The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. The Legends of Paradise and the Holy Grail

[ 1 ] We have examined the changes in the human physical and etheric bodies as experienced by the individual in the course of the esoteric development he or she strives to undertake. If we wish to describe the fundamental nature of these changes, we can say: In the course of this development, the human being feels his physical body and his etheric body more and more inwardly. With regard to the physical body, we have been able to emphasize that the individual organs are felt to be more and more independent the further one advances, that they become, so to speak, more independent of one another. The physical body feels more alive in itself—one might say. Regarding the etheric body, we have emphasized that it not only feels more alive, but that it becomes more sensitive in general, that it is permeated by a kind of consciousness; for it begins to empathize with the course of external events in a subtle way. We have emphasized how, in the course of their esoteric development, people become increasingly sensitive to the progression of spring, summer, autumn, and winter; how this progression becomes something quite distinct for them, so that the successive events of time become more distinct from one another than is the case in the ordinary course of life; that they separate, that they differentiate themselves.

[ 2 ] We can therefore say that human beings begin, as it were, to experience the processes of the outer ether. This is the very first step toward a true liberation from one’s physicality. As one begins to truly experience one’s surroundings, one becomes increasingly independent of one’s own physicality. One begins, as it were, to experience spring, summer, autumn, and winter inwardly; but by living in the external world, one ceases to live in one’s own physicality. Now, as we emphasized yesterday, all of this is connected with a growing sensitivity to this very physicality. As one becomes more independent of one’s own physicality, one gradually begins to perceive this physicality, so to speak, as a kind of calamity; one notices that everything related solely to this physicality becomes a kind of reproach. And with this, an extraordinary amount has already been achieved for higher development when one begins, in such mental images and feelings as were discussed yesterday, to no longer be able to fully agree with one’s own human personality; and when one experiences this to an ever greater degree, then very much has already been gained for the higher, for the spiritual experience.

[ 3 ] Today I would like to try, so to speak, to take a leap forward in our considerations—which we have so far conducted more from the inside out—by first attempting to describe the situation as if the human being, with his astral body and his I, had already become independent of the physical and etheric bodies. We will discuss the intermediate states in the coming days. So, for the sake of clarity, I will put forward the hypothesis that, in the midst of sleep, a person experiences the moment of becoming clairvoyant outside their body and can look back upon their physical and etheric bodies.

[ 4 ] So far, we have taken only a few steps toward this state; we have reached the point where we have, so to speak, stepped outside ourselves and learned to experience something like the seasons and times of day; now let us consider the state that would arise if, on the one hand, we had a physical and etheric body, and, lifted out of them as in sleep, an I and an astral body; and let us suppose we could look back upon the physical and etheric bodies we have left behind. Then what we are looking back upon would appear to us in a completely different light than it appears to us in ordinary life. In ordinary life, we look at our material body through everyday observation or through external physical science, and we see in it, with a certain justification in physical terms, the crown of earthly creation. We structure this earthly creation in such a way that we speak of a mineral kingdom, a plant kingdom, an animal kingdom, and the human kingdom; and we see all the various qualities bestowed upon the different animal groups united, as it were, in this crown of physical creation, in the human body. We shall see that this has a certain justification from the perspective of external physical observation. Nor is it the intention of today’s lecture to awaken the belief that what may initially present itself to retrospective observation of the physical and etheric bodies—if one were to suddenly become clairvoyant in sleep—constitutes a definitive view of the physical body; it is merely intended to capture, as it were, a moment of clairvoyant retrospection. The following may emerge from such a moment: We look back first, observing, so to speak, our etheric body, which appears to us as a self-structured misty formation, a misty formation with various currents that we shall describe in more detail later—an artful formation, yet one that is in constant motion, finding no stillness or rest in any place; and then we look upon that which is embedded in this etheric body, upon our physical body.

[ 5 ] Now remember that we said: one’s own thinking must be set aside. So, we do not form our own thoughts about what we see. Above all, this is a fundamental requirement for this clairvoyant vision: that we allow ourselves to be inspired entirely, so to speak, by the world-thoughts that flow into us. So what we see there, we look at it, but it affects our feelings above all; it affects our feelings and will. Our thinking—so it seems to us, once we have truly attained what has been spoken of—is as if we had lost it; I mean our own thinking. And so, with the feeling that has remained our own, we look back upon what is embedded there in the misty formation, in the ever-moving misty formation of our etheric body as our physical organ.

[ 6 ] First, we are struck by an overall impression. This overall impression is such that what we see there fills us with infinite sadness, with terrible sadness. And one must say, my dear friends, that this mood of the soul, this terrible sadness, does not depend on one human individual or another, but is quite universal. There cannot be a human being who, as has been described, looks back from the outside at his physical body, as it is embedded in the etheric body, and who would not be completely, utterly permeated by boundless sadness. All the impressions I am now describing are initially imprinted in feeling, not in thought. Immeasurable sadness, a wholly melancholic mood, comes over us when we now look up to the far-reaching thoughts that flow into us. These thoughts—which are not our own, but rather the thoughts that creatively weave and work through the world—illuminate, so to speak, this structure of our physical body, and through the way they illuminate it, they tell us what it actually is that we are seeing.

[ 7 ] They tell us: everything we see here is the final, decadent remnant of a glory that once existed. And what these thoughts convey to us gives us the impression: What we have before us as our physical body is like something that was once mighty and glorious but has withered and shrunk, and now, shrunk into a small form, shows us a former, expansive glory. What is embedded in our etheric body appears to us as a final memory of ancient glory, hardened into the physical. There our individual physical organs appear to us—organs that today, so to speak, belong to our digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems; we look at them from the outside, viewing them spiritually, and behold, they appear to us in such a way that we say to ourselves: All that we have before us in the physical body are shrunken products, withered products of beings that once existed; of living beings that once lived in a magnificent environment and have now shrunk and withered away. And in the life they possess today—this lung, this heart, this liver, and the other organs—there is only the final, decadent remnant of an original, powerful inner life.

[ 8 ] And in this clairvoyant vision, these organs gradually take shape for us into what they once were. Just as a thought that we remember only very vaguely, when we make an effort to bring it up from memory, grows into what it once was, so does that which we carry within us as, for example, the lungs—and which at first presents itself like the last memory of a primeval splendor and glory—grow into that. But we feel: it recedes like a present thought of a distant memory, which then develops into what it once was. In our vision, the lung grows into the imagination of what the occultist once knew as a constant symbol and still knows today as a symbol of the human form: into the imagination of the eagle. And we get the feeling: This eagle was once a being—not to be compared with a modern animal eagle, for that, too, represents merely a product of decadence of a once-mighty being that is called an eagle in occultism; the occultist is led, as in a cosmic memory, to the eagle that once existed. — And when we turn our gaze backward to our heart, we feel how it, too, appears as a shrunken remnant, a withered, contracted remnant, like a memory of ancient glory—: then we feel how we are led back to primeval times, to a distant past, to a being that the occultist calls the lion. — And then, the lower bodily organs present themselves to us as a memory of what is called the Bull in occultism, an ancient living being that once existed in magnificent surroundings, which has withered in the course of evolution, shrunk together, and which today manifests itself as the lower bodily organs.

[ 9 ] I would like to sketch schematically what once was and what we come to see when we view our physical organs from the outside through clairvoyance: I will simply sketch the Bull, the Lion, and the Eagle one above the other. In this way, we perceive something that once lived as three magnificent beings in the distant past. I will now reduce this somewhat and draw it only schematically. Around these primary organs, we can also see the other organs in what they used to be in the distant past; and in this way, we perceive before our clairvoyant gaze something that can be compared to almost all forms of the animal kingdom on Earth.

[ 10 ] If we now turn our gaze once more to this physical body embedded in our etheric body and look at what is known in anatomy as the nervous system, then this nervous system also appears as a shrunken product, as withered remnants. But what is embedded in our physical body today as the nervous system appears, when viewed from our etheric body through the clairvoyant gaze, as the sum of wondrous plant entities that wind their way in the most manifold ways through these entities that might be called animal, so that we see arrangements of plant entities extending in all directions. The entire nervous system dissolves into a sum of ancient plant entities, so that what truly presents itself to us is something like a powerfully expanding plant entity, within which dwell the animal entities we have just spoken of. As I said, I am describing what presents itself to the clairvoyant gaze, which has just been characterized as occurring as in sleep, that is, viewing the physical body embedded in the etheric body from the outside.

[ 11 ] When you have all this before you, you say to yourself—that is, you say it because the ideas of the world, so to speak, provide you with insight into it and help you interpret what you have before you—you say to yourself: Everything you carry within you as a human being is the condensed, shrunken form of what now dawns upon you clairvoyantly, as in a cosmic memory. — And now the task is to pursue development up to this point in such a way that one practices constant self-control and constant self-knowledge. Self-knowledge leads one to the point where one can now reflect emotionally: You are outside your physical body. That which appeared to you as your physical body embedded in the etheric body has transformed before your eyes into what has just been spoken of. And what you now see is not present in the here and now; it must have existed in a primeval past so that what your physical body is down there could come into being. For this shrunken product to have come into being, what you now see before you with clairvoyant vision must once have existed. — That is why the physical body initially makes this sad impression, because one recognizes it as something that has come about like the final withered remnant of a former glory that has now risen before the clairvoyant gaze.

[ 12 ] Once one has brought self-reflection sufficiently far, to this stage of development, then one becomes aware that in this astral body, which one now possesses in addition to the physical and etheric bodies, one simply cannot help but—please, do not misunderstand this; I am describing facts, and you will see how these facts resolve themselves; after all—if one were to say so, to the credit of the wise rulers of the worlds—one must first get to know the facts, and it will become clear in the next few days what this is all about— so one cannot help but recognize oneself, as one is there in one’s astral body, as an absolute egoist, as a being who knows nothing but oneself, and one comes to realize that one has reason enough to be sad. For the urge now arises to know why this has happened, why everything has shrunk together.

[ 13 ] And now the question is: Yes, who is to blame for this shrinking? Who has taken the form you see clairvoyantly before you—this wondrous plant being with the animal, perfect forms within itself—and turned it into today’s shrunken product of the physical body? —Now it resounds like an inner inspiration from within yourself: You yourself have made it so, you yourself. And the fact that you have become at all what you are today, you owe to the circumstance that you had the power to permeate all this glory with your being. That your being has been dripped into this ancient glory like poison—that is what has caused this ancient glory to shrink as it is now!

[ 14 ] So, one is oneself, and one owes the ability to be the self that one is to the fact that, with one’s own being, one has immersed and impregnated the seed of death into all this splendor, causing it to wither. It is as if you were to pierce a mighty tree, growing in splendor and nourishing within itself a multitude of creatures that can be sustained only by this tree; as if you were to pierce it at a single point, so that from that point it withers, shrinks into smallness, and with it perish all the beings that are nourished by it— so does it appear to you what has happened to that which spreads out clairvoyantly and what has shrunk down to the human physical body. This is a tremendous impression evoked by this moment of clairvoyant observation. — And more and more, the human being in his astral body is driven to know how this came to be. At this moment, among the animalic primordial beings he perceives here—as it were, on the back wall of the garden, writhing—appears, in a most beautiful form, none other than Lucifer!

[ 15 ] Here, through clairvoyant observation, one first becomes acquainted with Lucifer and now knows: Oh yes, that is how it was with the forces that are now withered away within the physical human body, at the time when Lucifer appeared within this entire being that now presents itself to you through clairvoyance.

[ 16 ] And now the human being knows that in that distant, ancient time, when everything that appears to the clairvoyant eye was reality, he felt alive within it all: he was right there in the midst of it; that was his realm. And in this realm, Lucifer drew him to himself; the human being united with Lucifer, and the consequence of this was that, in currents of force that might be roughly depicted along such a line, the beings of the higher hierarchies pressed in behind him and pushed the human being who had united with Lucifer—all of this is revealed to clairvoyant observation—into these regions and forward. The area here (top right) developed openings; as it contracted, these openings became our present-day sense organs. Through these openings, the human being who formerly lived in this area was pushed out because he had united with Lucifer. And because the human being was pushed out, he now lives in the world outside this formation, and this formation shrank together and became his physical body.

[ 17 ] So, to give you a schematic idea, imagine today’s physical body growing larger and larger, with all its organs enlarging—the digestive, circulatory, and respiratory organs becoming like massive animal creatures in their magnified state, and the nervous organs becoming like plant beings; within this mighty structure, imagine the human being reigning. Now Lucifer appears on one side; the human being is drawn to Lucifer, and as a result, beings from the higher hierarchies press in and push the human being out. Because the human being is pushed out, the entire structure gradually shrinks back into the narrow space that a human body occupies today, and the human being, with his consciousness, with his entire waking consciousness, is outside his body. For this has brought about the fact that the human being no longer knows what is inside, which he used to know, but rather knows what is outside. He has been driven out through the openings that are today the senses, and is now in the sensory world, and that in which he was in the distant past has now shrunk together; this constitutes his inner being.

[ 18 ] I have now given you a mental image of how human beings, through clairvoyant contemplation, arrive at what is called Paradise. This is indeed how human imagination was guided toward Paradise in the mystery schools. “Where was Paradise?” people ask. Paradise was in a world that, however, no longer exists in the sensory world today. Paradise has shrunk, has merely multiplied; Paradise has left behind as its last remnant of memory the physical interior of the human body, only the human being has been driven out of it; he does not live within his own interior. He can only come to know this inner world through clairvoyance, as we have seen. Man knows about the things outside; he knows what stands before his eyes, what is around his ears; otherwise he knew what was inside, but this inside was vast—it was Paradise.

[ 19 ] Now try to create a mental image of the fact that, in fact, by being a being that spreads consciousness over the external sensory world, the human being has compressed the world in which he lived before entering the sensory world into the withered or shrunken products of his inner body. Then the beings of Ahriman and other spirits—who first expelled humans from here (see drawing, page 117) and then continued to influence them—took advantage of this, transforming their activity into something good, and fashioned the limbs, hands and feet, and here the face, which they formed by providing the possibility for the human being to make use of the shrunken paradise through hands and feet and through what enters the inner being via the sense organs.

[ 20 ] We have thus seen, in our spiritual vision, the physical human body magnified to gigantic proportions, which in its present state represents the shrunken remnant of the former paradise. When we contemplate this, we can once again gain a mental image of how clairvoyant perception actually proceeds. We have seen how human beings first become increasingly sensitive to their physical and etheric bodies. Now, with a certain leap over an abyss, we have, as it were, looked to see what impressions arise when the human being looks back from entirely outside upon his physical body embedded in the etheric body. I have said that the etheric body is something that moves within itself; nothing in this etheric body, when one looks back into it from the outside, is actually at a standstill, nothing is at rest, everything is in constant motion. Something is constantly happening; but the more one learns, through spiritual training, to look into what is happening there, the more the tableau of these events expands, as it were, and everything becomes meaningful. Just as the physical body, in a sense, becomes the meaningful garden of Paradise, so too do the processes taking place in the etheric body become meaningful events. One could now attempt to describe, in a typical way, the facts and processes one sees there when looking at the etheric body and disregarding the physical body in the process. Well, the physical body, as I have described it to you, could really only be seen clairvoyantly if one were suddenly awakened clairvoyantly in the deepest sleep; then the physical body would expand into this form, as has been shown. But the etheric body is, so to speak, already easier to see; it can be seen simply by attempting, in a certain sense, to catch the moment of falling asleep—to catch it in such a way that one does not immediately slip into unconsciousness, but remains conscious for a time after having left the physical and etheric bodies with one’s astral body and the I. There one then looks mainly toward this etheric body, seeing these moving phenomena of the etheric body as if they were living dreams. Then one sees oneself as separated, as it were, by a deep abyss from what is happening in the etheric body; but one now sees everything not as a spatial but as a temporal event. So, once one has already stepped out of one’s etheric body, one must perceive these experiences—these dynamic experiences within the etheric body—as if one were slipping back into it once more with one’s consciousness.

[ 21 ] One must have this sensation, as if one were passing through an abyss filled, as it were, with ether—the universal world ether—as if one were separated from one’s etheric body by such an abyss; as if one were beyond the shore of the etheric body, where manifold processes were taking place. Since one is dealing here with processes that all take place in time, one feels, as it were, like a traveler walking toward one’s own etheric body. In reality, one is leaving it further and further behind, but in clairvoyant consciousness one is moving toward this etheric body. One feels, as if upon approaching this own etheric body, that there is something coming toward one that pushes one back. One arrives as if at a spiritual rock. Then it is as if one were being let into something. One was outside at first; then it is as if one were being let into something, as if one had been outside and were now inside, but not in the same way as when one is inside during the day. Everything depends on being outside with one’s astral body and I, and merely looking in—that is, being inside only with one’s consciousness. And now one perceives what is happening inside.

[ 22 ] In a certain sense, everything is transformed, just as the physical body has been transformed into paradise; but what happens there is still much more intimately connected with the processes currently taking place within the human being. Let us just consider what sleep actually means, what this “being outside the physical and etheric bodies” means. For we have assumed that the clairvoyant faculty was evoked at this moment by the fact that the human being suddenly became clairvoyant in sleep or remained clairvoyantly conscious while falling asleep. Let us consider what sleep is: that which permeates the physical and etheric bodies with consciousness is outside; inside, only vegetative processes, so to speak, are now taking place, and everything is happening that replenishes the forces expended during the day. Yes, we perceive this, we perceive how the forces expended in the physical body—particularly in the brain—are being replenished. But not in the sense that we would see the brain as an anatomist does; rather, we see how the human being of the physical world—whom we make use of for our consciousness while awake—how this human being—though abandoned by us, yet clearly showing that he is our instrument—lies, as it were, enchanted in a castle.

[ 23 ] Just as our brain lies within the skull like a symbol, so our human being on Earth appears to us as an enchanted being living in a castle. We approach our human being as a being that is, as it were, imprisoned, enclosed by rock walls. The symbol—which is, as it were, a condensed symbol of this—is our skull. From the outside, this appears to us as the small skull. But when we look at the etheric forces that underlie it, what is the earthly human indeed appears to us as being located inside the skull and trapped within this castle. And then the forces that sustain this human being—who is actually inside the skull like in a mighty castle—flow up from the other organism. There the forces flow up. First flows the force that comes from the astral human body, which is spread throughout the organism; everything that glows and makes the human being powerful through the nerve strands flows upward; all of this flows together into the earthly brain-human: this appears to one as the “mighty sword” that the human being has forged for himself on Earth. — Then the forces of the blood surge upward; these forces of the blood—one gradually feels, one learns to recognize—appear to one as that which actually wounds the brain-man lying merely within the enchanted castle of the skull: like the “bloody lance” are the forces that flow upward in the etheric body toward the earthly human being lying within the enchanted castle of the brain. — And then one gains an insight. This insight is that one can observe everything that is allowed to flow upward toward the noblest parts of the brain. One had no idea of this at all beforehand.

[ 24 ] Yes, you see, I’m coming back to what I’ve already touched on in recent days, but from a different perspective. For no matter how much a person may eat from the animal kingdom, for a certain part of the brain, none of it is useful; it is all just ballast. Other organs may be nourished by it, but there is something in the brain that causes the etheric body to immediately reject everything that comes from the animal kingdom. Indeed, the etheric body rejects everything that comes from the plant kingdom from a part of the brain—a small, noble part of the brain—and accepts only the mineral extract in this small, noble part of the brain; and there it brings together this mineral extract with the noblest impressions received through the sense organs. The noblest of light, the noblest of sound, the noblest of warmth come into contact here with the noblest products of the mineral kingdom; for the noblest part of the human brain is nourished by the union of the noblest sensory impressions with the noblest mineral products. From this noblest part of the human brain, the etheric body separates out everything that comes from the plant or animal kingdom. Then, of course, all the things that a person has received as nourishment also rise up. The brain also has less noble parts, which feed on everything that flows up and on which the organism itself feeds. Only the noblest part of the brain must be nourished by the most beautiful confluence of sensory impressions and the noblest, purified mineral extract. There one learns to recognize a wondrous cosmic connection between the human being and the rest of the cosmos. There one looks, so to speak, at a place within the human being where one witnesses how human thought, through the instrument of the nervous system serving the astral body, prepares the sword for human strength on earth; there one becomes acquainted with all that is mixed into the blood and which, in a sense, contributes to the killing of precisely the noblest part of the brain. And what is most noble in the brain is constantly upheld by the convergence of the finest sensory perceptions with the noblest products of the mineral kingdom. And then, during sleep, when thinking is not engaged with the brain, the products that have formed further down within the body from the plant and animal kingdoms flow into the brain.

[ 25 ] It is like this when one penetrates into one’s own etheric body: it is as if one were to arrive at an abyss and, looking across that abyss in one’s etheric body, see what is happening there; and all of this appears in powerful images that depict the processes of the spiritual human being during sleep. This ‘I’ and the astral body, this spiritual human being, who dives into the citadel formed from what is represented only symbolically in the skull, where, asleep and wounded by blood, the human being lies, in whom one can see how thoughts are his strength—that which must be nourished there by all that surges up from the realms of nature, which in its noblest part must be served by that finest substance which has been described—all this rendered into images, the Grail legend provided. And the legend of the Holy Grail tells us of that miraculous food, prepared from the finest effects of sensory impressions and from the finest effects of mineral extracts, which are destined to nourish the noblest part of the human being throughout his life, as he physically spends it on earth; for through everything else he would be killed. This heavenly food is what is contained within the Holy Grail.

[ 26 ] And what else happens—what rises up from the other realms—is sufficiently illustrated when we return to the Grail legend described earlier, where we are led to a meal at which a doe is served first. The ascent into the brain, where the Grail—that is, the vessel for the noblest nourishment of the human hero, slain by all else, who lies in the castle of the brain—ever hovers: all of this is depicted for us. And it is not actually best portrayed in Wolfram, but rather best portrayed externally—in an exoteric manner—because almost anyone can recognize, once their attention has been drawn to it, how this Grail legend is an occult experience that every human being can relive anew every evening—it is best portrayed, despite the profanation that has already occurred there as well, in Christian von Troyes. And he has sufficiently indicated through various allusions that he has presented what he means in exoteric form; for he refers, after all, to his teacher and friend who lived in Alsace and who gave him the truly esoteric content, which he then cast into exoteric forms. This took place at a time when it was necessary because of that transition to which I allude in my work *The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity*. Shortly before that, the Grail legend had been made exoteric, in 1180.

[ 27 ] Such things still seem like fantasy to the outer world today, because so often it appears to them that only what lies outside the human being is real. It is precisely when a person sees their physical body in its original, magnificent grandeur, and sees their etheric body as it works inwardly—on the physical body to revive what has been killed and paralyzed by that stab I spoke of as coming from the blood—that they recognize that humanity proves itself to be the crown of creation in an even higher sense. The etheric body works at this, to bring it back to life again as soon as possible; it sustains it throughout the human lifetime, even though it is already condemned to death when it is born. It sustains it, this etheric body, by expelling from a small part of the human organism everything that comes from the animal and plant kingdoms, taking only the noblest mineral extract and combining it with the noblest impressions of the external sensory world. Feeling this truly deeply enough, this noblest part of the human organism actually appears to one as the multiplied Holy Grail. And through these two examples today, I wanted to show how typically imaginations arise, how the viewing of the physical body gradually gives way to imaginations in true clairvoyance. And among the greatest imaginations one can experience, at least during the Earth period, are the Paradise and Grail imaginations.