The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] If we wish to continue the reflections we have been engaging in during our branch meetings over the past year, it is necessary for us to acquire some additional concepts, ideas, and perspectives beyond those we have discussed so far. We know that we could not possibly have addressed what we have to say about the Gospels and other spiritual documents of humanity if we had not presupposed that development of our entire world system which we describe there as the incarnations of our planet itself through the Saturn stage, the Sun stage, the Moon stage, up to the present ‘Earth stage.’ Anyone who recalls how often we have had to refer back to these fundamental concepts knows just how essential they are for any occult consideration of human development. If you now take a look at the information provided, for example, in Outline of Esoteric Science regarding the Saturn, Sun, and Moon phases of development leading up to the Earth phase, you will admit that this can only be a sketch—and even if it were much more detailed, it could not be otherwise—merely information that can be provided from a certain perspective, from a certain point of view. For just as earthly existence offers an infinite wealth of details, so it is quite natural that we must also record an infinite series of details regarding the existence of Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon, and that only a very rough charcoal sketch, a kind of outline, can ever be provided. For us, however, a characterization of evolution is necessary from yet another perspective.

[ 2 ] When we ask ourselves: Where do all these details come from? — we know that they originate from what are known as the records in the Akashic Records. We know that whatever has happened or is taking place in the course of world evolution can, so to speak, be read as if through an entry in a subtle spiritual substance, the Akashic substance. Of everything that has taken place, there is such an entry from which one can glean how things once were. Now, of course, we can assume that, just as to the ordinary eye that surveys something of our physical world, things that are nearby appear in their details more or less clearly and distinctly, and the farther away they are, the more or less unclear and indistinct they appear, so too will things that are temporally close to us—those belonging to the Earth’s or the Moon’s development—be more precisely described; whereas things that are further removed in time take on more indistinct outlines, for example, when we look back clairvoyantly into the Saturn or Sun existence.

[ 3 ] Why do we even bother to place such importance on exploring periods of time so far in the past? One might ask: Why do these anthroposophists still bring up all sorts of ancient matters today? Surely there is no need to concern oneself with these ancient matters in the world, for we have enough to do with what is happening in the present.

[ 4 ] It would be very wrong to speak that way. For what once took place continues to unfold today. What took place during the Saturnic era was not merely a thing of the past; it continues to unfold today, though it is obscured and rendered invisible by what surrounds human beings externally on the physical plane. And the ancient Saturnic existence, which unfolded so long ago, is made particularly, particularly invisible. But the old Saturn existence still concerns us, even today. And to give ourselves an idea of how it concerns us, let us consider the following:

[ 5 ] We know that the innermost core of our being confronts us as what we call our “I.” This I, the innermost core of our being, is truly a quite supersensible, quite imperceptible entity for modern human beings. Just how imperceptible it is can be inferred from the fact that there are now schools of thought about the soul—the so-called official psychologies—that no longer have the slightest idea of what the essence of this “I” consists of, and that do not even realize that such an “I” exists.

[ 6 ] I have often pointed out that, over the course of the 19th century, the apt expression “the study of the soul without a soul” gradually emerged in German psychology. In particular, the school of Wundt—which is world-famous today and holds great influence not only in Germany but is also held in high esteem wherever psychology is discussed—set the tone for this “psychology without a soul,” even though the term was not coined by it. “The study of the soul without a soul” could be expressed as follows: a description of the soul’s properties without taking into account an independent soul-being in which all the properties of the soul first gather at a kind of focal point, assembling in the ego. — That is the greatest nonsense ever hurled into the study of the soul; one cannot even imagine a greater nonsense; yet today’s psychology stands entirely under the influence of this nonsense. And this “psychology without a soul” is famous throughout the world today. Future cultural historians of our time will have their work cut out for them if they wish to make it even somewhat plausible to our descendants how such a thing was possible at all—that in the 19th century and well into the 20th, something like this was marveled at as the greatest achievement in the field of psychology. All this is said merely to indicate how unclear official psychology is about the ego, the center of the human being.

[ 7 ] If one could grasp the ego in its true essence and place it before oneself just as one does the external physical body, and if one could seek out the environment on which the ego depends—just as the physical body depends on what is seen from the outside through the eyes and otherwise perceived by the senses—if one could seek out the environment of the ego just as one seeks out the environment in the physical realm—in the clouds, mountains, and so on—if one were to seek this for the I as well, that upon which the I depends, just as, for example, the physical body depends on its food—then one would arrive at a world characteristic, a world tableau, even today, that permeates our ordinary surroundings, lies invisibly within them, and is identical to the world tableau of ancient Saturn. That is to say, whoever wishes to get to know the ego in its world must be able to envision a world such as the ancient Saturn world was. This world is veiled; it is a supersensible world for human beings. At the present stage of human development, people could by no means endure it. It is veiled from them by the Guardian of the Threshold so that it may remain hidden from them for the time being, and a certain degree of spiritual development is required to be able to endure such a vision.

[ 8 ] It is indeed a sight that takes some getting used to; above all, you must form a conception of everything that is necessary to even reach the point where you can still perceive such a tableau of the world as something real. You would have to mentally remove from the world everything you can perceive with your senses; you would also have to mentally remove your inner world, insofar as it consists of the ordinary emotional stirrings of human beings; you would have to further mentally remove from what is in the world everything that constitutes human ideas. So from the external world you would have to remove everything that the senses can perceive, and from the inner world everything that consists of emotional stirrings and ideas. And if you now wish to form a concept of that state of mind into which a person must enter when they truly grasp the thought: “All of that would be removed, but the person would still be there”—then one can only say that the person must learn to feel a shudder, a fear, before the infinite void that opens up around us. One must, as it were, be able to perceive one’s surroundings as entirely saturated, tinged with that which arouses shudder and fear in us from all sides, and must at the same time be capable of overcoming this fear through the inner firmness and security of one’s being. Without these two states of mind—a sense of dread and fear of the infinite void of existence and the overcoming of this fear—one cannot even begin to grasp what underlies our present existence as the legacy of the ancient Saturn era.

[ 9 ] People rarely cultivate these two sensations within themselves, as they have now been described. Consequently, even in literature there are few descriptions of this state. Of course, those who, through clairvoyant powers, have sought to get to the bottom of things over the course of time are familiar with this state. But in external literature—written or printed—there is little evidence that people have experienced anything like a shudder at the face of infinite emptiness, or even the overcoming of this shudder. To gain some external insight into the matter, I tried to look a little into recent literature to see where something like this shudder at the face of immeasurable emptiness might appear in a person. Philosophers are, of course, usually incredibly clever; they speak dispassionately in their concepts and avoid talking about the great, imposing impressions. One does not easily find anything about this there. Now, I do not wish to speak of where I found nothing at all. But I did find a small echo of these feelings once, namely in the diary of the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz, where he sometimes describes quite intimate feelings he experienced while living through Hegel’s philosophy. I came across a curious passage that comes across as an innocent entry he jotted down in his diary. Karl Rosenkranz realizes that Hegel’s philosophy proceeds from “pure being.” Much has been said about this “pure being” of Hegel’s in the philosophical literature of the 19th century, but one must say that it has been little understood. One might almost say that in the philosophy of the second half of the 19th century—though of course one can only say this in the most intimate circles!—people understand as much of Hegel’s “pure Being” as a Sunday ox does, having spent the whole week eating grass. It is a concept that has been sifted through: this “pure Being” of Hegel—not the existing, but the Being— it is a concept that is truly not yet what I have just characterized as the terrifying, awe-inspiring void, but it is the entire space within Hegel’s Being tinged with the quality that has nothing that can be experienced by human beings: infinity, filled with Being. And Karl Rosenkranz once experiences it as a shuddering, shaking sensation from the cold of the cosmic space, which is filled with nothing but empty Being.

[ 10 ] To understand what underlies the world, it is not enough to speak of it in terms of concepts or to form concepts and ideas about it; rather, it is far more necessary to be able to evoke a sense of the feeling that arises in the face of the infinite emptiness of the ancient Saturn existence. The mind is seized, even if it only catches a glimpse of it, by a feeling of shuddering. If one wishes to ascend clairvoyantly in order to then perceive this Saturn state, one must prepare oneself by actually acquiring a feeling that, in a certain sense, stems from the sensation of vertigo on a high mountain—a sensation more or less familiar to every human being—when one stands above an abyss and believes there is no solid ground beneath one’s feet; a feeling that one could remain nowhere, so that one feels surrendered to powers, to forces over which one no longer has any control. But that is only the elementary, the initial feeling. For one loses not only the ground beneath one’s feet, but also what the eyes can see, the ears can hear, the hands can grasp—in short, everything that exists in the spatial environment; and it cannot be otherwise than that one either loses all thought, falling into a kind of twilight or sleep state in which one cannot arrive at any insight; or else one immerses oneself in that sensation, and then there is nothing else but that one arrives at that state of shuddering. But one must be prepared; otherwise, one is overcome by a state of dizziness that cannot be overcome.

[ 11 ] Now there are two possibilities for people today. The one sure option is that someone has understood the Gospels, has understood the Mystery of Golgotha. Whoever has truly understood them in their full depth—not, of course, in the way modern theologians speak of them today, but in such a way that they have drawn from them the deepest thing that a human being can experience inwardly—takes something with them into that emptiness, which expands as if from a single point and fills the void with something akin to courage, a feeling of courage and security through union with that Being who performed the sacrifice on Golgotha. That is one path. — The other path is that we enter the spiritual worlds without the Gospels, that we enter the spiritual worlds through true, authentic anthroposophy. That can also happen. You know that we always emphasize first of all: we do not start from the Gospels when we consider the Mystery of Golgotha, but we would arrive at it even if there were no Gospels at all. Before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, this could not have been the case; but it is the case today because something has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, through which human beings can grasp the spiritual world directly for themselves from the impressions. This is what we can call the working of the Holy Spirit in the world, the working of the world-thoughts in the world.

[ 12 ] If we take one or the other with us, we cannot lose our way and cannot, so to speak, plunge into the infinite abyss when we first face that terrifying void. If we now approach this terrifying void with the other preparations provided to us through various means—as explained, for example, in “How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” and in what builds upon that, and penetrate into the spiritual world—a world from which everything that can shake our minds or be grasped by our imagination is absent—then, as we acclimate ourselves to this world, we learn, by attuning ourselves, so to speak, to the Saturn existence, to first encounter beings but not something that resembles the animal, plant, or mineral kingdoms; rather, we come to know beings—for this is a world in which there are no clouds, no light, and which is entirely soundless—but we come to know beings, specifically those beings we call, in our terminology, the Spirits of Will or the Thrones. These Spirits of Will—we come to know them in such a way that they become a true objectivity for us; one might say: a surging sea of courage.

[ 13 ] What a person can initially only imagine becomes a clairvoyant reality. Imagine yourself immersed in the sea, but now immersed as a spiritual being who feels at one with the Christ-Being, carried by the Christ-Being, swimming—but now not in a sea of water, but in a sea filling infinite space—there is no other term for it—of surging courage, surging energy! This is not merely an indifferent, undifferentiated sea, but all the possibilities and distinctions of what can be described as the feeling of courage come to meet us there. We come to know beings that, while consisting of courage, are nevertheless quite specific; even though they consist solely of courage, we encounter them as concrete beings. It naturally seems quite strange to say that one encounters beings that are just as real as human beings made of—flesh, and that consist not of flesh but of courage. But it is so. As such entities we encounter the spirits of the will, and initially we designate as the Saturn existence only that which the spirits of the will, consisting of courage, represent; nothing else. That is Saturn for the time being. It is a world of which we could not say that it is a world that is spherical, hexagonal, or quadrangular. None of these spatial definitions apply to it, for there is no possibility of finding an end there. If we wish to use the image of swimming once more, we can say: it is not a sea where one would reach a surface, but in every direction one always finds spirits of courage or of the will.

[ 14 ] In later lectures, I will explain how one does not arrive at this subject all at once; for now, I simply wish to follow the same order as before: Saturn, Sun, Moon; for it is much better to proceed in the reverse direction: from Earth to Saturn, as actually occurs in clairvoyance. — Now I am describing it in reverse, but that doesn’t matter.

[ 15 ] The peculiar thing is this: once one has risen to this level of perception, something occurs that is incredibly difficult to imagine for those who do not make the effort to arrive at such concepts slowly and gradually. For something ceases that is as intimately connected with ordinary human imagination as anything else: space ceases to exist. It no longer makes sense to say that one is swimming up or down, forward or backward, right or left, or to apply spatial relationships at all. It makes no sense in the old Saturn; in this respect, it is the same everywhere. But the important thing is: when one enters the early stages of Saturn existence, time also ceases. There is no longer any before or after. This is, of course, very difficult for people today to imagine, because their imagination itself flows within time: one thought follows another. That time ceases—this, again, can only be characterized by a feeling. This feeling is truly not pleasant. — Imagine your thoughts frozen, so that everything you can remember and everything you intend to do solidifies like a rigid rod, so that you feel trapped in your imagination and can no longer move. Then you will no longer be able to say that you have experienced something you experienced “earlier” in the past. You are bound to it; it is there, but it is frozen. Time ceases to have any meaning. It is no longer there at all. That is why it is also quite nonsensical to ask: You are describing the Saturn existence, the Sun existence, and so on—tell us, what was there before the Saturn existence! “Before” no longer makes sense there, because time ceases, so that one must also cease with all temporal determinations. It is truly the case in the old Saturn existence—in a very figurative sense one can say this—that the world is as if boarded up, in that one must stand still with one’s thoughts. The same applies to clairvoyance. One must have long since left ordinary thoughts behind; they do not reach that far. Figuratively speaking, you would have to imagine that your brain is freezing. And as you become aware of this rigidity, you would have some idea of the consciousness that is no longer confined to time.

[ 16 ] Now, having reached this point, one becomes aware of a remarkable shift in the entire picture. It now becomes apparent that beings from other hierarchies seem to break through, to interplay, from the rigidity and timelessness that characterize this infinite sea of courage with its entities, which we call the spirits of the will. Only at the moment when one senses this absence of time does one realize that other beings are interplaying within it. One notices, in fact, an indefinable experience of which one cannot say that one is experiencing it oneself, but rather that it is there; one can only say that it is within the entire infinite sea of courage. One notices something like a flash passing through this field, like a brightening, but not actually a flash, rather more of a glimmer. It is a first differentiation. A glimmer—but a glimmer that does not give the impression of a flickering light, but—one must, after all, resort to various analogies with these things—if you wish to make it comprehensible to yourself, imagine the following. You come face to face with a person who says something to you, and you get the feeling: How clever he is! — and as he continues speaking, this feeling intensifies, and you sense: He is wise, he has experienced the infinite, that he can say such wise things! — and this personality also has such an effect that you literally feel something like a magical breath emanating from him. Imagine this magical aura infinitely intensified—and picture it emerging in the sea of courage like clouds that do not flash but glow within it. If you take all this together, you have an idea of the fact that beings who are entirely wisdom play a part in the hierarchy of the spirits of the will—but a wisdom that plays a radiant role there, which is not merely wisdom, but wisdom that radiates outward. In short, you first gain an idea of what clairvoyant perception is regarding what the cherubim are. The Cherubim play a part in this.

[ 17 ] Now imagine nothing around you except what I have just described. I said earlier, emphasizing this point: One cannot say that one has it around oneself—but one can only say that it is simply there—as I have just described. One has to think one’s way into it. But the idea that there is, say, a flash there is not quite correct; that is why I said it is not a flash, but a glow, because everything is simultaneous. It is simply not the case that one thing arises and passes away, but everything is simultaneous. But one now gets a sense of a relationship between these spirits of the will and the cherubim. One gets the feeling that they are entering into a relationship with one another. One attains this awareness. And specifically, one attains the awareness that the spirits of the will, or the Thrones, sacrifice their own being to the cherubim. This is the final concept one arrives at when moving backward toward Saturn—the self-sacrificing spirits of the will directing their sacrifices upward to the cherubim—it goes no further; there the world is as if boarded up. And as one experiences this sacrifice of the spirits of the will toward the cherubim, something breaks free from our being. One can only express this now with the words: Through the sacrifice that the spirits of will offer to the cherubim, time is born. — But time is not now that abstract time of which we usually speak, but rather an independent entity. Now one can begin to speak of something that begins. Time begins with what is first born there as time-entities, which are nothing but pure time. Beings are born that consist solely of time; these are the spirits of personality, whom we then come to know as Archai in the hierarchy of spiritual beings. In the Saturn existence, they are only time. We have also described them as time spirits, as spirits that govern time. But those who are born there as spirits are truly beings that consist entirely of time.

[ 18 ] This is something of extraordinary importance: to participate in this sacrifice of the spirits of the will to the cherubim and in the birth of the spirits of time. For only now, as time is born, does something else arise that makes it possible for us at all to speak of the Saturn state as something that bears, so to speak, some resemblance to what now surrounds us. The sacrificial smoke of the Thrones, which gives birth to time, is what we call the warmth of Saturn. That is why I used to say that Saturn is in a state of warmth when describing what is there. In contrast to all the elements we currently have around us, we can speak of the ancient Saturn state only as a state of warmth. But this warmth arises as sacrificial warmth, which the spirits of will offer to the cherubim. Now this at the same time gives us a guide as to how we should truly think about fire. Where we see fire, where we feel warmth, we should not think so materialistically as is natural and customary for people today; rather, where we see and feel warmth, there is still present in our surroundings today, invisibly and spiritually underlying it, the sacrifice of the spirits of will to the cherubim. It is through this that the world first gains its truth: that we know there is a sacrifice behind every manifestation of warmth.

[ 19 ] In Occult Science, in order not to offend people too much, the focus is initially on describing the outer condition of the ancient Saturn. Enough people have already been offended by this, and those who can think only in today’s scientific terms regard the book as pure nonsense. But now imagine what it would mean if one were to say: In its innermost essence, in that which underlies it, the ancient Saturn holds the fact that the beings belonging to the spirits of will offered sacrifices to the cherubim; that time is born from the smoke of the sacrifice, from the sacrifice they bring to the cherubim; that from this the Archai, the spirits of time, have emerged, and that warmth is merely an outer reflection, a Maya, in comparison to the sacrifice of the spirits of will. But it is so: the outer warmth is merely a Maya, and if we are to speak the truth, we must say: wherever there is warmth, there is in truth a sacrifice—a sacrifice of the Thrones to the Cherubim.

[ 20 ] And now, a good imagination is as follows. It is mentioned very frequently in How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and it has also been said elsewhere, that the second stage of Rosicrucian initiation is the formation of imaginations. The anthroposophist must form these imaginations from correct conceptions of the world. Thus, he can conceive of what we have discussed today as transformed into a fantasy-like imagination: the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, kneeling in complete devotion, in a courageous devotion before the Cherubim, but in such a way that this devotion does not arise from a sense of smallness, but from the awareness that one possesses something one can offer as a sacrifice. The Thrones, in this willingness to sacrifice—which is grounded in strength and courage—kneeling before the Cherubim and sending the sacrifice up to them; and they send this sacrifice up like seething heat, flaming heat, so that the smoke of the sacrifice blazes upward toward the winged Cherubim! Such could be the image. And proceeding from this sacrifice—as if we could speak the word into the air and this word were time, but time as beings—proceeding from the entire process: the spirits of time, the Archai. This sending forth of the Archai presents a grandiose, powerful image. And this image, set before our soul, is extraordinarily impressive for certain imaginations, which can then carry us further and further into the realm of occult knowledge.

[ 21 ] That is precisely what we must achieve: transforming the ideas we receive into imaginings, into images. Even if the images are clumsily made by us, even if they are anthropomorphic, even if these beings look like winged humans, that is not what matters. The rest is ultimately given to us, and whatever they are not meant to have simply falls away. If we only immerse ourselves devotedly in such images, then we do what gradually leads us up to such beings: “If you take what I have just tried to characterize as courageous beings, overflowing with wisdom, you will see that the soul must soon take refuge in all sorts of images that lie apart from the concepts of the intellect. Intellectual concepts owe their existence to much later developments, so that we must not initially approach such things intellectually. And you must understand what is meant when certain spirits—(who are opening to clairvoyance and describe such things from a naive clairvoyant perspective)—describe them differently than intellectual people do. But intellectual people can then never truly understand such spirits. For those who wish to learn about this, I will provide instructions. Take from the Reclam Universal Library the book that is a good one: the so-called “old Schwegler,” which students used to like to use before exams, but which is no longer usable now that the soul has been set aside; even though it has been made worse by an editor, it has not been completely distorted. It is a history of philosophy from the Hegelian point of view. — So you can take the old Schwegler’s “History of Philosophy,” and you will have a good picture of everything concerning ancient philosophy; and even if you read there about Hegelian philosophy, you will find everything excellently described. But now read the short chapter specifically on Jakob Böhme, and try to get a proper idea of how helpless such a person, who writes a philosophy of reason, is in the face of a spirit like Jakob Böhme! Thankfully, he left out Paracelsus entirely, for he would have written some truly terrible things there. But read what is written there about Jakob Böhme. There Schwegler encounters a spirit to whom it has naively dawned—not the Saturn image itself, but the repetition of the Saturn image, for that did indeed repeat itself during the Earth period; he encounters a spirit who can do nothing but describe things with words and images that the intellect cannot grasp. There, for the intellectual person, all “understanding” ceases. Not that one cannot understand these things at all, but one cannot understand them if one wishes to remain at the level of the ordinary, dry philosophical intellect.

[ 22 ] You see, that is precisely the point: that we rise to a level beyond the reach of ordinary intellect. Even if the ordinary mind produces something as excellent as Schwegler’s History of Philosophy—for I have deliberately called it a “good” book—it is nonetheless an example of how an excellent mind comes to a complete standstill in the presence of a spirit like Jakob Böhme.

[ 23 ] Today, by contemplating ancient Saturn, we have attempted, so to speak, to penetrate more deeply into this ancient planetary embodiment of our Earth. We will soon do the same with the existence of the Sun and Moon, and in doing so we will see how we arrive at concepts there that may seem no less magnificent to us than when we trace back to the ancient Saturn state and the thrones offering sacrifices before the Cherubim arise within us—beings of time created as the results of sacrifice. For time is a result of sacrifice, and it arises first as living time, as a creature of sacrifice. Then we shall see how all these things are transformed on the Sun and how other magnificent processes of world existence will confront us as we pass from Saturn to the Sun and then to the lunar existence.