The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Over the years, in the various branches and during the various courses—and certainly also before a large number of the anthroposophical friends sitting here—reflections have been made on the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of Matthew, and in these meditations on the three Gospels, we have sought to bring before our inner eye, from three different perspectives, as it were in three different ways, the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha. And perhaps these meditations have been suitable for fostering an ever-increasing appreciation of these unique events within our souls. We have, after all, already pointed out that the reason we have four Gospels is essentially to be found in the fact that the Gospel writers, as inspired occultists, wished to portray the great event, each from one side, so to speak, just as one depicts or photographs something external from a single vantage point. And when one takes photographs of an object from different angles, one can, by combining what the photographs reveal—as it were, by viewing them together—bring before the soul what is actual reality. Each of the evangelists actually gives us cause to view the great event in Palestine from a very particular angle.

[ 2 ] From a perspective that we might call the unveiling of the highest human, occult, and other goals—and one that takes into account not only this highest human aspect but also the highest cosmic principle—the Gospel of John offers us insight into the great events in Palestine.

[ 3 ] The Gospel of Luke offers us a glimpse into the mysteries that surround the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—the Solomonic and the Nathanic Jesus—up until the moment when the great inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth was realized through the Christ.

[ 4 ] The Gospel of Matthew is intended to show those who either heard the cycle when it was presented or who will read it later how, so to speak, out of the folk traditions of ancient Hebrew culture, out of the folk mysteries of the Hebrew people, the physical principle of the body is prepared, into which the Christ principle was to be incarnated for three years.

[ 5 ] In a certain sense, it is actually the Gospel of Mark that can lead us to the highest heights of spiritual-scientific Christian contemplation, and through the Gospel of Mark we are given the opportunity to gain insight into many things that are meant to be communicated to us specifically through the Gospels, but which are not conveyed to us in the same way by the other Gospels as they are by the Gospel of Mark. And since the opportunity still presents itself to speak to you today in connection with the Gospel of Mark, I have set myself the task of doing so this evening.

[ 6 ] However, when we speak of this, we must realize just how necessary it is to look into certain things—things that the superficial world of today has little inclination to examine. If one is to understand the Gospel of Mark and all its depths, one must familiarize oneself with the very different manner of expression used by people at the time when Christ Jesus still walked the earth. Please do not take it amiss if I attempt, through clear shading—a distinct interplay of light and shadow—to convey to you what I actually wish to say with this.

[ 7 ] Through language, we express what we wish to say, and the words of language are meant to illustrate, in a certain way, what lives within our souls. The various epochs of human development differ greatly in the way they use language to express what lives within our souls. And if we were to go back to the epoch of ancient Hebrew development, to that wonderful mode of expression that was still possible in the ancient Hebrew temple language, we would find a completely different way of clothing the mysteries of our soul in words than people today can even imagine. When a word was spoken in the ancient Hebrew language—since only the consonants were written, the vowels were then added—what resonated within that word was not merely what resonates within it today, a rather abstract concept, but an entire world. And that is precisely why the vowels were not actually written out, because the speaker expressed his innermost being precisely through the manner of vocalization, whereas the consonants contained more of a description, a depiction of what lies outside. One might say that, for example, an ancient Hebrew, when he wrote a B—the letter corresponding to our modern B—always felt something like a depiction of external conditions, of something that forms a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter B always evoked the image of something that, like a house, can enclose a being. One could not pronounce the B without that living in the soul. And when one vocalized an A, one could not do so without something living in the A—something of strength, of power, indeed of radiant power. Thus the soul lived on; the soul’s content floated out with the words and floated further into space and floated toward the other souls. So language was a much more living thing. It engaged much more deeply with the mysteries of existence than our language does.

[ 8 ] That is the light I wish to paint for you. And I would like to set this in contrast with the shadow: that in our time, we have become philistines to a high degree in this regard. Our language now expresses only abstractions and generalities. People no longer feel this at all. In essence, it really expresses nothing but philistine notions. How could it be otherwise in an age when people begin to handle language—even in a literary manner—long before it has any intellectual content; in an age when so much is churned out as printed matter for the masses, when everyone believes they must write something, when everything is taken as a subject for writing. I have had to witness that, when our society was founded, writers gathered out of curiosity, intending perhaps only to be able to squeeze a novel out of this whole affair. Why shouldn’t there be figures one can exploit in public writing? So we must be clear that, in contrast to the way language was once thought of as something sacred—toward which one bears the responsibility that God should speak through it—we now have a language that has become abstract, empty, and philistine. That is why it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze those great, powerful facts—which are communicated to us and resonate, for example, in the Gospels—into today’s words. Why shouldn’t people today believe that everything can be expressed in our language! They cannot understand that our language says something that is empty compared to what even the Greek language meant by a single word. And when we read the Bible today, we read something that, compared to the original content, has been sifted once, twice, three times—but sifted in such a way that not the best, but always the worst remains. That is why it is, of course, easy to invoke the Bible’s words today in a certain way. But we fare the worst when we refer to the Bible as it stands today in the Gospel of Mark. We must not do that under any circumstances.

[ 9 ] Now you know that the Gospel of Mark, in its opening words, is based on the translation by Weizsäcker, which is considered excellent but—as one might expect, precisely because it is regarded as so excellent today—is not actually that excellent, rendering the text as follows: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: ‘Behold, I send my messenger before you, who shall prepare your way. Listen, a voice cries out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

[ 10 ] If the Gospel of Mark begins this way in Weizsäcker’s translation, honest people would really have to say to themselves: I don’t understand a word of it, for anyone who wants to understand it is deluding themselves. Anyone who approaches this honestly cannot understand a thing when it is said: “Behold, I send my messenger before you, who shall prepare your way; hear, how it cries out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For either a triviality is being stated, or something is being said that one cannot understand. Now, however, one must first gather the concepts that make it possible to understand a statement such as Isaiah’s here. For Isaiah pointed to the great, momentous event that was to be the most significant event in human development. What was he actually pointing to? Well, from what we have already described, we can very well point to what Isaiah foretold; we can point to it by saying:

[ 11 ] In ancient times, human beings possessed a kind of clairvoyance. They had the ability to grow into the spiritual-divine world through their soul powers. What actually happened to a person when they grew into the spiritual-divine world? What happened when they entered the divine-spiritual world was that they ceased to use their “I,” to the extent that it had already developed at that time; they used their astral body, and within it were the powers that were powers of vision and perception, while all the powers residing in the I were gradually awakened to the perception of the physical world. It is the “I” that makes use of the sensory organs. But the old human being, when he wanted to gain insight into the world, used his astral body. Thus, the old human being saw and perceived through the astral body. And the further development consists in finding the transition from the astral body to the use of the “I.” And with regard to this “I,” the Christ impulse should be the most intense impulse. If Christ is to be received into the ego in such a way that Paul’s words are true: “Not I, but Christ in me”—then the ego has the power to grow into the spiritual world through itself. Previously, only the astral body could do this.

[ 12 ] Thus, we see a development of humanity unfolding before us such that we can say: Human beings used their astral body as an organ of cognition, and increasingly they lost the ability to develop any organ of cognition within the astral body at all. Precisely as one drew nearer to the Christ event, there was a stage of development where human beings had to say to themselves: My astral body has less and less ability to look into the spiritual world. His connection to the spiritual world was no longer working, and the ego was not yet powerful enough to gain any insight from the world on its own. That was the age when Christ, so to speak, was approaching.

[ 13 ] In the actual development of humanity, the process involves certain major advances being gradually prepared and then simply coming to pass. This was also the case with the Christ impulse. But there had to be a transition. Things could not have unfolded in such a way that human beings would have seen their astral bodies gradually becoming dulled to the spiritual world, so that they would have felt complete desolation and barrenness within themselves until the ego was ignited by the Christ impulse. It was not to come to that. Instead, for some, it happened that through a special influence from the spiritual world, they already saw something in the astral body similar to what one would later recognize and see through the ego. The sense of self was, so to speak, prepared in the astral body. This was a foreshadowing of the sense of self in the astral body. After all, it was only through the ego and its development that the human being became an earthly human. The astral body actually belonged to the old Moon. At that time, the Angelos, the angelic human, was at the human stage. The angel was human on the old Moon; on Earth, the human is human. We know this. For the human being, it was fitting on the Moon to use his astral body. Everything else was merely preparation for the development of the ego. The beginning of our earthly development was a repetition of the lunar development. For in the astral body, human beings could never become fully human at all; rather, only the angel on the Moon could become human in the astral body. Just as Christ lived within the earthly human being to inspire the I, so too, in preparation for this I-hood, there had to be the possibility that among the angels of the Moon—that is, the Moon-beings, the Angeloi—there were prophets who inspired the human astral body so that the I-hood could already begin to prepare itself. So what a prophet might have described as follows had to come to pass: There will come a point in human development when humanity will be ripe for the development of the I. In the astral body, only the Angeloi of the Moon have risen to the highest level. But in order for human beings to be prepared for this I-hood, certain people—who experience this through grace in exceptional states—must be inspired on Earth in such a way that they act like angels, even though they are human beings; that is, they are angels in human form.

[ 14 ] This brings us to an important occult concept without which you cannot possibly understand the evolution of humanity from an occult perspective. On the surface, it is of course easy to simply say that everything is Maya. But that is an abstraction. One must take this very seriously. Therefore, one must be able to say: Well, there is a human being standing before me, but he is Maya—who knows, is he even a human being at all? Perhaps being human is only the outer shell, and a being entirely different from what a human is uses this outer shell to bring about precisely something that cannot yet be brought about by a human being. —I have hinted at this in my “Gateway to Initiation.”

[ 15 ] In ancient times, such an event became relevant to humanity when the individuality that had lived in the ancient Elijah was reborn in John the Baptist, and when an angel entered the soul of John the Baptist for his incarnation at that time and utilized John the Baptist’s physicality and also his soul-nature to accomplish what no human could have accomplished. An Angelos lives within John, who is to go before and proclaim in advance what was to live as true Selfhood in the most comprehensive sense in Jesus of Nazareth. It is extraordinarily important to know that John the Baptist is a maya and that an angelos, a messenger, lives within him. In Greek it also says: “Behold, I send my messenger, angelos, angel.”—Only the German no longer thinks of the fact that in Greek the word angelos appears here: “Behold, I send my angel before him.” - It thus points to a profound world mystery that took place with the Baptist, which Isaiah had foretold. He characterizes John the Baptist as a Maya, as an illusion; he who, in truth, encloses the angel, the Angelos, who, as an angel, must proclaim what man is actually to become through the reception of the Christ impulse, because angels must first proclaim what man is to become only later. So it would be fitting to say at this point: Behold, that which gives the world the I-ness sends the Angelos before you, to whom the I-ness is to be given.

[ 16 ] Now let us turn to the third sentence. What does it mean? To understand this, one must first consider the entire historical context. What had become of the human heart, since the astral body had gradually lost the ability to extend its powers like tentacles and to gaze into the divine-spiritual world with clarity? In the past, when the astral body was set in motion, it could gaze into the divine-spiritual world. Now this possibility gradually disappeared more and more, and it grew dark within the human being. The human being could formerly spread his astral body over all the beings of the divine-spiritual world. Now he was lonely within himself—loneliness is the same as &onuog. In this loneliness now lived what was the human soul. This is also still there in the Greek text: Behold how it appears, how it speaks there within the solitude of the soul—if you will, in the desolation of the soul—when the astral body could no longer extend itself into the divine-spiritual world. Listen to how it calls out in the desert of your soul, in the solitude of your soul.

[ 17 ] But what is being foretold here? We must now clarify what a very specific word meant when it was used in reference to spiritual phenomena, to spiritual manifestations in general—especially in Hebrew, but also in Greek: the word Kyrios. If one translates this as “the Lord,” as is usually done, one is translating utter nonsense. What is meant by this? Anyone in ancient times who uttered such a phrase knew that it referred to something connected with the spiritual progress of the human race. Therefore, they knew that the word Kyrios also pointed to the mysteries of the soul. When we look at the astral body, we see various forces within the soul. We usually call them thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. These are the three forces at work in the soul. But they are the serving forces of the soul. As humanity progressed in its development, these forces—which had formerly been the masters to whom humanity was subject (for humanity had to wait to see if its thinking, feeling, and willing were called upon)—these individual soul forces were placed under the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the I. And nothing else was meant by the word, when it referred to the soul, than the I, which no longer held fast to the old notion: that the Divine-Spiritual thinks, feels, and wills within me, but rather: I think, I feel, I will—the Lord asserts Himself in the soul forces. Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to walk such paths of the soul that you may awaken within your soul the strong I, Kyrios, the Lord in your soul. Hear how it calls in the solitude of the soul. Prepare the power or the direction of the Lord of the soul, the I. Unlock its powers!—This is roughly how one must translate it: unlock it so that it may enter, so that it is not the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing; unlock its powers! And when you translate these words: “Behold, that which is the I-ness sends its angel before you; he shall give you the ability to understand how it calls out in the solitude of the astral soul; prepare the directions of the I, open up its powers for it, for the I!”—then you have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; then you have the reference to the greatest event in human development; then you understand from this how Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, how he points out that the solitude of the human soul longs for the coming of the Lord into the soul, the I. And only now do the words become flesh and blood, and so we must grasp such words.

[ 18 ] And why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angelos? He was able to do so because he had undergone a very specific initiation. Initiations, you see, are specialized. They are not something general; they are specialized. For those individuals who have a very special task, an initiation must take place in a very specific way. Now, provision has been made for everything that takes place in the spiritual world, so that what are actually spiritual facts are truly revealed in the heavens in the language of the stars. One can receive the Solar Initiation, that is, enter into the mysteries of the spiritual world, which is the world of Ahura Mazda, for which the sun is the outward expression. But one can be initiated into the mysteries of the Sun in twelve different ways, and every initiation is, in a certain sense, a solar initiation, yet it is structured differently in relation to the other eleven. Depending on whether a person has this or that task for all of humanity, they receive an initiation of which one can say: This is a solar initiation, but one that must be expressed by saying that the forces flow into it as if the sun were in the sign of Cancer. This is different from receiving a solar initiation that must be expressed by saying: The forces flow into it as if the sun were in the sign of Libra. These are the expressions for various specialized initiations. And precisely those individualities who have such a high task, such a high mission as that characterized here for John the Baptist, must be initiated in a very special way into a special initiation, because only from this can they have the strong power to carry out this mission in the world, even under circumstances in a very one-sided manner. And so, in order for John the Baptist to become the bearer of the Angelos, he underwent the solar initiation that can be called the initiation from the sign of Aquarius. Just as the Sun stands in the sign of Aquarius, so this is a symbol of the kind of initiation that John the Baptist had received in order to become the bearer of the Angel, by taking in the power of the Sun as it flows in precisely when it stands in such a position relative to the other stars that one describes it with the expression: It stands in the sign of Aquarius. That was the symbol. John had the Aquarius initiation. The sign even came to be called Aquarius because the one who had received the Aquarius initiation, as a spiritual initiation, possessed the special ability to do with human beings what John, as the “Aquarius,” as the Baptist, did: namely, to truly bring people to the point where, by immersing themselves under the water, they freed their etheric body to such an extent that they attained a self-knowledge enabling them to perceive what was most important at that particular time. People were immersed, and for a moment the etheric body was freed. Through the baptism in the Jordan, people could sense the very special importance of this epoch in world history. That is why John was initiated into the baptismal initiation. And because this must be expressed symbolically through the flowing of the sun’s rays from the constellation in which the sun stands, this constellation was also called Aquarius. Thus, the name was transferred from the human capacity to the heavens.

[ 19 ] Today, a whole host of learned ignoramuses attempt, let us say, to interpret spiritual events by, so to speak, bringing the heavens down to earth. They say: Well, this signifies the advance of the Sun. — All these learned gentlemen, who in reality know nothing, interpret human events by looking down from the heavens. It was the other way around: what lives spiritually within the human being was transferred to the heavens by using the heavens as a means of expression. So that John the Baptist could say: I am the one who baptizes you with water. — And that was the same as if he had said: I baptize you with water; I am endowed with the initiation of Aquarius. — That would have been the word John the Baptist could have spoken to his innermost disciples. And just as the sun moves in the opposite direction to its sensory course when it moves away from Aquarius, so Virgo stands opposite, and then it moves toward Libra. But when we take the initiation, we must take an opposite course on the other side: from Aquarius to Pisces. Thus John could say: Something will come that will no longer have to act as corresponds to the Sun’s action from Aquarius, but as corresponds to the Sun’s action from Pisces. One will come who will bring a higher baptism. As the spiritual Sun rises higher, the baptism of Aquarius becomes the baptism from the spiritual waters. The Sun rises from Aquarius in the spiritual realm to Pisces. Hence the well-known sign of Pisces for the bearer of Christ, which is an ancient symbol. For just as there was an Aquarian initiation in John through very special spiritual influences, so the initiation of which I have already spoken to you here and there—which came about in a mysterious way through all the mysteries that took place around Jesus—was a Piscean initiation. A shift of the Sun by one constellation—that was what placed Jesus of Nazareth in his time: that he was first subjected to a Pisces initiation.

[ 20 ] And in the Gospel of Mark, this is, one might say, sufficiently hinted at; yet such things can only be hinted at figuratively. Christ Jesus draws to himself all those who seek the fish. That is why his first apostles were all fishermen. And we can clearly see what I have said—the advance toward the fish—when we are told: “I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

[ 21 ] And as he passed by the Sea of Galilee—that is, as the sun had risen so high that one could see its reflection rising from the water—those called Simon and Simon’s brother, James and James’s brother, the fishermen, found themselves inspired in the appropriate manner. And how can we understand all this? We cannot understand it unless we examine the language of that time a little more closely.

[ 22 ] Our modern way of speaking is philistine. When a person stands before us, we say, “That is a human being.” When a second person stands before us, we say again, “That is a human being.” A third—yet another, and so on. But what we have before us is merely Maya. If a being has two legs and a human face, in our philistine way of speaking we have only one word: “That is a human being.” But what is a human being for occultism? Nothing but Maya; at first glance, as he stands there before us, the human being is truly nothing. He is about as much as the rainbow that stands in the sky. How long is the rainbow something? Only as long as the relevant conditions between rain and sunshine are present. When the sun and the rain change their relationship, it is gone. It is exactly the same with the human being. He is merely a convergence of forces from the macrocosm. We must seek forces in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where one might suppose a human being to be somewhere on Earth, there is nothing for the occultist. But forces flow down from above and up from below, and there they intersect. And just as the peculiar constellation of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces converging from above and below in the macrocosm produce a phenomenon that looks like a human being—that is the human being. The human being is not at all as he stands before us. In truth, he is a phantom, a Maya, an illusion. For what truly exists are the cosmic forces that intersect where our eye believes it sees a human being. Try to take seriously the statement: The human being is nothing as he stands before us. He is the shadow of many forces. But the being that reveals itself in the human being may be somewhere entirely different from the point where the human being is currently walking around on two legs. There are three human beings: one is an ancient Persian laborer working with a plow in ancient Persian agriculture. He looks like a human being. In truth, he is one of the souls whose powers are nourished from this or that world, from below or above. The second is perhaps an ancient Persian official. He is formed from another world by forces that intersect within him. If we wish to know him, we must ascend to these forces. All of you, as you sit here, are in reality somewhere else entirely. Only the forces of your true being shine into this space. Then there stood a third Persian, of whom one had to say: He is all the more a true illusion, he is all the more a phantom standing there. What was that in truth? There one must ascend all the way to the sun; there are the forces that nourished this phantom. Up there, among the mysteries of the sun, one finds that which can be called the Golden Star, Zarathustra. It sends down the rays, and down here stands a phantom called Zarathustra. In truth, his being is not there at all. That is the third.

[ 23 ] The important thing is that in ancient times people were aware of what such terms meant; that they did not give names as we do today, but rather named people according to what lived within them, not according to their outward appearance. We must be very clear about this. So that one could have said: An old person at the time of Christ would have understood perfectly well if one had pointed to John the Baptist and said: here is the Angelos of God. One would have taken into account only what had taken its place there; one spoke of the main thing, not of the secondary thing. And let us now suppose that the same mode of expression was applied to Christ Jesus himself. How, then, when one understood such things, was one to speak of Christ Jesus? Indeed, to call that which walked upon the earth—this body in the flesh—Christ Jesus would never have occurred to a person of that time, not even in a dream; rather, it was the sign that what streamed down spiritually from the sun was received in a very special way at this point. When this body, which was the body of Jesus, went from one place to another, that was the manifestation of the solar power moving from one place to another. This solar power could also move on its own. At times the expression was used to mean that Christ Jesus was “at home,” in the flesh, but what was within him continued to move even without his body. Particularly in the Gospel of John, the expression is used such that, under certain circumstances, when the same being moves purely spiritually, the Gospel writer speaks exactly as if this solar power were dwelling in the physical body.

[ 24 ] That is why it is so important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always related to the physical sun, which is the outward expression of the spiritual world, captured at the point where the physical body moves about. So when Christ Jesus heals, for example, it is the power of the sun that heals. But it must be in the right place in the sky: “When evening came, as the sun was setting, they brought to him all who were suffering,” from illnesses and so on. — It is important to indicate that this healing power can flow down when the outer sun has set, when the sun acts only spiritually. And when he again needed a certain power to act, he had to draw this as well from the spiritual sun, not from the physical, visible sun. “And early in the morning, while it was still dark, he rose and went out.” — The path of the sun and the sun’s power is explicitly indicated to us: that this sun’s power is at work, and that, in essence, Jesus is merely the outward sign that this path of the sun’s power could also become visible to the mere physical eye. And wherever we speak of the Christ in the Gospel of Mark, what is meant is the solar power that became particularly active during that epoch of our Earth’s development in this part of the world called Palestine. And one could see the solar power: at this or that time, the Christ went from one place to another. One might just as well say: At that time, the spiritual power of the sun, as if gathered in a focal point, moved from one place to another. And the body of Jesus was the outward sign that made visible to the eyes how the power of the sun moved. The paths of Jesus in Palestine were the paths of the solar power that had descended to Earth. And if you chart the steps of Jesus as a special map, then you have a cosmic event: the working-in of the solar power from the macrocosm into the land of Palestine. And this macrocosmic matter is what matters. The writer of the Gospel of Mark points to this in particular, knowing full well that a body which was the bearer of such a principle as the Christ-principle had to be overcome by its own principle in a very special way. It was thus the pointing out precisely to that world which Zarathustra so magnificently announced beyond the sensory world, the pointing out of this world as it once again exerts its influence upon the human world. Thus, through Christ Jesus, it was now indicated how the forces act back upon the earth. Therefore, in the body—which, as we have seen, was in a certain way, even though it was already the body of the Nathanic Jesus, influenced by the Zarathustra individuality—a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra processes had to take place.

[ 25 ] Now let us hear the great and beautiful legend of Zarathustra. When his mother gave birth to him, Zarathustra performed his first miracle: the famous Zarathustra smile. The second of the miracles was that the king at that time of the district where Zarathustra was born, Duransarun, resolved to murder Zarathustra, about whom the backward magicians had told him strange things; but when the king appeared to stab the child, his arm became paralyzed. That was the second of the miracles following the birth of Zarathustra. And so this king, who could not use his dagger against Zarathustra, had the child led out to the wild beasts of the desert. This is an expression of the fact that even in his earliest childhood, Zarathustra had to see what a human being must see when he looks out with an impure gaze. Instead of the noble group soul and the noble, higher spiritual beings, he sees the outpouring of his wild imagination. This is the leading out into the desert to the wild beasts, from which Zarathustra remains unharmed. This is the third of the miracles. The fourth was again a miracle among the wild beasts, and so on. It was always the good spirits of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra.

[ 26 ] We find these miracles repeated in the Gospel of Mark: “And immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness”—the text actually says “solitude”—“for forty days, and he was tempted by Satan, and was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.” Here we are shown that the body was prepared, as it were, to absorb—as if in a focal point—what was taking place in the macrocosm. What had happened to Zarathustra had to happen again: the leading out to the wild beasts. The body absorbed what came in from the macrocosm.

[ 27 ] The Gospel of Mark places us within the broader context right from the very first lines. And I wanted to show you how, fundamentally, this Gospel of Mark—if one only understands the words in their true sense—not as in today’s philistine language, but in that of the ancient languages, where every word has living worlds behind it—if one understands it in the sense of these ancient languages, then the Gospel of Mark takes on new life, new power. But it must be said: Our modern language can only rediscover, through many circumlocutions, what was already contained in the words of the ancient languages. What we mean when we say: “Man lives on Earth and develops his ego; man used to live on the Moon, where it was the angels who went through their human stage”—all of that underlies the statement: “Behold, I send my angel before man.” These words cannot be understood without the foundation provided by spiritual science. And people today should be honest and should say, regarding the words at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark: This is incomprehensible. — Instead, they stand there in cheap arrogance and declare that spiritual science is a fantasy that reads all sorts of things into what they know in a simple way. They simply do not know it, the people of today. And today we no longer have the principle that existed, for example, in ancient Persia, where from epoch to epoch the ancient sacred text was rewritten to be clothed anew for each epoch. Thus the divine-spiritual Word was transformed and transformed again as the Zend Avesta. And what exists today is the final form. The Persian Bible was rewritten seven times. And anthroposophy is meant to teach people how necessary it is that the books in which the sacred mysteries are written must be rewritten from epoch to epoch. For precisely if one wishes to preserve the great old style, one must not try, so to speak, to stick as much as possible to the old words. That is not possible; we no longer understand them. Instead, we must try to translate the old words into an immediate understanding of the present. We attempted this with regard to Genesis this summer. There you saw how some of the words must be translated. Perhaps today you have gained a small sense of how the words in the Gospel of Mark must also be translated.