The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] From the hints given over the last few days, you will have gathered that Greek-Latin culture stands, in a certain sense, at the center of the entire post-Atlantean culture. The three preceding cultural epochs are, as it were, the preparation for that work of the human soul, of the I within the I, as we have indicated for Greek culture. The ancient Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cultures appear as a descent from clairvoyant perceptions to purely human perception in Greek culture. What begins in our time and must be achieved for humanity in ever-wider measure in the coming centuries and millennia must appear to us as a re-ascent, a re-attainment of clairvoyant cultures. So we must say: in the Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean cultural epoch, we have, so to speak, the last preparation for purely human Greek culture. At that time, in the third post-Atlantean epoch, human beings descended, as it were, from the old clairvoyant states through which they had still been able to participate directly in the spiritual world, and prepared the way for the purely personal, purely human culture, which can be characterized by a work of the soul that can be called “I in I.” This also showed us how the looking back into earlier incarnations associated with clairvoyant culture became unclear and blurred, at first for Gilgamesh, the initiator of Babylonian culture; how he no longer knew his way around when Eabani bequeathed certain abilities to him, as it were, to look back into earlier incarnations. And in keeping with this fall from a spiritual height and the withdrawal into the merely personal realm of the individual human being, everything that we see perpetuated for posterity through the work of these Babylonian souls has an effect in keeping with this peculiarity of the Babylonian soul.

[ 2 ] If we want to look at history from an occult point of view, we must say that it becomes increasingly clear to us that the peoples, with their work and their cultural achievements, are by no means isolated in world development and human progress. Every people has its spiritual task; it has a very specific contribution to make to what we call human progress. Our culture today is already very complex, and it has become so complex because many individual cultural streams have flowed together. In our present spiritual life and in our outer life, we have a confluence of the most diverse cultures of the peoples, which have been created by the individual peoples in a more or less one-sided way, in accordance with their mission, and which have then flowed into the common stream. That is why all individual peoples differ from one another, why we can speak of each people's special mission. And we can ask: What can we, who have incorporated the cultural work of our ancestors into our own culture, what can we show today that reveals what this or that people had to give us for the common progress of humanity?

[ 3 ] It is quite interesting to take a closer look at the cultural task of the Babylonian people. Oh, this Babylonian people, even the external historian has been presented with strange riddles in the last century through the deciphering of cuneiform writing. And even what has only been explored externally is already highly remarkable. For the external researcher can say today: What was formerly called history has almost doubled in terms of time through what has been learned with the deciphering of cuneiform writing. Even external historical research, based on external documents, can look back formally to five to six thousand years before the Christian era and say: During this entire period, a powerful and significant culture existed in the regions where the Babylonians and Assyrians later lived. There we find, above all in the earliest times, a most remarkable people, called Sumerians in history, who lived in the regions of the Euphrates and Tigris, more in the upper parts, but also towards the lower course. We don't have time here to go into the external historical documents, so we'll focus more on what occult history can teach us.

[ 4 ] This people, with everything they could think and create spiritually, and also with their external activities, belonged to a relatively early stage of post-Atlantean development. And the further back we go in the history of the Sumerians, whom we might call the pre-Babylonians, the more we realize that highly significant spiritual traditions lived within this people, that a meaningful spiritual wisdom existed, a wisdom that we can characterize by saying: The whole way of life, the whole way of not only thinking but of living in the soul and in the spirit, was completely different among this people than among later people in world history. For people in later world history, for example, it became apparent everywhere that there is a certain distance between what is thought and what is spoken. Who does not know today that thinking and speaking are two completely different things, that language, in a certain sense, consists of conventional means of expression for what people think? This is evident from the fact that we have many languages and yet, in essence, express a large number of common ideas in these different languages of the earth. So there is a certain gap between thinking and speaking. This was not actually the case with this ancient people, however, for they had a language that was fundamentally quite different from all older languages in its relationship to the soul. Especially when we go back to very ancient times, we really find something there—albeit no longer preserved in its pure form as a kind of proto-language of humanity. We do find the languages of individual tribes and races in the wider regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa already differentiated in a certain way; but a kind of common linguistic element that could be understood throughout the entire world known at that time, especially by people of a deeper spiritual nature, existed among the Sumerians. Where did this come from? Because the soul of these people felt something very specific in the tone, in the sound, and had to express clearly what can be felt in a thought and at the same time in a sound.

[ 5 ] You see, what has been said here, I would like to express first of all by pointing out that even in the names I had to give you when discussing the Gilgamesh epic, even there, striking sounds are still present: Ishtar, Isulan, and the like. If you pronounce these sounds and know their occult significance, you realize that these are basically names that cannot contain any other sounds if they are to designate the beings in question, because a U, an I, an A can only refer unambiguously to something very specific. This is precisely what has happened in the development of language: people have lost the feeling for how these things, these sounds — consonants, vowels — can refer unambiguously to something, so that in ancient times it was impossible to designate a thing other than by a very specific combination of sounds. Just as we today, when we mean one thing, cannot have a different thought about it in England or Germany, so in those days, because people still had the immediate spiritual feeling for the sound, they could not describe anything or anyone other than with a clear combination of sounds. So language in ancient times — and the ancient Sumerian language had echoes of these ancient times — was very specific and simply understandable to those who heard it, due to the nature of the soul. When we speak of language in this way, we must go back to the very earliest times of the post-Atlantean cultures.

[ 6 ] But then it was precisely the Babylonian people who had the task of bringing this living spiritual connection between human beings and the spiritual world down into the personal realm, where the personality stands on its own in its individuality, in its uniqueness. That was the task of the Babylonians: to bring the spiritual world down into the physical plane. And connected with this is that this living feeling, this spiritual feeling for language ceases and language adapts itself to the climate, to the geographical location, to the ethnic race and the like. That is why the Bible, which tells us more accurate things about these matters than the fantasies of Mr. Fritz Mauthner, who calls himself a linguist, describes this important fact to us in the story of the Tower of Babel, where all the people of the earth who spoke a common language were scattered. We can also understand this Tower of Babel spiritually if we know how buildings were constructed in ancient times. Such buildings, which were built for the purpose of performing certain acts dedicated to sacred wisdom, or which were to be landmarks for sacred truths, were built in ancient times in dimensions that were taken either from heaven or from man. And this is basically the same thing, for man, as a microcosm, is a replica of the macrocosm, so that the dimensions hidden in the pyramid are taken from heaven and from man.

[ 7 ] If we could go back to ancient times, to relatively early times, we would find symbolic imitations of human or heavenly measurements everywhere in cult buildings. Length, width, and depth, the way the interior was architecturally designed, all of this was modeled after the measurements of the heavens or those of the human body. But that was how it happened: where there was a living awareness of the connection between man and the spiritual world, the dimensions were taken down from the spiritual world. How did things have to become in the time when human knowledge was to be brought down, so to speak, from heaven to earth? From the general spiritual-human to the human-personal? The measurements could now only be taken from human beings themselves, from the human personality, insofar as it is an expression of individual egoism. This had to become the Tower of Babel, the place of worship for those who were now to take their measurements solely from the personality. But at the same time it had to be shown that the personality must first gradually mature in order to ascend again into the spiritual worlds. We have seen that it was necessary to pass through the fourth and fifth periods in order to ascend again. At that time, it was not possible to simply ascend back into the world of spiritual regions. This is what is meant by saying that the construction of the Tower of Babel had to be a failure, that it was not yet possible to reach heaven with what could be taken from the human personality. There is something incredibly profound in this world symbol, in the building of the Tower of Babel, through which human beings were limited to their individual human personalities, to what the personality could become in any people under particular circumstances.

[ 8 ] Thus the Babylonians were sent down from the spiritual world to our earth; there was their mission, there was their task. But, as I have already mentioned, underlying the outer Babylonian culture was a Chaldean mystery culture, which remained esoteric but nevertheless flowed into the outer culture in a very specific way. And that is why we still see the ancient wisdom shining through everywhere in the measures that the Babylonians were able to take. But they had to do this in such a way that it did not ascend with them into the spiritual regions, but that they applied it to our earth. And what lay in this nature of the Babylonians' mission has become incorporated into culture and has come down to our times. We can show this. We need only have a little respect for that still great, powerful insight into the spiritual worlds that the old traditions cherished in their souls and that had only reached twilight. We must have respect for the Babylonians' profound knowledge of the heavens and for their tremendous mission, which consisted in extracting from what was known to humanity through the spiritual world, from the measurements of the heavens, everything that was necessary for external practical life and had to be incorporated into human culture. But at the same time, they had the mission of relating everything to human beings. And it is interesting that certain ideas have survived to our times, which are, as it were, an echo of those peculiar feelings that the Babylonians still felt vividly: feelings of the whole macrocosm flowing into man, of a human lawfulness of the earthly personal human being, who reproduces the great lawfulness of the heavens.

[ 9 ] Thus, in ancient Babylon, there was a saying that goes: “Look at the man walking there, not as an old man and not as a child, walking as a healthy man and not as a sick man, walking neither too fast nor too slow, and you will see the measure of the sun's course.” A strange saying, but one that can give us a deep insight into the souls of the ancient Babylonians. For they imagined that a person with a good, healthy gait, a person who maintains a speed in his walking that springs from the health of life, that such a person, if he walked around the earth neither too fast nor too slow, would need 3651/i days to complete such a circuit—and that is approximately correct, provided that he walked continuously day and night. And so they said to themselves: That is the time it would take a healthy person to circle the earth, and also the same time—for they believed in the apparent movement of the sun around the earth—in which the sun goes around the earth. So if you walk around the earth as a healthy person, not too fast, not too slow, you keep the pace of the sun's journey around the earth. That means: “Human, it is implanted in your health to follow the course of the sun around the earth.”

[ 10 ] This is something that can inspire respect for the powerful cosmic view of the Babylonian people. For, based on this, they then created a division of this movement of man around the Earth. They calculated according to certain proportions and then arrived at something that is approximately the distance a person travels when walking for two hours; but this is equivalent to a mile. They calculated this measure based on a healthy gait and took it as a kind of standard measure for measuring the ground on a larger scale. And this measure, my dear friends, remained in use until recently — when everything in human development became abstract — in the German mile, which can be covered in about two hours. Thus, something originating from the mission of the ancient Babylonians, who had derived it from the cosmos and calculated it according to the course of the sun, was preserved until the 19th century.

[ 11 ] It was only in our time that it became necessary to reduce these measurements taken from human beings to abstract measurements taken from something dead. For, as is well known, the present measurement is abstract in comparison with the concrete measurements directly linked to human beings and to the phenomena of the heavens, which are all basically traceable to the mission of the ancient Babylonian people. With other measurements too, such as the “foot” — which was taken from a human limb — or the “cubit” — which was measured from the hand and arm of a human being — we can see everywhere that there is something underlying them that was found in humans, in the microcosm, as a law. And basically, until recently, the entire way of thinking of the ancient Babylonians was based on our system of measurement. The twelve signs of the zodiac and the five planets gave them five times twelve = sixty; that is a basic number. The ancient Babylonians counted up to sixty. At sixty, they started again from the beginning. In everything they counted in their daily lives, they used the number twelve as a basis, which, because it comes from the laws of the cosmos, actually fits much more concretely to all external concrete relationships. For the number has twelve parts. Twelve was the dozen, and the dozen is nothing other than a gift from the mission of the Babylonians. We have the number ten as a basis everywhere, a number that causes us great difficulty when we want to divide it into parts, whereas the dozen, in its relationship to sixty and in its various divisibilities, fits very concretely into the circumstances as the basis of a system of numbers and measures.

[ 12 ] It is not meant to be a criticism of our time when we say that humanity has entered into the abstract, even in relation to arithmetic and counting, for one epoch cannot do the same thing as the one before it. If we want to trace the course of culture from the Atlantean catastrophe to the Greek period and from there on through our own, we can say: The Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cultures descend; in Greek culture, the point is reached where pure humanity is formed on the physical plane, and then the ascent begins again. But this ascent is such that it represents, so to speak, only a branch of the real development, and that there is indeed a continuous descent into materialism on the other side. That is why, in our time, alongside the energetic spiritual striving upward, we have the crassest materialism, which penetrates deeply into matter. These things naturally exist side by side. Like a resistance that must be overcome in order for a higher force to develop, this materialistic current must exist. However, it is in the nature of this current to make everything abstract, for the entire decimal system is an abstract system. This is not a criticism, but merely a characteristic. And in the same way, people want to overcome the concrete in other areas. What suggestions have not been made, for example, to move Easter to a fixed day in April so that inconveniences for trade and industry would be avoided! No one notices that we still have something here that protrudes from ancient times in its determination according to the starry sky. Everything is supposed to flow into the abstract, and only like a thin stream does the concrete, which in turn rushes toward the spiritual, flow into our culture.

[ 13 ] It is extremely interesting how, not only within the spiritual sciences but also outside them, humanity is instinctively driven to make its way upward, to ascend again, let us say, to a similar attachment to measure, number, and form as was the case with the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians. For indeed, in our time there is a kind of repetition of Babylonian and Egyptian culture; the periods of ancient times are repeating themselves, the Egyptian period in ours, the Persian in the sixth, the Indian in the seventh. The first corresponds to the seventh, the second to the sixth, the third to our fifth, and the fourth stands alone, forming the middle. That is why so much of what was the view of the ancient Egyptians is instinctively repeated. Strange things can happen. People can be completely immersed in primal materialistic ideas and concepts, and yet they can be led into spiritual life by the power of facts—not by scientific theories, for those are all materialistic today.

[ 14 ] You see, there is, for example, an interesting doctor in Berlin who has made a strange observation. I will show you this on the board; this is a purely factual observation that has been made, apart from any theory. Let us assume that we are given the date of death of a woman — I am not recording something that has been invented, but something that has been observed — this woman is the grandmother of a family. A certain number of days before the death of this grandmother, a grandchild is born, the number of days being 1428. Strangely enough, 1428 days after the death of the grandmother, another grandchild is born, and a great-grandchild is born 9996 days after the death of the grandmother. Divide 9996 by 1428: you get 7. This means that in a period seven times longer than the period between the birth of the grandchild and the death of the grandmother, a great-grandchild is born. And now the same doctor shows that this is not an isolated case, but that entire families can be examined and that one always finds absolutely definite numerical ratios in relation to death and birth. And the most interesting thing is that if you take the number 1428, for example, you again have seven as a number within it. In short, the facts today compel people to find certain regularities and periodicities related to the ancient sacred numbers in the sequence of external events. And today, the number of results actually compiled by Fließ — that is the name of the Berlin doctor — and his students in this direction is proof that very specific numbers are the regulatory factors that govern the lawful course of such events. These compiled numbers are already available in overwhelming quantities today. The interpretation is entirely materialistic, but the power of the facts compels us to believe in the influence of numbers on world events. I would like to point out that it is extremely wrong how von Fließ and his students still use this principle. How he uses his main numbers, namely 23 and 28, which he also finds again – 28 = 4xX7 – will have to undergo many improvements. Nevertheless, in such a consideration we see something like an instinctive emergence of the ancient Babylonian culture during the rise of humanity. Of course, the vast majority of people have no feeling, no sense for such things; they remain isolated in narrow circles. But it must seem strange to us when we see that those people, such as the students of Fließ, who discover such things, then develop peculiar thoughts and feelings. One of these students of Fließ says: “What would people have said if these things had been known in earlier times” — they were known! — “what would the people concerned have said?” And the following passage seems to me to be particularly characteristic.

[ 15 ] After the student of Fließ has compiled many things in this way, he says: “Periods of the clearest mathematical structure are taken here from nature, and such things have always been unattainable to gifted minds accustomed to much more difficult things. With what religious fervor the calculating Babylonians would have researched here, and with what magic the questions would have been surrounded.” So how far are we already in anticipating what is really happening! How does the human instinct work according to spiritual life! But it is precisely there, where the common science of our time usually passes blindly by, that we must often seek what is deeply illuminating for the occult power of which people are completely unaware. For those who point to this peculiar law of numbers explain it in a completely materialistic way. But the power of facts is already forcing people to recognize the spiritual, mathematical lawfulness in things. Thus we see how deeply true it is that, in essence, everything that later expresses itself in a personal way in the course of human development is like a shadow image of what previously existed in elementary, original greatness, precisely because the connection with the spiritual world still existed. I would like to emphasize this so that it may be written in your souls that it was the Babylonians, in their transition to the fourth cultural period, who had to bring heaven down to earth, so to speak, who had to conceal the heavenly in measure, number, and weight; and that we have felt the echoes of this down to our own day, that we will return to this system of counting, that it must assert itself more and more, even if in other areas of life an abstract system of measurement and numbers is obviously the right thing. So here too we can see how, during the descent, a certain point was reached in the Greek-Latin culture of pure humanity, of the development of personality on the physical plane, and how then a new ascent takes place. So that, in fact, in relation to the course of post-Atlantean culture, Greek culture stands in the middle. Now we must bear in mind that the impulse of Christianity broke in during this Greek epoch, which is to lead humanity more and more upward into other regions. But we have already seen how Christianity did not appear with all its significance and spiritual content in the early stages of its development. We have seen from the behavior of the Alexandrians toward Hypatia what weaknesses and dark sides Christianity was initially afflicted with. Yes, we have often emphasized that the times when Christianity will be understood in all its depth are only just coming, that Christianity still has infinite depths within itself and that it belongs, so to speak, more to the future than to the present, let alone to the past of humanity. Thus we see how something that was only beginning to take shape in Christianity has become part of what is essentially the legacy of a primordial wisdom and spirituality. For what Greek culture had received, what it carried within itself, was truly something like a legacy of what human beings had acquired in countless incarnations through their living connection with the spiritual world. All the spirituality that had been experienced in earlier times had sunk into the souls and hearts of the Greeks and lived out in them. We can therefore understand that there may have been people who, when Christianity was taking root, especially in view of what had become of the Christian impulse in the first centuries, were unable to value this event as highly as what had been passed down to Greek culture with overwhelming grandeur and spirituality as an ancient heritage of millennia. And there was one particularly characteristic personality who experienced this struggle between the old and the new, this struggle between the most ancient treasures of wisdom and the most ancient spiritual treasures and what was only in its infancy and trickling weakly, within his own breast, so to speak: this personality of the Greek-Latin period of the 4th century, who experienced this on the stage of his soul, was Julian Apostata.

[ 16 ] Oh, it is interesting to follow the life of Julian, the Roman emperor. Born the nephew of the ambitious and vengeful Emperor Constantine, Julian was actually destined to be killed along with his brother when he was still a child. Only because it was believed that his death would cause too much of a stir, and because it was hoped that whatever harm he might do could be postponed until later, was he allowed to live. And Julian had to undergo his education amid many wanderings among various communities. And it was strictly ensured that he absorbed into his soul what was then taken in Rome and from Rome, from the Roman Empire, as Christian development for reasons of expediency. But this was a colorful mixture of what gradually emerged as the Catholic Church and what lived as Arianism; they did not want to spoil it with either of them, so to speak. And so, at that time, the old Hellenistic-pagan ideal, the old gods, and the old mysteries were fought against quite strongly in every way. Everything, as I said, was brought to bear to make Julian, who was hoped would one day ascend the throne of the Caesars, a good Christian, so to speak.

[ 17 ] But a strange urge expressed itself in this soul. This soul could never really gain a deep understanding of Christianity. Wherever this child was taken, and wherever there were still remnants not only of ancient paganism but also of ancient spirituality, this boy's heart opened up. He absorbed what lived in the culture of the fourth period in terms of ancient, sacred traditions and institutions. And so it came about that on his various wanderings, driven by the persecutions of his uncle, the emperor, he nevertheless came into contact with teachers of the so-called Neoplatonic school and with the disciples of the Alexandrians, who had received the ancient traditions from Alexandria. There Julian's heart was nourished with what he felt such a deep urge for. And then he learned what treasures of ancient wisdom still existed in Greece itself. And with all that Greece gave him, all that the ancient world gave him in wisdom, Julianus developed a living feeling for the language of the starry sky, for the secrets that speak down to us from the script of the starry sky in outer space. And then the time came for him to be initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries by one of the last hierophants. And in Julian we have the peculiar spectacle of an inspired man of the ancient mysteries, who is completely immersed in what can be attained when spiritual life becomes reality through the mysteries; we have the spectacle of such an initiate sitting on the throne of the Roman Caesars. And however much misunderstandings may have crept into the writings against the Christians that have come down to us from Julian, we still know what greatness lived in Julian's worldview when he spoke from the greatness of his initiation.

[ 18 ] But as a disciple of the mysteries that were already in their twilight, he did not know how to place himself correctly in his time, and so he went to meet the martyrdom of an inspired man who no longer knew which secrets had to be kept secret and which could be revealed. From the zeal and enthusiasm that Julianus had absorbed through his Hellenistic education and initiation, and from the magnificent experiences he had been able to gain at the hand of his hierophant, the will developed in him to restore what he saw as the living life and weaving of the ancient spirituality. And so we see how he tried through many measures to reintroduce the old gods into the culture in which Christianity had established itself. He went too far both in revealing the secrets of the mysteries and in his stance toward Christianity. That is why, in 363, when he had to undertake a military campaign against the Persians, he was overtaken by his fate. As everyone who has spoken without permission what should not be spoken has been overtaken by his fate, so it happened to Julian, and it can be historically proven that Julian fell at the hands of Christians on this campaign against the Persians. For not only did this news spread very quickly afterwards and was never disavowed by any of the important Christian writers, it would also have been highly conspicuous if the Persians had brought about the death of their arch-enemy and had not boasted of this death. But even among them, the view arose immediately afterwards that he had fallen at the hands of Christians. It was truly something like a storm that emanated from this inspired soul, from the enthusiasm that Julian Apostata had gained from his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, which were already approaching their twilight. Such was the fate of a man of the fourth century, a very personal man whose world karma basically consisted in living out in personal anger, personal resentment, and personal enthusiasm what he had received as a legacy. That was the fundamental law of his life.

[ 19 ] It is now interesting to look at this particular life, this particular individuality, for the purpose of occult historical observation in the later course of events. In the 16th century, in 1546, a remarkable person was born into a noble family in northern Europe. He was born into a wealthy family and had everything that could have led him to high office in the traditional way of life at that time. Because, in keeping with family tradition, he was supposed to become a person in an outstanding government or other high position, he was naturally destined for a legal career and was sent with a tutor to the University of Leipzig to study jurisprudence. The tutor tormented the boy—for he was still a boy when he was supposed to study law—he tormented the boy all day long. But when the tutor slept the sleep of the righteous and dreamed of legal theories, the boy stole out of his bed and observed the stars at night with the very simple instruments he had constructed himself. And he soon learned more about the secrets of the starry sky than any teacher, and even more than was written in all the books at that time. For example, he soon noticed a very specific position of Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation Leo, looked it up in the books, and found that it was recorded completely incorrectly. This gave rise to a longing in him to learn as much as possible about this script of the stars and to record the paths of the stars as accurately as possible. And what wonder that this man, despite all opposition from his family, very soon obtained permission to become a natural scientist and astronomer and not to spend his life dreaming over law books and doctrines. And since he was able to raise considerable funds, he was able to set up an entire institute.

[ 20 ] This institute was strangely furnished; its upper floors contained instruments designed to observe the secrets of the starry sky, and in the basement there were apparatus for forming the various mixtures and separations of substances and materials. And there he worked, dividing his time between observations in the upper floors and cooking, boiling, mixing, and weighing in the cellars below. This spirit worked to show, little by little, how the laws written in the stars, the planetary and fixed star laws, the macrocosmic laws, are reflected microcosmically in the mathematical numbers that underlie the mixtures and separations of substances. And what he found to be a living relationship between the heavenly and the earthly, he applied to the science of medicine and sought to produce medicines that had such an evil effect around him precisely because he gave them free of charge to those he wanted to help. For those who were doctors at that time and were intent on charging high prices raged against this man who brought about such “horrible” things with what he wanted to bring down from heaven to earth.

[ 21 ] Fortunately, through a certain event, this man had the favor of the Danish King Frederick II, and as long as he remained in this favor, things went well, and indeed, tremendous insights into the spiritual workings of the world laws, in the sense I have just characterized, were achieved. Yes, this man knew something about the spiritual course of the world laws. He amazed the world with things that today, however, would no longer be believed. For once, when he was in Rostock, he predicted the death of Sultan Soliman from the constellation of the stars, and it came to pass within a few days, a piece of news that made the name Tycho Brahe popular throughout Europe. Today, the world knows little more about Tycho Brahe, whose life is actually only a short time behind us, than that he was somewhat simple-minded and had not yet fully reached the high materialistic standards of our time. He did indeed map a thousand new stars on the star chart, and he also made the epoch-making discovery of a star that appeared and disappeared, describing it as the Nova Stella, but these things are mostly ignored. The world knows nothing else about him except that he was foolish enough to conceive a world system in which the Earth stands still and the Sun revolves around it with the planets; that is what the world knows today. The fact that we are dealing with a significant personality of the 16th century, a personality who achieved something infinite that is still useful to astronomy today, that there is a wealth of profound wisdom in what he has given us, is not usually recorded, simply because Tycho Brahe, in establishing his precise system based on his own deep knowledge, saw difficulties that Copernicus did not see. And if it may be said, it seems paradoxical, but the Copernican world system is not the last word on the matter. And the dispute between the two systems will continue to occupy later generations. But that is only a side note, because it is too paradoxical for today.

[ 22 ] It was only under the successor of his king, who was well disposed towards him, that Tycho Brahe's opponents, who came from all sides – the doctors of the time, the professors of the University of Copenhagen – succeeded in turning his patron's successor against him. And so Tycho Brahe was driven from his homeland and had to move south again. He had already set up his first large planiglobe in Augsburg and the gilded globe on which he repeatedly drew the new stars he discovered, which eventually numbered a thousand. In exile in Prague, this man was to meet his death. Today, if we do not consult the usual textbooks but go to the sources and study Kepler, for example, we can still see how Kepler arrived at his laws precisely because Tycho Brahe had done such careful astronomical observations before him. He was a personality who, in turn, but on a grand scale, bore the mark of what was great and significant in wisdom before his time; who could not yet find his way into what immediately afterwards became popular in the materialistic worldview. Wasn't it a peculiar fate, that of Tycho Brahe?

[ 23 ] And now think about it, when you compare these two personal destinies, how infinitely instructive it is to know from the Akashic Records that the individuality of Julian Apostata reappears in Tycho Brahe, that Tycho Brahe is, in a sense, the reincarnation of Julian the Apostate. How strange, how paradoxical the law of reincarnation is when the karmic connections of individual human beings are modified by what is world historical karma, when the world powers themselves seize human individuality in order to use it as a tool.

[ 24 ] I would like to expressly note, however, that I am not saying things like the connection between Julianus and Tycho Brahe so that tomorrow they will be shouted from the rooftops and discussed at every dinner table and coffee table, but so that they may sink here as a teaching of occult wisdom into many souls, and we may learn more and more to understand what truly underlies all that is supersensible in the sensual-physical realm of human beings.