate of the Sun Oracle. Their entire instruction was directed and guided in such a way that, at the appropriate stages of human development, it was always possible to allow the right influences to flow out from the place led by the Initiate of the Solar Oracle, the great Manu.

[ 19 ] Let us assume, it had become necessary at some point in human development for a rejuvenation of culture to take place, so that, so to speak, what humanity had preserved as tradition for a time and what had grown old received a new impetus, and a new cultural element was given to humanity. To this end, provisions had to be made directly at the seat of the Initiate of the Solar Oracle, and this was done in a variety of ways.

[ 20 ] In the early period of post-Atlantean cultural development, people who had been prepared for this were sent directly here and there to carry forth, as a result of their careful training, whatever was needed by this or that people. In this oracle site, which had remained hidden in a certain region of Asia, care was always taken to ensure that the individual cultures could be influenced in the appropriate manner.

[ 21 ] But then, five to six centuries after the appearance of the great Buddha, a very special time had come. The need had arisen to rejuvenate Buddhism. What had been proclaimed by the great Buddha as an ancient, mature worldview—a worldview at the highest level—was to be channeled through a fountain of youth so that it could present itself to humanity in a fresh, youthful form. Very special youthful forces had to be brought to humanity. These youthful forces were not contained within any individuality that had otherwise been working out in the world.

[ 22 ] Whoever works for the world wears out their powers, and the wearing out of powers is precisely what it means to grow old. We could go back in time and would find how one culture after another arises: first the ancient Indian culture, then the ancient Persian, then the Egyptian-Chaldean, and so on, and we would see that there were always great, significant leaders of humanity. All these leaders of humanity have given their best efforts to advance the human race. The great holy Rishis have given their best efforts; Zarathustra, the founder of Persian culture, has given his best efforts; Hermes, Moses, and the leaders of Chaldean culture—they have all given their best efforts. In a certain sense, through what they were able to accomplish, they were all the right and best leaders and guides of their times. Let us take any figure from ancient India. They had incarnated again and again, had reappeared in this or that incarnation, in the Persian, in the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural epoch, and in reappearing, their soul had grown ever older, ever more mature; they had risen to ever more mature powers, but they had lost the fresh powers of youth. One can mature, can accomplish tremendous things, when one has become an old soul that has worked on itself through many incarnations, but the soul has become an old soul. One can teach great things, accomplish much for humanity, but one has necessarily had to give up the freshness and vigor of youth when one has developed oneself to such a height.

[ 23 ] Let us take, for example, one of the greatest figures who has worked in the course of human development: Zarathustra. It was he who, from such great depths of the spiritual world, was able to bring the great message of the Sun Spirit to his time; it was he who was able to point his people upward toward the great Spirit who later appeared as the Christ. It was he who said: He is contained in the sun, Ahura Mazda; he will draw near to the earth. And he spoke of him in great, significant words. Only the deepest spiritual insight, the highly developed clairvoyance of Zarathustra, could perceive that Being of whom the holy Rishis still said that Vishva Karman lay beyond their sphere—that Being whom he, Zarathustra, called Ahura Mazdao and whose significance for human development he proclaimed. An immensely mature spirit was already present within Zarathustra’s physical form back when Zarathustra founded the ancient Persian culture.

[ 24 ] We can imagine that this individuality, through its subsequent incarnations, has risen ever higher, become ever more mature, ever older—and ever more capable of making the greatest sacrifices for humanity. Those of you who have heard other lectures of mine will know how Zarathustra surrendered his astral body, which later revived in the leader of Egyptian culture, Hermes, and how he surrendered his etheric body to the leader of the ancient Hebrew people, Moses. All this is possible only if one possesses a powerfully developed soul. Then one can become an individuality as highly developed as Zarathustra, who appeared in Chaldea six hundred years before our era, at the time when the Buddha was active in India, and was able to work as the great teacher Nazarathos or Zarathas, who was also the teacher of Pythagoras. All this could be achieved by that great soul who was the leader and inaugurator of Persian culture. Up to this point, it had become ever more mature.

[ 25 ] But what was now necessary, when Buddhism was to be rejuvenated, this soul could not do, as you will see from all this. It was impossible for it to yield entirely youthful forces, which were to be characterized precisely by the fact that they developed to sexual maturity during childhood, so that they could then be transferred to the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya. The Zarathustra entity could never have done this, precisely because it had risen so high, had ascended so far from incarnation to incarnation. Therefore, it would not have been possible for it to develop in a child at the beginning of our era in such a way that what had become necessary could have been achieved.

[ 26 ] If we therefore look around among all the individualities that unfolded at that time, we find nowhere a human being who could have been born then, who had the power to unfold in such a way that, in the twelfth year, he could surrender the youthful, fresh forces that were to rejuvenate Buddhism. We have just turned our attention to the great, unique Zarathustra individuality to mention something extraordinary, and we can say to ourselves: Even the Zarathustra individuality was unsuitable for animating the body of Jesus up to the time when the astral mother sheath was shed so that it could unite with the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya. |

[ 27 ] So where did the great animating power of the body of Jesus come from? It came from the great Mother Lodge of humanity, which is guided by the great Solar Initiate, the Manu. A great individual power, which had been nurtured and cared for in the great Mother Lodge, in the great Solar Oracle, was instilled into the child born to the parents named Joseph and Mary in the Gospel of Luke. The best and strongest of those individualities was instilled into this child. Which individuality?

[ 28 ] If we wish to understand the individuality that was instilled into the child Jesus at that time, we must go far back, to the time before the Luciferic influence on humanity, before the Luciferic influence had extended into the astral bodies of human beings. This Luciferic influence came upon humanity at the very time when the primordial human couple, the principal human couple, was populating the Earth. This original human couple was indeed strong enough to overcome human substance, so to speak, so that it could incarnate, but it was not strong enough to resist the Luciferic influence. The Luciferic influence came upon them, extending its effects even into the astral body of this original couple, and the result was that it was impossible to allow all the forces that were in Adam and Eve to flow down into their descendants through the blood of their descendants. The physical body had to be allowed to propagate itself through all the generations, but something of the etheric body was held back in the guidance of humanity. This was expressed precisely by saying: Human beings have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, what came from the Luciferic influence; but it was also said: Now we must take away their ability to also eat from the tree of life! That is to say, a certain sum of forces from the etheric body was retained. These did not now flow down to the descendants. So there was a certain amount of forces within Adam that were taken from him after the Fall. This still innocent part of Adam was preserved in the great Mother Lodge of humanity, where it was cherished and nurtured. This was, so to speak, the Adam-soul, which had not yet been touched by human guilt, which had not yet become entangled in that through which humanity had fallen. These primal forces of the Adamic individuality were preserved. They were there, and they were now guided as a “provisional I” to the place where the child was born to Joseph and Mary, and in the first years this infant Jesus possessed within himself the power of the original progenitor of earthly humanity.

[ 29 ] Oh, this soul had remained very young. It had not been guided through the various incarnations; it had been held back at a very primitive stage, as if we were artificially holding back the child in our hypothetical educational experiments. So who was it that lived on in the little child born to the couple Joseph and Mary? The progenitor of humanity, the “old Adam” as a “new Adam.” Paul already knew this (1 Corinthians 15:45); it lies in what is hidden behind his words. And Luke, the writer of the Gospel of Luke, who was a disciple of Paul, knew this as well. That is why Luke speaks of it in a very special way. He knew that something special was necessary to bring this spiritual substance down to humanity at all; he knew that a bloodline tracing back to Adam was necessary. That is why he provides a genealogy for Joseph that goes all the way back to Adam, who emerges directly from the spiritual world itself; thus, in Luke’s terminology, he is of divine origin—he is a “Son of God.” Luke traces the lineage all the way back to God (Luke 3:23–38).

[ 30 ] A significant mystery lies precisely in what we call Luke’s genealogy: that common blood had to flow down through the generations and be preserved in an unbroken line all the way to the last descendant, so that when the time was fulfilled, the spirit too could be passed down to the descendants. - Thus, this infinitely youthful spirit, this spirit untouched by all earthly fates, this young soul—whose powers, if we were to seek them, would have to be sought in ancient Lemuria—was united with the body born to Joseph and Mary. This spirit alone was strong enough to radiate fully into the astral womb and, when this was shed, to impart to it the powers it needed to unite fruitfully with the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya.

[ 31 ] We may therefore ask: What, then, does the Gospel of Luke actually describe to us when it begins to speak of Jesus of Nazareth? First, it describes a human being who, through bloodline, traced his physical body back to Adam, to the times when humanity was saved on Earth by a principal couple amidst the desolation of the Earth. And it further describes to us, placing itself entirely from the perspective of reincarnation, the reincarnation of a soul that had waited the longest before its reincarnations. We find the Adam soul before the Fall, which had waited the longest, again in the child Jesus. We may therefore say—as fantastic as it may sound to humanity today—that the individuality which was guided into the infant Jesus by the Great Mother Lodge of Humanity not only descended from the physically oldest lineages of humanity, but is also the reincarnation of the very first member of humanity. — Now we know who it was who was presented in the temple and shown to Simeon, who the “Son of God” was according to Luke. He is not speaking of the present human being, but testifies that this human being is the reincarnation of the one who was there before, who was there as the very oldest progenitor of all the lineages.

[ 32 ] If we summarize all of this, we must now say the following. In the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E., the great Bodhisattva lived in India, whose mission was to bring to humanity the truths that were to be born gradually within humanity itself. He provided the impetus for this. Through this, he became the Buddha at that time. Therefore, he does not reappear in a later earthly body that fully corresponds to his individuality. He does, however, appear again in the Nirmanakaya, the body of transformations, but only up to the etheric-astral world. The shepherds, who become clairvoyant for a moment because they are to see what is announced to them, see him there in the form of the angelic hosts. He bends over the child born to Joseph and Mary. And there is a purpose in his bending over this very child.

[ 33 ] What the great Buddha was able to bring to humanity had to be present in a mature form; it is difficult to understand, for it stands on significant spiritual heights. In order for it to bear fruit for all, a power that was entirely fresh and youthful had to flow into what the Buddha had attained up to that point. He had to draw this power up from the earth by bending down to a human child from whom he could absorb all the youthful forces from the astral womb that was shedding itself. This human being was born to him through the fact that from the blood — from the lineage — a child was born whom he, who knew best, could trace back to the progenitor of humanity, but whom he also traced back to the ancient-young soul of humanity during the Lemurian epoch, and whom he could point to as the reincarnated new Adam. This child, who had a soul that was the mother soul of humanity—a soul that had been preserved in youth throughout the epochs—lived in such a way that it radiated all its fresh powers into the astral body, which then detached itself, ascended, and united with the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya.

[ 34 ] But these are not all the facts through which we can understand the wondrous mystery of Palestine; this is only one aspect. We understand: now, who was born in Bethlehem after Joseph and Mary had traveled there from Nazareth, and who was announced to the shepherds. But that is not all. In the time at the beginning of our calendar, many strange and significant events took place to bring about the greatest event in human development. To make clear what gradually led up to this great event, we must still consider the following.

[ 35 ] Within the ancient Hebrew people there was the house of David. Those whom we call the “Davidic houses” all traced their lineage back to their forefather David. You can see from the Bible that David had two sons, Solomon and Nathan (2 Samuel 5:14). Two lineages, the Solomonic line and the Nathanic line, thus descend from David. Therefore, if we disregard the intermediate links, we can say: At the time our calendar begins, the descendants of both the Solomonic line and the Nathanic line of the Davidic lineage are present in Palestine. And living as a descendant of the line we call the Nathanic line of the House of David is a man named Joseph in Nazareth. His wife is named Mary. And there lives a descendant of the Solomonic line of the House of David in Bethlehem, who is also named Joseph. It is not particularly surprising that there are two people from the House of David, both named Joseph, and that both are married to a Mary, as the Bible calls her. We thus have two sets of parents at the beginning of our calendar in Palestine; both bear the names Joseph and Mary. One set of parents traces its ancestry back to the Solomonic line of the House of David, that is, to the “royal line”; the other set of parents, the one in Nazareth, traces its ancestry back to the Nathanic line, that is, to the “priestly line.” This latter pair of parents from the Nathanic line had the child I described to you yesterday and today. And this child provided an astral womb that could be taken up by the Buddha’s Nirmanakaya. This couple from the Nathanic line went from Nazareth to Bethlehem at the time the child was to be born—as Luke says—“for the census” (Luke 2:4–5). This is described in the genealogy of the Gospel of Luke.

[ 36 ] The other couple, who did not originally live in Nazareth at all—one need only take the Gospels literally—lived in Bethlehem, and this is described to us by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 2:1). The Gospels always describe the truth—there is no need to speculate—and through anthroposophy, people will once again come to take the Gospels literally. To this couple of the Solomonic line, a child is born who is also named Jesus. This child also possesses a powerful individuality within his body. But this child first had a different task—the wisdom of the world is profound—this child was not meant to be called upon to impart the fresh, youthful forces of the astral womb, but was called upon to bring to humanity that which can only be brought if one is a mature soul. This child was guided by all the forces involved so that it could be the incarnation of that Individuality which once taught Ahura Mazda in Persia, which once could surrender its astral body to Hermes and its etheric body to Moses, and which reappeared as the great teacher Pythagoras, as Zarathas or Nazarathos, the great teacher in ancient Chaldea: it is no other individuality than the Zarathustra individuality. The I-ness of Zarathustra was reincarnated in the child of whom the Evangelist Matthew tells us that it was born to a couple, Joseph and Mary, who descended from the royal line, from the Solomonic line of the Davidic dynasty, and who originally already resided in Bethlehem.

[ 37 ] Thus we find one part of the truth in Matthew, and the other part of the truth in Luke. We must take both literally, for the truth of the world is complex. Now we know what was born of the priestly line of the House of David. But now we also know that from the royal line was born that Individuality who once worked in Persia as Zarathustra and there established the magic of the ancient Persian Empire, the royal magic, . Thus the two individualities lived side by side: the young Adam individuality in the child from the priestly line of the House of David, and the Zarathustra individuality in the child from the royal line of the House of David.

[ 38 ] How and why all this happened, and how the development was further guided, will be continued tomorrow.