The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Dearly beloved!]

Eight days ago I took the liberty of characterizing this great transition, which for a mystical view of things expresses itself in the further development of the Mystery Being, of the Mystery Mysteries to Platonic-Socratic mysticism, and I ask you to consider from the outset, if I may, the Platonic philosophy, in the center of which the personality of Socrates appears as the bearer of a series of powerful ideas, that everything that I allow myself to develop as Platonic mysticism should certainly be understood in such a way that I develop everything out of Platonism that appears to me as Platonic mysticism.

From the outset, it will perhaps appear to those who view Platonic philosophy in a scholarly manner as an impossible, perhaps even a daring undertaking to illuminate the Platonic world of thought from the so-called mystical point of view. To the historian in particular, much of what I find in Greek philosophy, especially in Platonic philosophy, must appear to be unhistorical. The sources that led me to it, however, caused me to regard Platonism as a decidedly mystical doctrine, which I cannot avoid, which I cannot do without as a precursor of Neoplatonism and the teachings of early Christianity, to which I want to hasten.

These views are for me undoubtedly components of the mystical development in the West, and therefore I ask you to regard them as necessary components of mysticism, but not to regard them as any contribution to a purely scholarly conception of Platonic philosophy.

The last time I took the liberty of showing how art grew out of the basic view [of the Mystery Being], [which] was not yet divided into art and beauty, into wisdom and truth, on the one hand, and what is called philosophy grew out of it on the other, that a one-sided striving for truth, a one-sided striving for knowledge arose in the higher and lower form of logic, which, however, as I said, is nothing other than having grown out of an [originally unified] striving for the spiritualization of man.

I have endeavored to show that Aristotle's work can only be understood if it is regarded as a faint echo, a shadow of this original conviction of Greek mysticism, just as this basic conviction was in the Mystery Cult, that one cannot arrive at wisdom through the ordinary pursuit of truth, of logic, but that one can arrive at this wisdom through a method that still contains the pursuit of art and the pursuit of truth unmixed.

We are at the point in Greek development where, through Socrates, the pursuit of art stands out from human spiritualization and expresses itself on the one hand in Greek art and tragedy and on the other in the one-sided pursuit of truth, as we encounter it individually in Socrates and Plato.

In the course of the previous lectures I have tried to show that nothing else was to be understood from the mystery cults than a conception of the core of truth in the highest sense of myth, and how such a deepening of the Greek mythological ideas is possible that we must say to ourselves that the grasp of Greek mythology through the mystery cult appears to us as the detachment of the originally existing core of truth within Greek philosophy.

Now it is natural that at that time, when knowledge on a logical basis branched off from the actual original mysticism, the need had to arise to become clear about how myth actually relates to what is called truth in the ordinary sense. We have seen that it was a completely different striving for truth, which expresses itself quite differently, expresses itself in a kind of tongue of fire, which immediately leaps over into a kind of symbolic mode of representation. We have seen that they deviated completely from what we call scientific work. We saw that the prosaic need for truth jumped over into the mythological-allegorical mode of representation, so that we had the dress on one side and the core of the myth on the other.

After Socrates and his disciples had endeavored to pursue the truth in a purely intellectual, rational way, the question had to arise: How does what emerged in the myths relate to our abstract pursuit of truth? Socrates, who was initially interested in nothing other than knowledge of human nature, rejected the interpretation of myths. He rejected it and regarded himself as an uninitiated person. We will see that this has its deeper meaning in the Platonic account.

However, he had to take a stand on the question of myth. He took a highly peculiar position for those who look at the matter superficially. This can be seen from two works when we speak of Platonic philosophy. These two works are the Phaedrus and the Phaedo. Both deal with areas which contrast the contemplation of the finite with the contemplation of the infinite, or which rise from the contemplation of the temporal to the contemplation of the eternal.

If we therefore note this, the contemplation of the finite in relation to the infinite, we are confronted with the curious fact that Plato is quite resolutely opposed to any rationalistic interpretation of myth. We encounter this particularly in the "Phaedrus", in the discussion about love.

The other strange thing is that Plato [indeed] rejects a rational interpretation of myth, [but that at the same time] where he passes from finite truths to infinite truths, he himself becomes a myth-denier. Plato expresses himself symbolically and allegorically where he wants to speak of what we cannot see with our eyes or hear with our ears. Thus, where he speaks about the "Phaedrus", he expresses himself mythologically, while on the other hand the meaning of myth, as it was cultivated by the sophists, is understood in such a way that myth must be explained simply on the basis of pure reason and rules of understanding, as, for example, the carrying away of the king's daughter by the wind is interpreted as a simple natural event. This is simply rejected [in the "Phaedrus" by Socrates].

At the same moment, however, when contemplation rises from the ordinary things of life, Plato himself becomes a mythmaker. The deeper reason for this is none other than the fact that Plato has the definite feeling that everything that goes beyond sensory observation, beyond the observation of the intellect, is impossible for man to express in any other way than through myth. It is impossible for him to give a form of transmission other than by using the ordinary, prosaic word, as we see and hear it with the senses, connect it with the intellect, separate it logically and so on, mythologically. We have no language and are forced to resort to myth ourselves.

Now let us see what Plato says about the doctrine of the soul itself. The Platonic "Phaedrus" is about the subject that we have seen as the center of all Greek thought. It is about the path from subordinate levels of consciousness to the superior levels of consciousness. It is nothing other than a more logical approach, a more intellectual approach, which Plato practises compared to the approach practised by the Mysteries.

This way of looking at things undoubtedly has the great advantage for man that it is initially closer to the logical thinker, the person who prefers to appeal to reason. But then it also has the disadvantage that only very few can rise with Plato from the sensual, intellectual contemplation to the higher contemplation of a true myth. By a true myth I do not mean one that is supposed to include a miracle, but one that is borne by that higher concept of truth that we have come to know as the bearer of mythology, as the bearer of myth.

I think we have to follow the path, roughly, if not exactly, in the Platonic version, that a student of Plato would have taken under the leadership of a personality like Socrates. In the Phaedrus we are led to that principle in man, that force that drives him upwards from the lower states of the soul to the higher ones. And for Plato, this driving force that leads him from the lower to the higher states is love, that is Eros, that is what leads man with elemental force from an everyday life to a higher spiritual life.

And if we now visualize the process on the basis of the "Phaidros", we find three states of moral life characterized. These are:

Firstly, the state in which man is completely dominated by the lowest forms of love, in which he strives to fulfill the needs of his lustful feelings, in which he is completely driven by his lustful feelings. He is dominated by the pursuit of the pleasurable, and this is completely immersed in everyday life. He lives entirely in the life that is given to him through his senses. He lives entirely in the feelings that can only be awakened through his senses. This thus dissolves in the manifold and [in the finite,] in that which surrounds him and to which he also belongs. The power in man, which he has as a single member in this multiplicity, is sensuality, which evokes his feelings of pleasure and which he strives to satisfy.

The next higher level to which man can rise is that on which man does not stand exclusively on the ground of the sensual world. This is the form of prudence. There he rises above the world of the senses to the use of his actual spiritual power. He now regulates his needs [no longer merely according to pleasure, but according to the principle] of usefulness, according to what appears useful to him. That which appears useful to him for his temporal and, in his view, eternal existence becomes the content of his view of life and he satisfies this on his next, higher level.

This power in man, which will guide and lead him to satisfy his needs, is the human mind, which divides all things into useful and harmful in life. A person who allows his ethical life to be guided by his intellect will reject many things from his life's path that would give him pleasure but do not appear useful. Therefore, man is not always uplifted, but often pulled down. Prudence shows this. The prudent person will refrain from doing many things that give pleasure, and he will not conceal from himself the fact that what is useful is often only a hidden means of satisfying his pleasure. It may therefore be a higher level. However, we must assume that man must by no means completely abandon lust and sensuality. That would mean a weakness of human nature, because if man had to completely drown out his senses, he would find that he would not be able to elevate this sensual world through prudence.

[Thirdly:] Prudence should represent nothing other than a spiritualization of the life of the senses, the stage at which love takes the form of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not something that relates to the finite, but something that raises man from the finite to the infinite. Therefore, no one is capable of enthusiasm who, in addition to avoiding the sensual, is not able to grasp the eternal, the imperishable, the permanent. And here, where he first discovers his soul, where he first outgrows it and where he must feel himself as a member of multiplicity, and here, where he feels within himself that something higher presents itself in the moment of existence, he rises from finitude.

Here Plato falls into a form of representation that we must describe as mystical, symbolic, allegorical. Here he believes that we are dealing with something that is impossible to express in intellectual forms. Here he does not write as one writes from the intellect, but as one who has immersed himself in the sea of the infinite. He does not write like someone who can only reproduce the logical form, but like someone who has a new, higher form of representation that represents nothing other than a higher truth in relation to the logical truth.

If you do not look at it this way, the soul myth appears to you as nothing more than any other. But if you look up, you will find that Plato - unlike his predecessors - was what is called an initiate, that is, he was a man who was able to reproduce in image the deeper truths that were revealed to him. The person who is able to reveal the secret of this image, this mystery, can also know what Plato wants. This will also be different for different people. One person will only be able to guess what is hidden in the image, and the secret can only gradually be revealed to him. In any case, however, it is symbolism that expresses the deeper truths, because it is not a matter of brutally presenting them externally to the mind.

Such a brutally presented truth is not recognized in its full depth and cannot be recognized in its full depth. This is the same thing that compelled Goethe to speak as he did in his "Fairy Tale" of the green snake and the beautiful lily or in the second part of his "Faust". It is a need that is connected with human nature and that reverent shyness before the deeper truth:

He who has an inkling of the infinite capacity of such truths will find that it is necessary to live through the content of these truths, he will find that it is impossible for this content to be expressed logically. That is why Plato always becomes mystical, allegorical at the deepest points.

Plato describes the virgin soul in mystical form in such a way that he creates a myth out of it. It is intended to represent his conception of the soul. This Platonic myth is something you will find in theosophical literature from all over the world, including Buddhism. And if this myth does not correspond to what you know as "esoteric Buddhism", there will still be an opportunity to show a deeper correspondence between Platonic philosophy and esoteric Buddhism.

A calculation is not always wrong because something else comes out. You have to know whether the calculation is based on completely different assumptions from the outset. We calculate with decadic numbers. But there can also be systems where you only count to five. There would be a new order, so that all types of calculation would appear different to us. Some things will be different, and this is how I would like to characterize the teaching of the Mysteries in relation to esoteric Buddhism.

For Plato, it is therefore the case that one ascends or submerges into the world of infinity on three levels. And this world of the infinite, which no longer transmits the same properties as our senses, with which our mind reckons, separates and connects, can be grasped. Where man ascends, where he grasps the spirit in its sense-free form, we use the word "intuition". So we use the word intuition where the human being does not use the spirit to process the sensual, but perceives the spiritual as the sense perceives the sensual. Just as the sense perceives the sensual, so the spirit perceives the spiritual. And so it is a reflection of the eternal.

Here, then, Plato rises from the perception of the temporal to the perception of the eternal. Here Plato has reached the point where all the things, all the forms in which man perceives the ordinary sensory world, no longer have any validity, so that one can no longer speak about space and time. Above all, at this moment, when man rises from prudence to enthusiasm, the prospect of a new world opens up in his soul.

It must be noted that Plato knew, not merely believed. We know that Plato knew the difference between belief and knowledge. Belief disappears. Therefore, for Plato it is simply a foregone conclusion that the things that present themselves to a person on the third stage are eternal in nature. Just as it is clear to him that something stands before his eye, so it is clear to him that the things that present themselves to a person on the third stage are of an eternal nature. But just as he who can see colors is not able to give a colorblind person a real insight into the diversity of colors - he can [only] offer him a surrogate for it - just as he is not able to show him the colors, so the spiritually seeing person is not able to teach the spiritually blind person this. He who is not able to develop his outer world of the senses up into the world of the intellect as far as the spiritual world, where things are transformed from the temporal into the eternal, is not able to go along with Plato up to this point. Here ends what the physical mode of conception has enclosed in the usual way.

Whoever is enclosed between birth and death gains here a view into that which is not enclosed between birth and death. What connects Plato from such concepts, we must be clear that it is an exoteric talking around. Imagining the soul as a sensual thing, no matter how diluted its resemblance to the physical, is not yet an esoteric view.

We must realize that it is impossible to speak of an actual proof of the eternity of the soul before an actual Platonic way of thinking. That is simply nonsensical. One will prove things that are attainable through logic. One proves some mathematical theorem for my sake. When you prove it, you have a complicated manifold in mind, which you break down into parts and then put together what you want to prove. The entire basis of what a proof refers to must be given by observation. No other proof can prove anything. Therefore, for Plato it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul.

There was no room for such a proof for Plato. For him, it was about elevating man so that he could see the spiritual without senses. And that is nothing other than the Platonic world of ideas. Anyone who sees it free of sensual qualities, who sees things as they appear to the spirit, has an idea of the Platonic world of ideas. This can also be called the soul's "participation in the world of ideas". At this moment, the soul immerses itself in the world of ideas. It penetrates it so that it is incorporated into an eternal stream and ceases to belong to merely temporal life. It surveys the temporal from a higher point of view. Thus, for Plato, rising above the world of the senses is the actual world of the spirit or the knowledge of the soul.

For Plato, the elevation to the actual spiritual world or the knowledge of the soul is not a logical process, but a real process of the soul. Man becomes a different person, he ascends and conquers his soul. At the moment when he has done this, when he can set aside the sensual qualities of the world, he has achieved that to which space and time are not applicable, where one can no longer speak of coming into being and passing away. He has attained that which is sublime above birth and death; he has become a partaker of eternity, so that what Plato understands by "becoming a partaker of eternity" is something that must be conquered.

In the Platonic view, we cannot say: We carry an eternal soul within us, and we only need to recognize ourselves and we will recognize the eternal soul. That would not be the correctly understood Christian theory. But that is the Christian trivial theory. The soul is present in the human being. You can go looking for it like something hidden behind a door. It is there. Knowledge is there without us going through the [stages of] knowledge.

This view is not like the Platonic view. Those who do not want to go through the process of development, but want to recognize something that they already have within themselves, remain stuck in the sensual, in the intellectual. They remain in the sensual and do not reach that which is new. That is the cancer of our modern theory of knowledge.

This disaster has been caused by Kant's philosophy, which starts from the point of view that all truth is finished, that all truth is already there and that man only has to discover the truth, that he only has to pull away the veil and that he is actually the fifth wheel in the world's gears. Man is necessarily part of it. And when Plato speaks of the Godhead, the Godhead is just as dependent on man as man is on the Godhead, because the Godhead could not achieve perfection if man were not involved. It would remain at a lower level if man did not help it to achieve its goal. What man develops in the spirit is part of the world process.

This is also the point at which Platonic development can also say yes to our scientific theory of development. If we see it simply as a series of perceptions, but one that is infinite and never complete, if we view the sensory stages as a chain and see man as the pinnacle of nature, who in turn continues the same development out of himself, so that he represents a link in the development, then we have before us in the modern world what we also have before us in the Platonic world.

The human being who does not merely dissect and interpret sensuality, whose process of cognition is a real one, who does not merely recognize in the process of cognition, but who does something, who transforms the soul, transforms it from a temporal into a divine soul. It is the transition that must be found. And the driving force that conjures up the divine, that elevates man from sensual desire to enthusiasm, where his spiritual drive finds the transition, that is Eros, that is where he attains the higher standpoint and gains the overview.

He then does not take these drives from temporality, they are borrowed from the eternal world of ideas. We call this timeless and spaceless world the world of ideas because everything spatial and temporal is discarded, because we know that we are dealing here with the spirit. At this level, we cease to speak of the soul enclosed in finiteness and can only speak of the eternal. Everything that man gains in temporality is nothing other than a shining forth of the eternal world into the temporal, and the temporal world is nothing other than a reflection of the eternal in temporality.

If we translate this back, such a reflection appears in our imaginary life. If the matter becomes such that we see things in the light of eternity, then this is not an idea that has arisen, of which we can say that it was not there. It has always been there, only it has not been in the consciousness of man. It is exactly the same as with an idea that took root in our consciousness yesterday, which we did not think about, but which re-enters our consciousness today. Such an entry into consciousness is also the entry of eternal ideas into consciousness. It is the ability to remember.

So Plato can understand all higher knowledge as a memory by translating the [temporal into the eternal] back. And so he can say: Everything that we imagine in our imaginary life is the recollection of an earlier, purely spiritual life. And that which thus shines in cannot perish. It is what remains, it is what lies beyond death and beyond birth.

This, then, is the transition from the [temporal to the eternal]. Now think of how Plato speaks of the soul, saying: The soul remembers the former states before birth. The way in which he expresses himself is again a language of infinity translated back into temporality. But this prompts Plato to express the idea in a mystical way so as not to evoke the sensual imagination.

And now, in Plato, the process takes place that has taken place in all myth-making, a process that will always prevent us from interpreting the myths in a realistic way. The process takes place that must develop in every human being when he has to say goodbye to the logical. Here are the limits of logic.

Kant only knows about intellectual cognition. When man finds the way out from the knowledge of reason to the knowledge of experience, then he knows that this higher knowledge exists. When man is able to recognize as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did [that is] in such a way that he perceives the visible from the spiritual, because the spiritual becomes so fluid, then he feels compelled to resort to myth.

The myth that Plato chose for the virginal soul presents the soul as a team of two horses, one rushing along, the other heading for heaven. They are steered by a guide on their journey through the world. First they come to the region of the sky and then to the region of the sky above.

Through these regions of the world, the soul, guided by its leader in the sense of this Platonic myth, reaches the heaven above after ten thousand years. During the transition from the sphere of the mundane to the sphere of the divine, it has to overcome the greatest obstacles. This is where it faces the greatest danger. The steed inclined towards sensuality threatens to shy away. If the senses are not able to gain an insight into the Supermundane, [the soul] can be thrown back. But when it returns, it can undergo the marriage with heaven. Within ten thousand years it undergoes ten embodiments in one millennium each. The soul is free to choose its body once every millennium and is thus able to shorten its path. The ten thousand years can be shortened to three thousand years.

By imbuing itself with philosophy, theosophy and mysticism, the soul is able to shorten the path. This enables it to limit life to a smaller series of physical embodiments. Physical life is on the one hand - I may not say a marriage of the spiritual with the material - but a marriage of the soul with the sensual. It is a sensual reflection of the spiritual. And this marriage necessarily takes place according to the eternal laws of the universe. Man is necessarily compelled, after a series of years, to make that great transition where he must gain passage through the purely spiritual realm of the world of ideas. At the same time he is free on this path, which he accomplishes both below and above, to give himself his embodiment. He is a being that floats between freedom and necessity, that carries out his life between freedom and necessity. Thus Plato can understand life in the temporal as a recollection of the life he experienced in the extra-temporal. Man must participate in this retrospection of the world of ideas if he wants to rise to the higher levels of knowledge.

This is Plato's poem about the transition from the finite to the eternal. He speaks of it as if he were speaking of a journey, he speaks of it as if it were a fictionalized world of the senses. But this is nothing other than the art of awakening the imagination through myth. This has to do with the fact that, whatever one may speak about these things, one sees even deeper foundations coming before the soul, and that one would therefore only restrict, only limit these things with every intellectual limitation, with every conceptual expression.

If, on the other hand, they are expressed in a symbolic way and the symbol is conceived in a higher sense and is not too sober and unambiguous, then everyone will perhaps be able to draw higher, more meaningful things from this symbol by penetrating into it than those who speak in symbols. The person who speaks in symbols does not claim to have already thought everything that the listener can put into it.

But what about the question: did he mean what he said? Well, he wants us to be able to read more into his symbol than he himself was perhaps able to see in it. This is the exoteric and esoteric understanding of the symbol. The esotericist is aware that every human being, no matter how high a level of knowledge he may reach, still only has individual knowledge, and that it is possible for him to find the point of passage through the human spirit to that which the individual human consciousness cannot exhaust. He is aware that man can express truths in poetry without knowing what lies within these truths. And it can be the case that someone else, who comes afterwards, can first peel out what is contained therein.

This difference must be noted, so that we must not ask: Did he who created a myth of the inner life put these things into the myth? No, it is a need for man to express himself mythically when he comes to things that go beyond the human. When we come across such a mystical thing, an allegory or a symbol, it is a sign that a different interpretation is now coming in, and proof that we may now apply not a "finite but an "infinite interpretation".

It is quite the same as with the one who stands before the ordinary views of human life. Such a person can only describe the mountains to us in a finite form. He cannot tell us everything that the mountain has shown us. He cannot convey the same impression. But the one who does it the way Plato did it does not want to give us a description, he will not say: Use this description, which will lead you on the right path. The Platonic writings will only be used by a higher understanding in a higher way when they serve as a kind of "spiritual Baedeker". They should not be interpreted, they should be travel descriptions in the realm of the spiritual and lead you to the things themselves. But then the very language of myth, which makes certain things disappear in a kind of indeterminacy, will be appropriate because it does not create the impression that the thing itself is to be completed with the strict contours. No, what is handed down to us should only be an indication of what the person concerned saw. It should be a guide, not a story, a manual on how to study history.

Question answer:

The number 10,000 as the time of reincarnation.

Everything contained in "Esoteric Buddhism" tempts us to interpret everything exoterically.

The symbol is not a truth, but a path that can lead us to the truth.

Allegories. Not all allegories are original. Many will be taken over. Otherwise, every allegory corresponds to a spiritual. You draw them from your inner life.

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

At the center of the Platonic structure of ideas is Plato's discussion on the immortality of the soul, the "Phaedo". And this discussion is perhaps the most important of the Platonic discussions apart from the "Timaeus". It is a work which perhaps in the most eminent sense provides proof that in Plato we are dealing with "true mysticism", indeed with "theosophy". I must emphasize quite explicitly that we are dealing here with theosophy, even though the name is not applied to it. Nor can it be used because the name 'theosophy' has only been used in literature since the third century. Before that, everything was called 'philosophy'. So the logical part of theosophy was also philosophy. This was no different in Plato's time. The word 'philosophy' is as old as Pythagoreanism. The word 'theosophy', however, dates back to the third century.

We know that this Platonic theosophy comes to light in the "Phaedo" in particular. This conversation, like the other conversations, is linked to Socrates. He is at the center of this conversation. Moreover, it is the innermost and most intimate circle of friends that gathers around Socrates. Therefore, it is probably also the most intimate thoughts that are expressed in it. The other conversations also take place between Socrates and a wider circle of friends. Therefore, much is spoken in a form that we need not take as the precise Platonic opinion, whereas in the Phaedo we actually have the deepest opinion [of Plato] before us. Moreover, this Phaedo ties in with one of the most significant historical moments, the death of Socrates. We are now led through philosophy from the conquest of life to the comprehensibility of death. When we then look at Dionysus, the god of pleasure, and what is said of him in the Phaedo, this is elevated in the Phaedo by the fact that we see that it is Socrates who is having this conversation immediately before his death. In the moments before he dies, he once again sets out his views on life and on overcoming life; he talks about the eternity of the soul. It is therefore a significant moment in which the conversation begins, so that we perhaps have to look for the most important thing that Plato believes he can tell us.

When Socrates' pupils visit him in the dungeon and are on the verge of the sad event, some weep for him, while others say that he is dying the death of the wise man and should therefore not be mourned. But one thing we notice immediately is that a significant change has taken place with Socrates. Socrates is the turning point that drew wisdom out of spiritual life. We have seen that in the Mysteries there was the highest spiritual life, that they united religion, art and truth. Socrates was the one who strove only for the truth, who searched only for clear, pure concepts.

The purpose of Socrates' dealings with his students was to reduce everything to clear, pure concepts. This is why Socrates is portrayed to us throughout his life as not actually being a friend of poetry. This was combined with the art of singing and music. He was portrayed as a man who pursued the truth in a prosaic, sober form. Musicality was alien to him. Shortly before his death, however, he was musical. From this mood, he draws his pupils' attention to the fact that swans also sing before they die and that such an animal as a swan obviously only sings when it feels joy. So, he thinks, it will also be Socrates' turn to sing at the hour of death. Besides, he says, I have been singing all my life. Philosophy is the expression of the deepest tones in the world. So, having sung my own work throughout my life, at the end of life I may well sing as other people have sung.

This is the conversation that Socrates had with his students. It is significant that Socrates gets into a singing mood shortly before his death. I would like to point out that all those who imbue themselves with this kind of wisdom have the same basic feeling. I would like to refer to Goethe's Faust poem. Worry also approaches "Faust. It makes him blind. But it also makes him see inwardly. That which the eyes are throughout their entire life, [namely] seeing, Faust becomes inwardly in the end. This view that in the hour before death Socrates does the same thing that other people before him have done throughout their lives is the same basic feeling as when Goethe lets Faust become what the others have been throughout their lives. This is expressed as the basic tone that runs through the entire "Phaidon"

One should not believe that Platonic philosophy, with its knowledge of the sensory world, must necessarily abhor sensory life in an ascetic manner or glide beyond sensory life to an unreal beyond. This cannot be the case. Plato does not want to destroy the life of the senses immediately, because he wants to transition from the life of the senses to the life of the pure spirit.

This is also not what Platonism strives for. It does not lead to ascetic renunciation, but by allowing people to look into the hereafter, it only leads them to a different illumination of the sensory world. It is rather like imagining the hereafter as a dark twilight realm, as a gloomy vault. No light shines into this vault for those who have not awakened supersensible powers within themselves. But the moment they are awakened, the light of eternity shines into the sensory world. We must not assume that we are distracted by the sensory world. No, it "only appears in a new light. "Only I say. It is only said to those who believe that it disappears. No, it will be completely retained and will only appear in a new light.

Now we have to ask ourselves: Where does it actually come from that, in the sense of Platonism, we have to distinguish between the "finite sensory world" and the "infinite spiritual world", between the "eternal" and the "temporal" world? The difference is there in the material world. If [this difference] also existed for an infinite faculty of perception, then perhaps Platonism could not be understood, because the question would then eternally arise: How do the two worlds, the spiritual and the sensory world, relate to each other?

This world of the spiritual would itself have to become finite if it still had one next to it, if it were not able to dissolve it into itself. For Plato, the separation between the sensory and spiritual worlds only exists in the human being within the human faculty of perception. It only exists for the human soul. It would not exist for a soul which had reached the end, which had perfected its perceptive faculty to such an extent that it was able to survey the whole universe. It is only because the human soul is enclosed between two potencies, because it participates in part in forces below and above it, that the human soul has a perceptive faculty which it must divide into the sensual-material and the spiritual world. Such dualism is only possible for a person who has not reached higher levels.

Because we are on the material level, we all carry two world potencies within us, we carry two forces within us, that force of will, that Promethean nature, which tends to become one with the Logos; that is the Promethean striving. The other is the striving downwards, it is the striving of Prometheus' brother, Epimetheus. What we can overlook is the nature of Epimetheus, is the non-spiritual nature in us, is that which lies within us as the [reflective], the explanatory. Prometheus is the [thinking ahead], the one who looks to a higher level. If we were to imagine a seven-part path and if we were to think of the path from the material to the spiritual as passing through all the stages, we would have to imagine this striving as a Promethean one. And if we looked back, we would have to describe this as the force that is presented to us in the Greek imagination as Epimetheus.

Suppose that we had all reached the highest stage of development. For such beings, there would be no more Prometheus. We would all be transformed into "Epimetheus®. One could now ask: Is this the reason why Platonic-mystical philosophy has a dualism, assuming a world divided into a sensual and a spiritual part? It is not there for purely sensual beings, nor for those who have been identical with the divine being, but for those who are on the way there. Therefore, the way upwards and the way downwards must be given. These two perspectives are intertwined in Platonic philosophy. Those who do not understand Platonic philosophy in such a way that it regards man as changing will not be able to understand it, nor will those who regard it as self-contained if they fall into myth with a view to the immortal, if they want to extract the higher truths from the unconscious.

We have to process the facts from knowledge, to determine them from reality. Science demands facts. But they only apply to those looking downwards. Man can only find facts as far and on the path he has traveled himself. At the point where man has now reached, he ceases to find anything beyond the sensual. For an animal, for example, there are only sensory perceptions.

Man who advances through the third and fourth stages of life [of the seven-limbed path] is no longer limited to the sensual. When he gets beyond the fourth stage of life, he sees higher psychological truths. There he no longer has sensory perceptions, but spiritual ones. Only on the path below us do we perceive facts. But in that part into which we look only from below, which we have not yet passed through, which is not seen by us, which reveals its secrets to us only gradually from above, which flows into us, we can never be given such facts as those which lie on our path. These have to be put into the form of myth. And Plato puts them in such a form. This is the upward perspective. This is the reason why Plato switched to mythical representation in his most important works. And this reason is also present in the "Phaidon", the discussion about the immortality of the soul.

Now I have already mentioned that Plato does not want to teach his intimate students about eternity in such a way that he provides them with evidence. It is not a question of providing logical proofs, but of leading them, as it were, to higher perceptions, leading them where they have not been before, leading them where they can see the world in a new splendor, in a new light.

There we also have the method. We start with the simplest thing imaginable. Can we not already find something in our sensory world that could lead us further towards knowledge of the soul? Let's take a look at the sensory world around us. We do not see things around us that remain, but things that come into being and pass away. We see flowers that come into being, blossom and fade. We see an eternal becoming and passing away. This is characteristic of all of nature. We must therefore assume that this "becoming and passing away" runs through the entire universe. That which is germ before is fruit after. Because that which was previously dead is life, we are dealing with an eternal cycle.

As it is with falling asleep and waking up, so we will also have to do in the higher, the actual spiritual spheres. It is no objection to say that what applies to the lower spheres need not apply to the higher spheres. It is very much a part of higher knowledge that what happens in the higher sensory world is only a reflection of the eternal, and we may well use it to illustrate what is going on in the world of the spiritual. This is particularly important for understanding Platonism. We must not imagine that it is as if Plato were rejecting or delimiting the sensory world, as if the non-sensory world were something quite different from the sensory world. That is not the case. We only need to illuminate the sensual world with the spiritual world. If we do this, then we can also see the images of the eternal.

Plato used a comparative image. We know that when our eye is directed towards sensual objects, it only sees the passing images. Imagine people sitting in a cave. All the things that are real are behind the people. A source of light is also located behind people. People cannot turn around, they can only see what is happening on the opposite wall. So they do not see the objects themselves, because the light and the objects are behind them. But they see the shadows, and they also see the shadows of themselves.

This is also the case with sensory perception. If we stop at sensory perception, we only see the world in sensory shadow images. We do not see ourselves as we are, we only see ourselves as shadow images. Only in the face of spiritual deepening, only when man is able to deepen into his inner self, only when man has attained this "know thyself", when he sees himself, does he become aware of the deeper basis of things.

But the shadows are also part of reality. We must not imagine that the shadow is not real. No shadow will really move without the underlying real form having moved. What presents itself in the shadow realm is only a consequence of what takes place in the sensual and spiritual world. Anyone who understands the shadow images can also recognize the processes in the spiritual world in the sensory world. Every atom shows itself to him as an expression of the spiritual realm.

In the same way, Plato was able to deduce from the eternal cycle of life the becoming and emergence of things, from the realm of the senses, from the shadow images, to the realm of the spirit. But now he has Socrates say: "This is correct. But let us look at things even more sharply and ask ourselves whether, when we direct the mind towards things, we can have no sensory perception, whether something eternal does not shine into our cognition in the subtlest way, in a shadowy manner. This argument is very correct. The materialists do not realize what difference there must be between animal perception and human perception. Although human perception is first dominated by animal perception, it is of such a nature that the spirit cannot be separated. Even in the coarsest human perception there is still a spiritual trace. And therefore the Platonic perception is also correct. When we perceive a trace of the spiritual, it means an "ascent to the spiritual". We could not ascend if the higher did not enter our sensory world.

Plato has Socrates say: "Listen, how can the number <> come about? - By adding one sensual thing to another. A combination has taken place. This has created a "two. That is a combination. The mind observes this joining by first counting "one" and then "two". However, the sensory process can also happen in such a way that I split the "one". I then get the "two" by splitting the "one" apart and not joining it together.

This is exactly the opposite way for sensuality. On the one side we have a joining together, on the other a splitting apart. But the result is the same when viewed from the spiritual realm. Sensory perception is something that can depict the spiritual in the most diverse ways. We can say: If man did not add a spiritual to the sensual, he would not regard anything in the sensual as the same. There would not be an equal for him if the sensual process were not exactly the same for him. Thus, for Plato, the spiritual shines into the sensual. But we cannot perceive whether the sensual shines into the spiritual. We must admit that even in the simplest processes, the spirit is at man's side in the sensory processes and that man therefore lives, carries out his life, through the fact that the spirit, even if only a spark at first, is present right into sensory perception.

If we imagine the seven-part nature of man and the world being, they consist of pure matter and of what we call force, of what we call matter and of what we call spiritual, astral. But then there is also what is present in the animal, what we call the animating, the principle that animates matter. As the fourth link we then consider that which we find in the higher human being, and with this we have penetrated as far as the spirit without matter.

So we must imagine with Plato that this spark of the spirit, which is also present in the lower man, goes from above to below. We have to imagine that on the one hand matter goes from bottom to top and on the other hand the spiritual goes from top to bottom, so that they interpenetrate and man becomes a double being through the interpenetration of the spiritual and the sensual. So when we examine the matter, we find in any case that the spiritual is present in man, even if only in the thinnest form - as in mathematics.

If the soul can only grasp the spiritual at one end, then it can regard this beginning of the spirit as a guarantee that it has a share in the spiritual and thus in the eternal, because the spiritual is the eternal in relation to the material, because it is the permanent in relation to the existing, the lasting, because it always remains the same as the spiritual in the sensory world.

For Plato, it is a matter of leading the students to where the spiritual, the eternal, is grasped at one end, and [then] leading them to the perception of the spirit in sensuality, so that [they] thereby [become] citizens of the infinite realm. This is what Plato tells us in his book. He has arrived at the point where he shows us how the spiritual enters into the sensual.

An important objection of his students is this: If we imagine that we have the sensual in its multiplicity before us and that the soul has a share in the infinite, we can imagine something else entirely. We can imagine that the soul only appears to have a share in the infinite. Let us think of the manifoldness symbolized as a series of taut strings on the lyre. We can produce a harmony through the sounding together of the taut strings of the lyre. Perhaps it is also just a uniform, harmonious tone that is merely struck. But we are always dealing with a harmony.

Socrates objects to this: Let's take a closer look. With harmony, shouldn't we say that the strings - each one individually - fit into the harmony, so that each individual string contributes to the harmony? Is this also the case with sensuality in the soul? Does it not have to go beyond sensuality? Harmony only exists in the parts and through the parts. But the soul must overcome the parts in their details if it wants to be a whole. And the essence of the soul lies in this ability to overcome the individual parts of multiplicity. The essence of the soul is therefore more than harmony. It is a life in itself. The spiritual life is not merely the harmony of the sensual, but something that is independent.

And now Socrates makes a very important remark: we have now finished with harmony. Let us now see how it goes with the "Kadmos". - Now we are led back into the myth. It is interesting that it is precisely at this point that this myth comes into play. Theologians have wondered in many ways about the inclusion of this myth. Kadmos is the hero whose sister Europa is stolen by Zeus. [Zeus] did this in the form of a [bull]. So Kadmos followed the trail of an ox, came to Europe and founded the castle of Thebes. He brought the Greeks, the Thebans, the science of the Orient, the alphabet and also the spiritual content of the alphabet. We are then told that he married after he had founded Thebes and established the Greek order.

Kadmos is the independently striving human being, the person who constantly strives for perfection. This is a trait that we also encountered in other figures of the gods. Harmonia, to which he wedded himself, is simply the harmony of the striving human being with the world. And when Socrates says that we are finished with harmonia, this has a meaning.

We have seen that harmony is not the highest, but that higher is the independent comprehension within the harmony. So at this point we have gone beyond harmony. We are ascending to Kadmos. We can grasp this independence ourselves.

And now Socrates is made aware of important objections by his students. Even if it is conceded that the soul is a harmony, it is not eternal. We must assume that a soul is alive in the face of sensual diversity. But this soul-life, even if it expresses much more personality in the earthly personality, does not have to be eternal, it can also be of temporal duration.

In the image, in the relationship between "rock" and "man", we can imagine the relationship between "body" and "soul". We can also imagine that the skirt is changed once. Once the person dies, the skirt passes on to someone else. The skirt outlasts the person. It could be the same with the soul. It might also outlive the next sensual form, and another soul could take possession of this body. One could imagine that the soul is independent, but not of infinite duration.

So we must also overcome this limited duration, we must show that we can find an independent entity within the human being, we must show that it is not just something that lasts for a shorter or longer time but is still temporary, but that it is the eternal that shines into the human being.

Platonism provides this proof, albeit in a figurative sense, by saying that when we look at something in the sensory world, we are searching for a connection. His predecessor Anaxagoras always looked for causes. When a stone fell to the ground, he looked for the cause. If a stone was heated, he looked for the cause that heated it, the sun's rays or some other cause. But now he asks himself: Can we get by with that? Aren't we going round in circles if we look for the cause of every effect? Don't we have to acknowledge that we are actually claiming something of which the opposite can be just as true?

He clarified this with an example. He asked himself: Why is this beautiful? Because it has a beautiful shape, a beautiful color and so on. So if we want to know: "Why is this thing beautiful", we come to the conclusion that it can be beautiful in different ways. It can be beautiful because of its color or because of its shape and so on. Therefore he says: All things are beautiful that are partakers of beauty. It is the same with goodness, greatness and other things. All things are partakers of imperishable, eternal ideas. What is beautiful today and what was beautiful millions of years ago are the same. They are the same ideas. They are in the same beauty. Therefore, there is a piece of the eternal in everything that is transient.

We only need to ask ourselves: What communion does the transient have with the eternal? And then: How is man related to the eternal? And the answer arises: through what we call the soul in him and through the fact that he has something that distinguishes him in it. We have said: A thing is good if it is a partaker of goodness, a thing is beautiful if it is a partaker of beauty. What is it that makes us call the soul "soul"? Each thing excludes another. Let us take snow. Snow is part of the cold. When the fire gets to the snow, the snow is no more. Fire and snow are not compatible. Let us look for what remains in man when we separate out sensuality. Let us seek that which is present in man just as beauty is present in beauty, greatness in greatness and so on, let us seek in man that which is as incompatible with the transitory as fire is with snow. What we find there is life.

The lifeless melts away before the primordial living just as the snow melts away before the fire. As a result, this spark of the infinite, which protrudes into the material, becomes in man what he recognizes as the actual soul principle. And so he must say to himself: This primal living is absolutely alive, is alive through and through, and therefore, because man is partaker of the living, he is also partaker of the eternal.

This is the highest stage in the process of proof to which the Platonic Socrates ascends in the "Phaidon". First he tries to make it clear how we first have to deal with "spirit" in every sensual work. This must be grasped, and then we can have a view of the rest of the spiritual world.

You might think it could be an illusion, a mere harmony. But now Socrates refutes the idea that we are dealing with a harmony and shows that we are not dealing with a harmony but with an independent entity, because it is not merely the harmony but the individual parts that are overcome. These can only be overcome by an independent entity.

And now he asks about the independent entity and discovers that the independent entity is the primordial living being, which is as incompatible with the transient as fire is with snow. Therefore, we cannot speak of Kadmos as being temporary, but as a completely independent entity that shines in here, and we must assume that we are partakers of a real, infinite life.

So Socrates leads his students step by step up to the primordial living, where he gives them what he has set out as wisdom as myth. He leads his students up to the ethereal heights of heaven and tries to describe how the earth would look if we were to view it from the ether. Wouldn't it look very different to us walking around on earth? Think of the inhabitants of the seabed. They live on the mud of the earth. Above that is the water, then the air of the earth. Now we can imagine the transformed human being who would be just as astonished as a deep-sea creature if it were to look at the seabed from the air. He shows you another possibility in a vividly intuitive form. He describes the underworld, the various rivers and so on. The soul will take a different course in the underworld; it will receive different treatment in the underworld. Some are immediately thrown into Tartarus. These are the ones who were bad, criminals. The others will be washed back onto the shore and can once again call upon those who have offended them and ask for forgiveness.

The sensual image is less important. It is much more important when he says: It could be like this, but it could also be different. It is not an exoteric perception, but a visualization. It is nothing other than the reassurance of what has previously been achieved in me. In any case, the pictorial is completely justified by the preceding wisdom. If wisdom is to be visualized, then Plato leads over into myth. He allows a higher language to enter. This is the language of myth.

So we see that this Platonic conversation about the eternity of the soul is basically an argument about the whole of Platonic mysticism. It is one of the most important works that Plato has left us, perhaps one of the most important that we have. It shows us what Plato actually wanted to give us: a philosophical-mystical image for the gradual perfection of man within the [path of knowledge], an image of how man ascends through the form to the seizure of the spirit and how man does not come to conviction by providing himself with logical proofs, but by understanding things himself.

It is significant that Plato chose the form of conversation. This form is conditioned by the Platonic way of thinking, by the Platonic attitude. Plato is convinced that it is a matter of seeing spiritual, higher powers, and these must be developed through the word. The word is that which is the key to the spiritual: it is therefore also the word that compelled Plato to present the gradual capacity for perfection, the gradual capacity for development in the form of conversations that the teacher conducts with his pupils.

Question answer:

It is amusing to see how our philosophers stop at one point when interpreting Platonic philosophy. To a certain extent, Kühnemann realizes that it is a matter of education, of enlivening the soul, that immortality is still to be acquired through knowledge. He goes as far as the narratives that he can no longer control.

Plato is a predecessor of Philo. I would like to develop Philo's late Platonic mysticism. We have a continuous rise of mysticism. With Philon, the mystical deepening was also the highest peak. This is also the basis for Christian mysticism, namely for the Gospel of John, and also leads to an understanding of the Apocalypse.

With our division into seven, we are dealing with the end points as two opposite poles.

The [Greek] letter writing ties in with Kadmos.

In his "Philosophy of Revelation", Schelling created a "positive philosophy in contrast to the "negative philosophy of logic. He gave a philosophy of experience in contrast to merely conceived philosophy.

The history of dogma is the further development of external myths in scientific form. Schelling was formally ridiculed here in Berlin. He had no success in Berlin in 184[1]. He died in 185[4].

[Dearly beloved!]

Eight days ago, I took the liberty of speaking about the Platonic "Phaedo" on the conversation about the immortality - or rather the infinity - of the soul, in order to show how Plato has his hero, let's say Socrates, speak to a kind of initiate, to those of like mind, to souls who can understand him. I said it is a kind of spiritual conversation with those who are already in the matter. And we have seen that it is primarily about leading the participants up to where they actually develop within themselves that of which Goethe says: "And as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth."

The conversation ties in with Socrates' death in order to show what Plato thinks of as sensual, how it appears in [his] spiritual retrospection, how Plato understands this retrospection, how he allows [eternity] to peer through it into our temporal existence and how, for him, all things that are given in the world of the senses appear in their true meaning, in their transience and insignificance. "Phaedo" is the most significant of the Platonic dialogues in that it presents the event of death, which is the event that forces man down the most, as an untrue event. It expresses the strongest possible belief in the spiritual world. He says to himself: I believe in the living; and because I believe in the living, I overcome all other things that appear to me in the world of the senses. I also overcome the belief in death, I do not believe in the truth of the appearance of the senses, I believe in the truth of the primordial living.

The point here is not to provide a logical proof. Through the direct perception of the spiritual, the pupil should awaken the perception of the primordial living, so that death is also only an event of the sense world. Hence this conversation in the face of Socrates' death. The spirit should be in direct harmony with what is shown as a sensual event, so that Socrates simultaneously represents as a spiritual interest what he expresses in the conversation, so that it is expressed as a symbol, so that the dying Socrates in the moment when he approaches sensual death, Socrates, as he approaches sensual death, tries to teach his disciples the belief that death and all that is connected with it is a continual overcoming of sensuality, that life is a continual dying, a coming to terms with everyday life.

As he brings this teaching to his students, he is also able to seal with death what he has taught. This is how the "Phaidon" stands for us. Even in its external composition it is a symbol of what is inside. Socrates is the bright [guest] who had grasped it, this dying and becoming, and who sought to make it comprehensible to his students in the face of death.

The other Platonic conversation, the "Banquet", in which [Plato] also has Socrates converse with his friends, appears as a counter-image to this. Here we have the direct opposite. We have Socrates in the presence of the highest affirmation of life, in the midst of carousing people, in the midst of an idea which, like the immortality of the soul in the "Phaedo", is love in the conversation about the "Banquet". This idea is also slowly being grasped again. But the comprehension is such that among the guests [Socrates] alone is the clairvoyant. All those around him have not found it and have not grasped it. They have not grasped it. Socrates rises like a pillar above those who speak out of darkness and error. Among them, Socrates appears to us as the only bright one. It is therefore an addition to the actually clairvoyant conversation of the "Phaidon". Here, in the "Banquet", we are shown how infinitely excellent he is who possesses the highest consecrations of Plato and [how they are represented in Socrates]. Socrates is confronted with the most diverse views. We see how [the guests] personally express their views on love. First Phaidros, a man of ordinary life, who has thought about it from the point of view of common sense. Then Pausanias, a statesman, then a physician, then a poet of the comic type of poetry and then one of the tragic - in short, personalities who have not penetrated into the depths of the mind.

We can now see how he formed the contrast between the different people. Phaidros said that Eros is the divine, that which is absolutely valuable. Those who are united in love are thereby also compelled to virtuous behavior. He who loves another, who is bound to him in friendship, will feel compelled to behave virtuously in a completely different way. He will feel ashamed if he allows himself to be tempted by an unvirtue. We see [...] that everything practical, the utilitarian point of view, is praised as the originator of virtue.

The statesman declares that all the order of the state is founded on love and that the state is held together by it.

We then see how the physician sings the praises of love, how he shows how illness is cured by it, in that the substances that love or do not love each other give direction to the medicine, so that they act according to the deepest laws of the world. It is the disharmony in the universe from which the disease develops. Harmony is what the physician strives for. It is love from which harmony develops. Thus the scholar stands opposite Eros, which permeates everything. I have already spoken about how Empedocles has the world composed of four primary substances and how the primary substances then assume a hostile opposition. What the physicist calls repulsion and attraction, Empedocles calls hate and love.

[The fourth thing that confronts us]: Aristophanes gives us his view of love in the myth. We have seen that Plato seizes on myth when he wants to ascend to higher powers. Where scientific concepts do not suffice, he resorts to myth, to poetry. It is not something [that should appear as a higher fantasy], but a reflection of higher spiritual events that poetry should be. Aristophanes expresses himself thus: 'Originally human nature was of a very different kind. If we could look back to the origin of the earth, we would see people who are not only divided into individuals, but also those in whom several individuals are united into one. Only later, through a kind of fall into sin, were these individuals separated. They have retained a longing for each other from this original state. This longing is expressed in their love for each other. They seek what they once were and strive towards each other in order to regain their original state, their original nature. For the beloved being, love is nothing other than the striving for their other half, from which they have been separated by the world. - This is the strange worldview in which he expresses his view. He leads them back to what is below what is now human nature. Where the collision of the spiritual and the natural occurs, where they come together in a direct way, the comic confronts us. Every single comic phenomenon consists in nothing other than the succession of the natural, in the [clash] of the natural with the spiritual, without us being able to see the harmonious balance between the two.

The joke arises from the fact that one seeks to bring about a connection between things that do not belong together, so that the gaping chasm between sensual diversity and spiritual unity always appears. It is this search of the spiritual being for the original natural foundation, this gaping fissure, in which Aristophanes seeks his image for Eros.

The tragic poet [Agathon] seeks to sing the praises of the god of love in a serious manner. He also makes his views known. He describes the nature of the god of love by saying: "He is that which manifests itself as the fire of the mind, that which winds its way from mind to mind. While longing is a property of reason, love arose when wisdom took possession of the mind. As the human mind feels drawn to the primordial mind of the world, the infinite workings of Eros are revealed. It shows how all human beings are an outflow of the mind, it shows that the highest form of virtue is based in the middle state. It is precisely the love-filled mind that triumphs over blind power everywhere.

The wisdom of the mind is stronger than the blind force that prevails in the world. [Eros] is stronger than the blindly rushing Ares. These are worldly views that he presents to us. He now contrasts these with the Socratic ones.

It is Socrates who now makes his views on love known. He is the only bright guest among the dull guests, who rises above the world of the senses and at once enters the vision of the eternal, of ideality. I will show in a moment what a strange appearance Plato allows to occur in relation to Socrates' arguments, and we will see how Plato has given a counter-image to his "Phaidon". We shall see that [Socrates] does not say: I give here a conviction. For all those I have cited are actually stating their opinions. He, as a personality, says Socrates, has no opinion at all. [It has no value at all, is not even worth considering. He immediately puts his personality in the right light. He shows immediately: I am a member of the manifold world. But that which I have elevated myself to should speak from me. That is why he says: I do not give my wisdom - but he points to a seeress, saying that she has initiated him into that which he gives for the best.

Here you have the passage in Plato's work where you can see what the Greeks meant by this. Wherever a female figure, a priestess, a goddess or heroine or any other female entity enters the spiritual process, a state of consciousness is always meant. We have seen this in the development of the Greek myths and we see it today too. Socrates makes nothing known. He does not want to say anything from the ordinary level of consciousness, but from the higher one. He rises to what the [seeress] Diotima taught him. What does Socrates explain that Diotima taught him? He first explains, in his own way, what love is, and asks: Is it really to be praised as that which has no matter with it at all? Is it really as different as the others have made it out to be? It has been said that Eros is the oldest and most valuable god. But let us only see how he expresses himself. This deity expresses itself by leaning towards something that it does not have itself. We must therefore say that it is based on [lack]. The wise seer taught me something else. She taught me [- says Socrates -] that love, Eros, was conceived at the birth festival of Aphrodite by the god of abundance on the one hand and by the goddess of scarcity, of lack, on the other. Need and wealth are the parents of Eros. We therefore see that where love appears, it is not actually a divine thing, but it is precisely that which stands between the human and the divine. It is that which has not emerged from the pure need of life, but has emerged from the lack of life and from the richness of the eternal as that which forms the mediation that draws man upwards.

This is how Socrates portrays love. Eros is precisely the mediator that leads from the sensual to the spiritual fullness. Eros is therefore not actually a god, but a mediator between the divine and the human. That is why [Socrates] calls him a "demon". Therefore, this is also an explanation [when otherwise speaking of the demon]. Socrates says that he obeys an inner voice when he should do or refrain from doing something. This demon is nothing other than that which confronts us here as Eros, that which leads us up to the divine. That is why he describes Eros as something demonic, not as something divine. It is the power that leads up to the divine, to the infinite. When we find it in diversity, when we find it as that which appears to us as light, when we have left the darkness, then it is Eros that leads us there, leads us up to the infinite. So it is Eros that Socrates presents as the guide to the essence. Eros, love, confronts us in the same way as in India, when Krishna says: "In the middle of the sun is light, in the middle of light is truth, in truth is essence."

In the Platonic view, we are also confronted with the fact that the infinite being emerges in the truth that appears in the perspective of eternity. This Platonic view is accompanied by the fact that the demonic force that leads man from his immediate sensuality to the eternal view is nothing other than the demon of love.

So Socrates appears to us as the one who follows Eros in order to be led up to the immediate truth. Socrates is portrayed to us in such a way that he appears in the midst of the other speakers as the clairvoyant, the clairvoyant. The "banquet" is a wild affair. They are caught up in the sensory world. And while Socrates proclaims wisdom in his speeches, other speakers fall asleep, which means that they cannot escape from the dark diversity. He talks to the comic and tragic poets and discusses ideas with them. As the last ones who have remained bright, he tries to lead them to the eternal vision. He converses with them, saying that the poet, the real poet, must be able to express the comic as well as the tragic.

Here we see how Socrates goes beyond the poet, but retains his belief in poetry to the end. Here he points out that the tragic and the comic are capable of rising to the eternal. The comic and the tragic arise from the fact that the manifold is measured against unity, the [transient against the eternal,] against truth. Wherever we encounter the tragic or the comic, the spirit must in some way confront us with the sensual. The tragic hero in a tragedy only appears tragic because in him the idea ultimately triumphs over the demise of the external, the mortal. The spirit, as opposed to the earthly-material, appears as the comic. When man looks over the disharmony of the earthly, after he has already gone through a certain development on the spiritual ladder, when he thus looks back on what is going on down there, what does not appear as harmony in the manifoldness, while before his eyes it does appear as a kind of harmony, then it appears to him as humor. The one who looks back is actually the comical one in the sense in which Socrates expresses his words from the standpoint of eternal vision.

And when the spiritual emphasizes the immense difficulties it has to overcome, emphasizes how difficult it is to escape from the material, when the spiritual is not held up in a light sense, but in such a way that the opposite word is held up seriously, then tragic poetry appears. [What the wise Silen answers the tragic King Midas] to the problem is: What would be best for man? The best thing for man would be not to be born and, having been born, to die soon.

This is to be understood in such a way that what is enclosed in the temporal form overcomes this form and penetrates through to the eternal. This is how man overcomes tragedy. Therein lies the primal tragedy that everyone must feel who has the perspective upwards into the spiritual and downwards, depending on the mood that overcomes him, depending on whether he views the penetration from below or above. The world appears tragic or comic to him depending on his perspective. The poet must be able to deal with both the tragic and the comic, depending on the view upwards or downwards. The one who has a clear view upwards and downwards can do this.

Socrates remains the clairvoyant, not like the one who sees the spiritual and the material side by side, but like the one who recognizes the interweaving of the two, who is no longer humorous and also no longer serious, but who dissolves the contrast in the great development, where the material has increased, the spiritual penetrates from above and thereby enlivens the material. It is a unified view that takes the place of the tragic and the comic. He is the wise one beside the two. They fall away, and Socrates alone remains. It is he who outlasts them. From the point of view of the Greek view of life, not as a crude symbolic representation, it should be mentioned: he drank the most. The others have fallen away. He is the one who alone remains awake. Even if this is a dubious symbol for us, it was intended to express the fact that Socrates was so far initiated that he could not be kept from his clairvoyance by any sensual-material effect. It is he in whose personality is expressed what Plato describes as the fusion of the material and the spiritual.

[He was led by] Eros to the vision of eternity, to spirituality. He is sensuality transformed into spirituality. He appears in his personality as the bearer of wisdom, as the bearer of this spirituality, while the others are presented to us as those who have remained dull. Here it is the brighter spirit of Socrates who has grasped it, who has detached himself from all sensual multiplicity, who has reached it, the primeval, through the power of Eros, by which he has allowed himself to be guided.

So the "Banquet" is a complete antithesis to the talk of immortality or the infinity of the soul. It is intended to show us how Socrates ascends to the eternal, while the others are attached to the temporal. The best thing is how Plato shows us how he lets [Socrates] cease as a sage and how he lets him reproduce what he has received as inspiration from the goddess, the priestess. This is proof that the Greek mystic always uses the symbol of the feminine, which represents the deepening of the state of consciousness.

So we see that Plato is always talking about leading people up to deeper or higher states of consciousness. What Plato means in his view of eternity is not so clear to us in his work. It only appears to us in a later age at the same time as the emergence of Christianity in the West. We will see how these thoughts first acquire their true content through philonic mysticism.

What Plato shows us as a spiritual path can also be preserved in terms of content within the West. But those who stick more to the external form of Plato have an unopened bud in him. He shows us what he has grasped in his inner being, like a bud. We will only see this bud unfold when we go beyond Plato. Just as in Plato we see the emergence of Heraclitus' philosophy, so in Philo we see the emergence of Platonic philosophy.

I do not want to say that Plato did not stand on a higher level of knowledge. The ancients succeeded in saying this in a more direct way than Plato did. I would describe mysticism up to neo-Platonic mysticism as a continuous unfolding. [We have a strong folding together] with Heraclitus. He drew directly from the wisdom of the Mysteries. Heraclitus is a very important point in the dawn of Greek spiritual life. That is why Heraclitus was well aware that just as the Logos must follow descending paths in the development of the world, so matter must follow the ascending path. The Logos must spiritualize matter, and so it is called to penetrate it. At first it appears as a mere babble. Only later does the word attain the power to directly represent the spirit. Thus the whole spiritual process is a continual permeation of the word with the spirit.

600 years before the birth of Christ, the Buddha already said this. His words have a divine power. They will perhaps reveal more of themselves than what they now seem to contain. They are, as it were, the body for what they contain. They already contain this. But the body has only been able to develop through approximation. In the rise of Christianity, the spirit took possession of the word and appropriated dominion over the word at the time when the word really became flesh. Only after Plato did the word become the direct expression of the spiritual. With Plato, this is still veiled like a bud. This is also the reason why Platonic philosophy, if it is taken merely in an exoteric sense without the deeper mystical insight, cannot directly reveal what it wants to reveal. After all, it has the abyss-like depth of all essential penetration. But this depth is still resolved in the depths of the matter itself. The outer garment of the Platonic dialogues has not yet received all the wisdom driven out of it. And this is where the assertion that Platonic philosophy contains contradictions comes from.

In the juxtaposition of the material with the spiritual, one sees [according to Plato] a kind of "Achilles heel", and we must also admit this for the exoteric. Platonic mysticism only becomes comprehensible if we look at it esoterically, as we tried to do with the Phaedo and the Banquet. But if we take it in this way, many things become clear to us that would otherwise seem incoherent. On the one hand, Plato places the view of ideas, on the other the world of sensual existence. Plato did not succeed in showing that the one is actually also the other, that the one rules in the other. He did not succeed in showing that "I" is "You" and "You" is "I", that the individual does not have the right to speak "I" to himself, that he may only say "I" to himself when he has overcome the individual ego.

Plato contrasted the earthly diversity and the unity hovering above the earthly. He must overcome the sensual being and can then advance to the eternal. How then does the temporal appear to us? The temporal is powerless in the face of the eternal. The temporal is not spiritualized by the eternal. Plato has not found a transition. Plato has the eternal, but not as the eternal creator. Plato does not know the creative, divine personality, says the Christian. Temporality belongs to creation, says the Christian to Plato. He may have referred to the eternal, but he did not understand how to explain the temporal through the eternal, how to harmonize them. This can rightly be said if one takes an exoteric view of the matter.

Plato distinguishes between two types of knowledge. Sensory knowledge or the wisdom of temporality and the wisdom of infinity. And here we have come to see how its bud must be made to burst open. The one who still sees "I" and "You" as separate has not yet reached the point where the being is "one". He therefore knows that there are two kinds of knowledge, the wisdom of the infinite and the wisdom of the finite. But he also knows that these two kinds of knowledge only appear as two as long as the being itself is caught up in multiplicity, in finiteness. He points out not to contrast two kinds of knowledge in the absolute sense, but to recognize that there is a ladder in the direction where wisdom leads, that one can indeed lift oneself up to wisdom.

We always see beings developing upwards to divinity, from sensual knowledge to divine knowledge. We can also see this as a characteristic of the Greek striving for wisdom, that the Greek sage was aware that on his path of wisdom the earthly must also be transformed into the eternal, that he must also rise on the path of wisdom, that knowledge must not remain where it is worldly knowledge, but that just as the religious must set out on the path, so must he who seeks wisdom set out on the same path. The Greek sage is aware that the pursuit of wisdom is one of the paths to the infinite.

Here is what led Heraclitus to find the right expression, what led Heraclitus to real theosophy, to real philosophy. He made the distinction between earthly and divine wisdom. When the soul ascends from the body to the free ether, then it will be an immortal God, then knowledge is on the way to becoming divine wisdom. - Viewing from the eternal perspective of the gods, becoming God - that is what the Greek development of wisdom strives for. Not a knowledge of a place or thing lying behind things, but a becoming wisdom, that is what Greek development strives for.

I think we have seen that Platonic mysticism is one of the most important stages in the Greek pursuit of wisdom from the earthly-temporal, from purely human opinion to divine wisdom.

Answer to the question:

"Timaeus" and "Phaedo", which lead out of philosophy into mysticism, are the pinnacles of Platonic philosophy. These will then lead us to the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse.

Socrates looks down on suffering and joy from a higher point of view.

The manifold is not to be overcome in knowledge, but as such itself. In the mystery of Christ, death itself is overcome as such, not merely in the realization that death is nothing. Suffering, which Socrates only had to console himself about, must here be conquered, overcome. Victory must be achieved. There must be an absolute necessity for this victory to be achieved.

Wisdom is merely an abbreviation of the path. In exoteric terms, Plato shortened it to a third. Man has to overcome death through initiation, through the divine within the purely spiritual, as with Plato through knowledge. Not everyone can walk the path of wisdom. There must therefore also be a path that runs in real life, where the Word made flesh, the spirit made corporeal, is the overcoming. That is why the Socratic overcoming is there for the wise. For the ordinary man, however, the Socratic overcoming cannot exist under ordinary circumstances. For the higher truths and insights there is no great difference. But there is a great difference for the human being. Hübbe-Schleiden expresses it like this: Mysticism is of the highest value to man; but he who wants to bring the whole race on the path must also take spiritual knowledge to his aid. That is why this idea relates to the Socratic idea as life relates to the spirit. The salvation that is achieved through the Christ idea is salvation in life as opposed to salvation in the mere spirit.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

We have passed by the basic ideas in the Platonic worldview. I call them basic ideas because they are actually the most important for understanding Platonic mysticism, namely the Platonic ideas of the eternity of the soul and the ideas of love. The one idea has been revealed to us through an examination of the Platonic discussion "Phaidon", the other through an examination of the "Banquet". We have seen that these two ideas, which perhaps play the greatest leading role in the spiritual development of mankind - the great goal of the eternity of the soul and the path of love - are also among the most important and fundamental ideas in Platonic mysticism.

This is also the point where we can best understand the influence of Platonism on Christianity, i.e. how Christianity developed under the influence of Plato. It would not be making the most necessary contribution to clarity if we did not, on the occasion of the consideration of the eternity of the soul and love, at the same time draw attention to how these two basic ideas have reappeared in Christianity. I will pass over the intermediate stages. They will become all the more understandable if we touch on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. I have thought a lot about this. You will therefore forgive me if I have to address some of the more difficult questions.

I am of the opinion that the views and relationships that exist between Platonism and Christianity have not unjustly given rise to such a great literature, a literature that is centuries old, because through the shadowing, through the peculiar way in which the Platonic spirit has settled into the Occident through Christianity, one can see how the Occident is influenced by Platonism. It can only be understood - and it is only possible to show the true relationship between Platonism and Christianity - if one looks at its mystical elements and considers the core ideas of Christianity.

The liberal, theological approach still insists that the relationship between Platonism and Christianity should be presented according to a mystical method. And so we must be clear about the fact that we must seek out the actual core ideas of Christianity in their original meaning. Only in this way will we be able to understand where Platonism meets Christianity and thus understand what Plato presents to Christianity as a kind of world view. Only the theosophical-mystical direction has the possibility of really grasping the core. All exoteric methods do not have the possibility of grasping what had to come from ancient mysticism in order for Christianity to emerge.

But in order to show what has happened, I would like to show the characteristic features, illustrated by the consciousness of the builders, those who have contributed to its development. I would like to show how it presented itself to the souls of the first [church fathers and teachers]. Then the most important key point is that [Christianity] presents something fundamentally new compared to Platonism. This fundamentally new thing is nothing other than that Christianity is direct, real life, life as it presents itself before our eyes and ears. If you do not hold on to this core point, you will not be able to see what distinguishes it from the old religions and also from the mysteries and Platonism.

I would like to point out once again what is emphasized in Platonism and Christianity. It was the immediate life, that which the everyday person perceives directly, that Platonism was supposed to overcome; and on the other hand, it was that it rose to something higher, which cannot be perceived with the senses, into the eternal view. Plato's "Phaidon" wants nothing other than eternity of the soul. He does not want to prove the eternity of the soul. It is not about logical proofs. His aim is to bring to life that which gathers around Socrates and to bring it into a new world. The soul should rise by turning away from what can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. In short, eternity should be something that one acquires, that one acquires through the introduction to the mysteries. Plato's pupil says: "The soul can become immortal when it rises to the vision of eternity. When it sees the spiritual, it participates in spiritual life. This makes it eternal. This is a developmental process that we went through in the Platonic "Phaidon", and also a developmental process that we see in the "Banquet". We see that it was Diotima who lifted us up to the higher standpoint.

I drew attention to what Goethe said about his view of such eternal conversations. He says: "If I have inserted myself into the spiritual course of development of the universe, then I am entitled to have a place assigned to me by nature. We are not immortal in the same way. We must first acquire this right. We have to develop this first claim first.

This is the basic element that runs through Plato's "Phaedo". Plato says [in essence]: You can see what you want, but if you only perceive what your eyes, ears, the external senses give you, then you cannot enter the spiritual. The supersensible is what guarantees you the eternity of the soul. - He could not have soul eternity proven. The disciples should acquire it, they should become immortal. This is the basic conception of the Platonic method. - Logic can only link together perceptions that you already have.

And now let us look at what lived in the first centuries of Christianity. The experience of the senses was what was emphasized. The message of salvation was to consist in the fact that the Savior, the one who brought the right to eternity for man into the world, was visibly there. So it is the Savior who is perceived by the senses. - Here are a few passages that show that it is about becoming visible, about the Good News:

"We behold his glory. - He who has seen it testifies to it, and his testimony is true, and he is conscious of speaking the truth so that you may believe." [John 19:35]

We have not preached the presence of Jesus Christ to you in a sophisticated way, but as eyewitnesses. We have heard his voice. - I am not saying that this is to be understood symbolically, I am saying that this is to be understood literally, not symbolically. - What we have heard and touched, we tell you so that you may have the message with us.

It is essential that we are assured by Irenaeus that we can be assured of this by people who have known such people themselves. Irenaeus himself still knew people who were disciples of the apostles, and he says that they still had personal experiences. This is the sensual truth that lived in the consciousness of the first Christians. This sensual truth, which was there for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, lives on in the Church. This [truth] is there for all time. It is not only the temporal truth that took place at the time when Jesus lived, but it lives on as such. This is what we call Christian mystery.

The Lord's Supper is not just a symbol and must not be just a symbol if we do not want to end up with something completely watered down. Christ has appeared today - Christmas. We must take this as an eternal truth, that what has happened once can happen again and again. So it does not happen symbolically, but in such a way that it is really there in the present.

This mystical view existed in the first centuries when Christianity was formed. I would therefore like to agree with [Möhler] and consider it to be the only correct thing to say: viewed from one side, the Church is one in which the living Christ lives, whose personality is repeated and continues uninterruptedly. Not in the way of a deceased person. He does it in a sensual way. In baptism he always takes us into his fellowship. The Savior has been foretold. And for the apostles and the first Christian teachers, the word and sensory perception are valid. They relied on the Old Testament as well as on visual evidence.

We must be clear about the fact that they see an incomprehensible continuation of life. What has happened once must be there forever. This must be emphasized, just as the words of Augustine must be emphasized again and again, which show us that even at the time of Augustine, appearances compelled him to do so, for he says: I would not profess it if the sensually perceptible authority of the Church did not compel me to do so. This is what guarantees the truth of the message of salvation.

There are two aspects to this: firstly, being a naturalized eye and ear witness and secondly, the authority of the truly continuing church. Without this continued existence of the church, even Paul would not have felt comfortable believing in it. The church must be the embodiment of the mystery, it must be a mystical community, it must be added to the testimony of the apostles and apostles' disciples. It must be clear to us that these views became firmer and firmer in the first centuries, and that they also became firm in Augustine's worldview.

What I have now explained as the basic characteristic of Christianity in the first centuries is the necessity that the content cannot be proven, but only vouched for, that human thinking has nothing to do with this content, that it can at most be a point of reference for understanding this content. We have to keep that in mind. It is essentially linked to Christianity that it is based on certainty.

The mysteries also have nothing to do with logic, they are also based on experience. Plato was familiar with the mysteries. Anyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to personally submit to the required process. He had to take part in it personally and allow himself to be initiated. He had to ascend to the pinnacles of knowledge. They had to climb up personally. And so it was in the Platonic initiation.

In Christianity, something new was added: the substitution by a single personality living in history. It was something that antiquity had in mind as an exemplary type of commitment in a historical act by a single historical personality. Three things had to come together - and that is the important thing that had to happen in order for Christianity to come into being. It had to be there:

- firstly, what lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world;
- secondly, the initiation process that everyone who wanted to be initiated had to undergo;
- thirdly, a transformation had to take place.

Let's take a closer look at what this transformation was like. Platonic mysticism has already shown us the beginnings. This [transformation] is that we are dealing with a - I may best say - first materialization of the eternal being, let us say with a materialization of God. And then again we are dealing with the ascending process of the development of the worldly into the divine. We have to do - now let us say - with the divine, in order to make the conception that comes into consideration clear - with the eternal, divine essence, and on the other side with the Logos that forms itself in matter, that develops, that transforms itself in the most manifold ways, with a sequence of stages in the development of the Logos. [We need only follow Philon of Alexandria], and we will find this sequence of stages of the Logos.

First, we have the Logos before us in its pure spiritual form. No human being can grasp it, although human individuality rests in it. According to [Philon], this spiritual entity is the primordial Logos. It is a [prototype] of what appears in the world as the divine world order. Whoever lives and works in the world and recognizes the world must - and this must be noted - consider on the one hand the descending line that goes from the spiritual to the material, and on the other hand the line that ascends and goes from the material to the spiritual. Only by standing in the middle can he understand why he is an individual. Only through this can he understand why he is a being appearing as a duality. By realizing that he can have hope of entering into the spiritual primordial being, but also by realizing that this being forms the world order itself.

Because the world itself is spiritualized, he becomes aware that he is dealing with a twofold Logos, with a Logos that cannot be reached and with a Logos that is poured out, with the Logos that has become flesh, with the Logos that has become material. The material world is an exact image of the divine world; but it is not the same as the original divine essence.

[Philon] distinguishes between these two entities. God is the Father of all things, the primordial Logos; and the Son of God, the children of God are the materialized Logos in the world. It is that which develops, transforms, strives upwards towards the primordial Logos. This upward striving in one form or another can be found in mysticism. We will see this in neoplatonic theosophy, which form mysticism can still take. Then we have the basic skeleton that underlies all mysticism. That is one element.

The other element is the initiation process; and here I must try to express myself particularly clearly, because - according to the experiences of others - they say things somewhat differently. I am compelled by my experiences to express myself somewhat differently. I will try to be as clear as I can. We have to understand what it was all about. I will only be able to prove this with a few glimpses, let's say, of the initiation process of the Egyptian schools. [Gap in the transcript]

We must be clear that man, by moving further along this path, is making a journey that leads back in the true sense of the word. Now I would like to draw your attention to this: Initiation is that which a person achieves when he walks back along his path, goes through it, when his consciousness is illuminated. Deeper and deeper truths can be revealed to people. And these are the initiations that man encounters on his path into his inner being. These initiations are the same as the Principia of the world. They are the fundamentals and the foundations of the world that come to development in the world. Let us call the principles of development in the world "Logos. If man can really progress on the path of initiation to the real principles of the world, then he will find within himself the same thing that he finds outside as a principle. Thus initiation was a real, actual process, something that man actually goes through. It is not of subjectively human significance, but of objectively divine significance. The path of knowledge is a way back, a reconnection of man with the original source of existence. What he finds in himself is what he rests with in the objective of the world, that is what leads man to deification, to divinization. The path of knowledge is the path of deification.

The second way is that which is based on principles, on the Logos. This is also a real process. It is a real process, not an allegory. The idea that it is a real process can only be obtained through spiritual experience. Think of the initiation process that every Myste had to go through, intertwined with the process of the creation of the world. And now, instead of understanding this as an exemplary process that every Myst had to go through, think of a unique historical process, think of a single initiate and think of him as the original initiate, as the representative initiate for all others, then you have the image of the "Christ as it developed in the first century of Christianity. The materialization, the incarnation of the divine Logos conceived as a one-time event, but in such a way that it is the real incarnation of the divine Logos, then you have the Christ-appearance.

Three things must therefore be distinguished:
1. the old doctrine of the origin of the world,
2. the initiation process and
3. the combination of these two things with a historical

conceived, individual act. This is the view that Theosophy has of the origin of Christianity, and this is the one against which, of course, not the slightest objection can be raised from the esoteric point of view, because the esotericist must regard precisely this way of looking at the truth as much deeper.

Here you have what lived in the consciousness of the old Christians. They claimed that which was presented to them as a process of development in the old schools and which then happened as a single act. And that made it necessary to make it dependent on appearance. The purpose of the initiation process is to raise the lower aspects of man, to divinize them, so that the Word becomes flesh in the individual, so that the individual struggles upwards, is sanctified upwards. This was demanded as something done.

So instead of continuing the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity had to bring a new mystery into the world. Spiritual survival is not merely an allegory, but a matter of faith, and the ecclesiastical principle of authority had to take its place. For Plato, the concept of love was central. He regarded it as a kind of demon. It is that which leads people from the lower levels to the higher levels of knowledge, which transforms people from the temporal to the eternal. Love is the mediator between the temporal and the eternal. But love is also the demonic agent that brings about the process of development in each individual human being, the passage from the temporal to the eternal. And to the extent that this love is not at work, to that extent the review of ideas, as Plato says, cannot take place.

What is achieved through this initiation process, which is described to us as the initiation process of ideas, is an introduction to the divine, to seeing. This can only be mediated through love, which is a guide for every personality. Platonic love is something else. It is not to be confused with what "Christian love is. What can be found in Christian writings is not to be put together with Platonic love. Just think that the path was there in the ancient mystical teaching. The path of the mystics was a personal one. It was such for an individual. Now we are dealing [in Christianity with a vicarious mystery] with a historical event that happened once. It is a question of what used to serve as the idea of the origin of the world becoming, as it were, the map according to which the path is traveled. This whole world, which Plato calls the world of ideas, was removed from the personal perspective, it was removed from personal observation. It was that which was guaranteed by historical tradition or ecclesiastical authority. But that which underlies the ancient mystery, the eternal truth of the incarnation of the Logos, was that which was moved beyond the human perspective. For the people of Platonic philosophy, this was called the way of love. This love, this Eros, took on a different, a new form. It now became a principle through which man could look up to something that was beyond human comprehension. Everything Plato said boiled down to this: knowledge was there to lead to where one could make perceptions; but this knowledge could not lead there [because the Eternal born in the midst of knowledge, in the midst of light - Brahma, so to speak - was not accessible to knowledge]. What had to take the place of love was not something that had an end, but something that offered a view, that led to remaining in the apparent, in the historical. At the same time, a path was closed which the old Myste wanted to reach, but which can no longer be traveled. This is why Christianity had to put forward a different idea for the "path of love". And that is "faith. Faith is that [which no human knowledge can achieve, it is that] which can only be revealed, which must be guaranteed by sight. The Christian can believe, but not strive for the content of the infinite. This is what took place at the beginning of Christianity, because these views were actually transformed, because in each individual the mystical initiation process was re-stamped as a unique historical event. The element of Hermes, the guide from the earthly to the divine, was also transformed into an abstract element that had only a subjective meaning. The way in which the Platonic conception and the mystery doctrine in particular still had to take on an earthly form in everything that presents itself to us as Christianity is something I would like to talk about next time.

Answer to the question:

The Christ has been completely eliminated. Two things are to be distinguished, the believers and the teacher who taught the doctrines of the ancient mysteries. The parables reveal a teacher of the Essaean community. He spoke to the people as it was appropriate for the people. Behind Jesus stands the actual teacher, as with Krishna, Ramah and so on. What Jesus taught is no different from what the Orient taught. But what Christianity has become is something else. What was demanded by the mystics is something else[: to believe in] a unique historical fact.

The content of the Christian dogmas of the first centuries is exactly the same as in the old mystery schools. The content of the mystery teachings is presented as a diabolical imitation of the divine word in order to be able to say that they teach something else after all.

Philon deepened the Platonic philosophy. Philon broke through the principle of strict isolation from the outside world. The external dissemination of doctrine through the parable was cultivated. The esoteric core disappeared, the exoteric shell remained. Paul deepened the exoteric nature of Christianity.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

I tried last time to show how Philo of Alexandria introduced a new influence into Platonic philosophy and how Philo then formed the transition from the Mysteries, from Jewish mysticism to Christianity. And at the end I drew attention to the fact that both Philo and Jesus made use of parables to illustrate the hidden wisdom acquired in the mystery schools.

We have an illustrative example in the explanation Philo gives of the fourteenth chapter of the first book of Moses. There we will see how Philo goes about it. It is the story you are familiar with, which reads: “And it came to pass at that time that Kedor-Laomor king of Elam and the kings of Shinar and Ellasar and the king of the Gentiles fought with the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Zeboim and Bela, whose name is Zoar.” Abraham puts his opponents to flight, rescues Lot and is finally blessed by Melchizedek.

There are five kings with whom Abraham fights against the four other kings. There is a mystical meaning in this. The four kings are four vices: lust, desire, fear and sadness. The other five kings must be understood as the five senses, which are connected to them. Abraham, however, points to the Logos. When he trains his virtues, he conquers those powers victoriously. In the struggle of the five kings against the four others [Philo] sees the struggle of the Logos. He sees the power seizing the five senses. With the help of the five senses, that is wisdom and knowledge, the Logos fights against lust, desire, fear and "sadness. This human process, which can be recognized when we climb into the soul, is exactly the same as when we face the plants. It is the same lawfulness. The regularity of spiritual human creation can also be explained by the fact that man has taken these laws from human nature. The myth is not to be explained in an external way, but by the fact that it underlies the deepest mystical process.

So we see that Philo applied to the Old Testament myth for the first time something that we have come to know from the mystics and Greek popular religion. The Greek mystics certainly imagined it in the same way. We must refrain from what is unscientific in it, or what contradicts precise self-knowledge. Now, it is only a matter of saying what is going on in man. And what happens in man must be understood from the original, human forces. It is not to be understood as if it were an allegorical expression, but one feels it as an objective, spiritual lawfulness, which the spirit uses to produce the myth. One grasps the myth and behaves towards it in the same way as the naturalist behaves towards nature.

In these deepest driving forces in the human soul, which create an external existence for themselves by transforming themselves into myths, by [living out] themselves in the mythological world, so that what deeper forces have been at work in them is no longer visible in the external world, [Philo] sees the Logos, the eternal world spirit, reigning in the human spirit. And this world spirit reigning in the spirit of man, which he calls Logos, which, insofar as it lives itself out in man, is not a merely abstract conceptual world, but something directly alive, this world spirit he designates at the same time with the word “Sophia”—reason I would like to translate it—“the Word” and “the Wisdom”. These are the two components into which general wisdom is transformed into human spirit. This is the deeper truth that underlies the whole Old Testament myth. This is, as I said, what we see expressed by Philo.

So we see that what is distributed in the Greek myth among manifold figures of gods and what the Greek myth could more or less put together in the figure of Dionysus is put together by Philo in this single figure. It is the same thing that was also contained in Judaism. What was previously sought in the diversity of the world, Philo traces back to a single primordial spirit as a single divinity and calls it a “logos”.

In these few words, he says, wisdom was led in deeper souls to that which in Jewish mysticism at the time remained stuck in symbolism. It is what they called the masculine-feminine. For Philo, male logos and female wisdom is the state of consciousness that corresponds to the outer symbol I spoke of the other day. Thus Philo says: Everything that appears as spiritual in the world leads back to the God-man, to the divine in human nature.

We may say—and this is speaking in the Philonic sense, and passages could be cited for this if we delve deeper into the ancient scriptures—that nothing else reveals itself to us but the divine-human.

This is what Philo's philosophy brings to the Western intellectual world as a new component. He was aware that he had not given something of which he was the first author. Philo was aware that he had predecessors. He also gives a description of them, in which he reveals how he had predecessors. He describes not only personalities, but entire sects. From an early age, he knew the 'therapists' as hermits in various parts of Egypt and North Africa. He describes them as hermits who lived in seclusion from the world, withdrawn from all sensuality, from all worldly things, in order to awaken in themselves what Philo refers to as the God-human. They spent a large part of the week, six days, in a purely contemplative life, using the seventh day to come into contact with the world at communal meals.

The therapists practiced scriptural interpretation using Old Testament and Egyptian writings. It was by no means a different one, but the same one that we discovered in Philo as his own. He had already written "On the contemplative life" before he had reached the age of thirty. In the book "On the Contemplative Life" we can see how the therapists searched for the God-man behind every fact. However, they were treated tendentiously in the most diverse ways in Western philosophy.

Here we can see how we are often the father of the thought. First of all, they were hermits, whom the Catholic priests regard as ancestors in the most eminent sense. There has been an interest in seeing in these forerunners of Christian monks in order to be able to say that contemporaries of Jesus had already formed a kind of monasticism. Catholicism saw this writing as proof of how old monasticism was. Protestantism has sought to prove that this writing is spurious and has been foisted on Philo. This view has recently been shown to be completely erroneous. The philological investigation cannot really sort anything out; but from the use of language and from individual phrases it has been proved that it is a Philonic writing.

There can be no doubt that we are dealing with a truly Philonic writing. However, this cannot be proof of the existence of Christian monasticism. There is only talk of hermit-therapists. This way of life was certainly the cause of the development of certain ascetic trends in Christianity. But they must not be regarded as institutions of Christ.

Thus we have become acquainted with an entire sect from which Philo received his inspiration. Just in the writing [by Mead] on the Gnostics, which has now appeared and which contains a translation of the writing "On the Contemplative Life", you can read how this has been proven by English [philology]. But even in Germany there has long been no doubt about the authenticity of this writing. If you read it, you will see that Philo describes a sect in the Therapeutae that comes close to what Philo himself taught.

If we want to clarify the difference between the two, then we can say that Philo is more philosophical and the therapists are more religious. Philo's approach is more geared towards translating the esoteric interpretation of the [Old] Testament into philosophical language. Just as Philo interpreted the first book of Moses, so could a follower of the Therapeutic sect have interpreted it. But Philo goes beyond this by showing that one has a right to resort to such a view. This soul is given power in no other way than by the fact that the God-man is in the human being itself. Thus a second divine is added to the hidden divine, to the deepest part of the spirit of the world in Philo.

We cannot yet say that Plato has a clear awareness of how his world of ideas relates to the divine. In Philo, however, we find precise philosophical thoughts about this. The divine, the infinite in every direction, is that which can never be exhausted. It is that which man can look up to, but which can also completely enter the human soul. But only the God-man, wisdom, can do this. And that is what lives itself out in the human soul, and that is what lived itself out in the content of the Old Testament.

From there, Philo comes to the conclusion that the divine-human is expressed in the human soul, that there are, as it were, two divinities that are accessible to human beings, related to human beings, and that there is, in essence, a hidden, infinite divinity. There he comes to the conclusion that where the appearance of Jehovah is spoken of, it is not the infinite God himself, but the divine-human that he has discovered. Thus he arrives at a kind of personification of the divine where the divine appears to Moses in the form of the burning bush.

If I were to turn the divine-human that appeared to Moses - Philo said to himself - into the unattainable divine, into that which can never be exhausted, I would not be able to comprehend anything, since the deepest knowledge can only be guessed at. In order not to drag it down into the earthly-worldly, in order to leave it the divine, even though it cannot be penetrated, Philo contrasts the highest divine with the divine-human. And he contrasts this divine-human with the "Father as Son". He therefore says: "Wherever the divine appeared in the Old Testament, it was the Son. Wherever God gives help or punishment, for Philo it was the "Son of God who intervened. He is the one who only now becomes comprehensible to man for those who look deeper into the structure of the world.

In the [Logos], according to Philo's view, the Jews understood the mediator between the Father and the world. Now, however, humanity has become spiritually imbued with him. Philo regarded such sects as that of the therapists as the nurturing place of human personalities who wanted to ascend to that elevated human entity in which the God-man within them could come into existence.

So Philo regards the life of the therapists as a preparation for the appearance of the Son of God in human nature. He regards the life that the therapists aspired to as one that accomplishes the immediate influx of the divine nature into the sensual nature.

Something similar happens in another sect. Over in Asia - you can read about it yourself in Philo's writings - you will find the same view among the Essenes as among the therapists. This sect, which Philo visited and, as he himself admits, learned from it the interpretation of Scripture as he practiced it, was just like the sect of the therapists, it endeavored to seek out the divine-human in the Old Testament myth. This Logos, which was destined to do so and which sought to live itself out in the human, was to take shape, to really live in the human spirit. And this teaching lived in the sect of the Essenes two or three centuries before the birth of Christ.

The therapists are doctors of the soul. If we research the origin of the name, we find a sect that derives its name from "healing", and this healing means something like "being a physician of the soul". These therapists were those who wanted to raise the soul to a higher level. They were of the opinion that the sensual is something that leads away from God, something that causes illness, something against which man must undergo a healing process. The therapists were people who wanted to free people from the sensual. It was the same with the Essenes. They had a kind of communist state. There is evidence to see in the Essenes the same thing that the therapists were, and it can be shown that the Chaldean word "Essene" means nothing other than "healer". But that is less important.

According to the allusions in Josephus, Philo and Pliny, however, we can say that the teaching of the Essenes is in fact exactly the same as that of the therapists. Only in their external life did the Therapeutae, the hermits and the Essenes differ. There was a communist state near the Dead Sea. There was a complete community of goods and a strictly regulated, ascetic life. Describing the external form of government has little significance for the course of spiritual life. What is particularly important is that those who wanted to be accepted had to commit themselves through the so-called great vow: firstly, to actually submit to everything that was demanded of the Essenes so that they could ascend to the highest level; secondly, not to betray anything outwardly of that by which the Essenes came to the top.

This great vow makes a person an actual [Nazirite], as they were called in the Essene community. At least two centuries before the birth of Christ, we are dealing with views that we cannot characterize in any other way [...], because Philo would undoubtedly not seek evidence for his doctrine in the teachings of the Essenes. He takes for granted something that the Essenes themselves have from the Old Testament myths. He would not take anything for granted if it were not the case that the Essenes would have had the same basic view as Philo did.

Philo lived around the same time as the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The same teachings, the doctrine of the incarnate Logos, the doctrine of the mediator between God the Father and the world, which Philo himself taught, were also found among the Essenes. They existed among the Essenes for two centuries, undoubtedly more than a century before the birth of Christ. We can assume nothing other than that this teaching came to them in a roundabout way via Egypt. Any other possibility is out of the question. No matter how much effort has been made to establish that such an interpretation of the Scriptures emerged from Judaism, we are actually dealing with nothing other than the transfer of the Greek mystical way of thinking to the consideration of the Old Testament by individual sects when we consider the entire view of the Essenes.

The reason for this is that Greek philosophy arrived there by way of a detour via Platonic philosophy via the School of Alexandria in northern Egypt and that this philosophy led to the extension of Greek methods to the Old Testament. This led to a view that can serve us as confirmation of this process, a view that already prevailed before Philo. They believed that the whole of Greek philosophy was nothing other than a process of development that emerged in particular from Greek-Jewish philosophy. Plato is seen as a disciple of Moses and the prophets. They transformed the myths of the Old Testament into Greek myths; and now Greek philosophy is related to them in such a way that it is nothing but something that is derived from the Old Testament.

This view prevailed in Alexandria. Philo in particular advocated it. The esoteric method was then applied to the Old Testament, in particular to Pythagorean philosophy. Plato also dealt with the latter. They had to go through long trials. This method led to therapists introducing similar methods. The actual [esoteric] content of the Jewish myth was found through the fact that Greek mysticism was led to seek out this content. The actual esoteric core of the Old Testament myth was sought through them. This is why the Essenes are a sect that practises esotericism.

It is the Logos who actually represents God in the world. The Logos is the mediator between the Father and human beings. The Logos is the Son of God. This is Essene doctrine. Philo merely deepened this doctrine. He was the philosopher of this doctrine. He admits that he found this teaching, that it was already there. Among the Essenes and therapists, such views were already commonplace centuries before our era. There must have been someone who was looking for the [divine-human] in the Old Testament. Great teachers lived within the Essene community who taught them this ancient worldview, that the All-Spirit lives itself out in the human Logos. Fulfilling oneself [with the Logos] is what man has to strive for. This was what the Essene sect wanted and what formed the core of the Essene sect's deepest aspirations.

So we must assume from the external testimony a great personality whose name could not have come down to us. He could not have been named because every Essene only reproduced within his Essene community, only within his own brotherhood, what it was all about in the deepest sense. The actual penetration of the deeper core was only practiced in the Essene community. Taking it out into the world held back the vow. We may assume that there was a founder, that he summarized all mystical interpretations of the deepest essence of mythology in a central figure of the God-human Logos, and that he taught that this Logos is that on which all knowledge, all truth depends. It must have been a conviction of the Essene community that all the wisdom of man is worthless if this Logos does not permeate this wisdom.

It is a folly of naturalists and a presumption to want to know God directly. The only way in which man can look at God is this: "I and the Father are one." This realization is the deepest core of the Essene doctrine. This is how we see the deepest spiritual core of esoteric Christianity, roughly outlined, taking shape in the Essene community two centuries before the birth of Christ.

The need for a savior was present within the Jewish community in the most diverse ways. We see that teachers of the Old Testament, alongside this view, alongside this "Greekness", sensed something from the Jewish writers. We therefore find allusions to a Greekization of the Essenes and certain schools. Jewish writers speak of Greekness with shyness and disgust. Individual schools and the Essene community in particular were aware that something foreign had been absorbed. In this Judaism, a lively need developed for a Messiah who could free the Jews from the terrible political situation in which they found themselves. We must imagine that alongside the Essene esotericism, there was also an exoteric interpretation [of the Old Testament] all around, which was understood to mean that a Messiah was to come who would redeem the Jewish people from the weakness and shame into which they had fallen in worldly life. This view ran parallel to that of the Essenes.

If we follow the circumstances closely, we see that all the conditions were present in Judaism for a good reception of such personalities who were able to free the Jews from the situation they had got into. It was easy to turn them into messiahs. The most diverse personalities are seen as such messiahs. There is not enough time to illustrate this relationship with the personality of John the Baptist and other personalities. I only wanted to draw attention to the fact that those who lived within the Essene community were no longer able to uphold this vow when Philo had made this teaching the basis of his philosophy and something of it leaked out. Now it was no longer possible to close oneself off. Now everything was open to those who sought the path in a philosophical way. Now you could no longer be an Essene just by joining the Essene community.

If we want to understand the emergence of Christianity itself, we have to realize that something essentially new was created through the Philonic philosophy, through this act of acceptance. People were equipped with new tongues of fire, so to speak. Now it was possible to speak again as it had been spoken in the ancient Greek mysteries, namely to represent in myth what had presented itself to them as an [inner] experience through [the description of] external sensual facts. They were able to learn this through the currents that developed from Greek philosophy.

Protagoras believed that all people share a sense of virtue, morality and social coexistence, but that only a few people have the ability to ascend to the highest levels. This is why in Platonic times this is represented by the myth that once only gods lived on earth as fire. Animals and humans no longer had the ability to live in fire. Therefore, they had no possibility of life. That is why Prometheus was given the task of implanting life into them. However, Epimetheus transferred everything to the animals, so that nothing was left for humans.

[Prometheus] gave fire to mankind. That means the gift of the arts, the gift of wisdom. I think this legend mythically illustrates an inner process. This shows us the way in which the legend is continued. The abilities are distributed, one has more, the other less. Hermes was sent with the ability to distinguish between good and evil. They all have this in the same way. The Greek philosopher expressed inner human facts of the soul in myths.

The person who considered himself capable of doing this was the apostle John. The most important thing for us is given in his Gospel - despite modern theological research. He gives us - from the standpoint of [Philonic] philosophy according to practical esoteric methods - the life story of the God-man. He translates the inner God-man for us. He himself knows the teachings of the Essenes and he gives us what he learned in the Essene community. What he could not say openly, he gives us in mythical form. He shows us how the Christian idea grew out of the philosophy of Philo, the Therapeutae and the Essene sect. The Gospel of John] has been regarded as the last, as the least certain. But that is not tenable.

We shall see, if we compare it with the other Gospels, that we must say that it presents to us the sacred legend as it must have been formed. But the one who was initiated in the deepest sense into the teaching of the Essene community, who was therefore able to let [the] idea of the God-man grow out of [the] Logos made flesh, who was able to explain this, was John. Therefore it also begins with the words: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word" and so on. These are ideas that form the basis of Philonic philosophy. The idea of the Father and what can be associated with it, the Logos made flesh. The words: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" cannot be interpreted in any other way than that he had the Essene concept and was aware of the significance of the Essene doctrine.

There are all sorts of external reasons why it can be maintained that [the Gospel of John] is a later product. But basically the whole tenor, the whole presentation of the Gospel, shows that it grew directly out of the deepest conception of Christianity. This is also shown by the very modest way in which John [concludes the Gospel by saying that he was present at these things, that he was, so to speak, an ear and eye witness, but that he is not interested in communicating what he personally experienced, what was apparent, but the deeper core, that is, what was taught in the Essene community. Therefore, we can understand the matter in such a way that we find an esoteric Christianity centuries before Christ and that we have the exoteric interpretation of it in the Gospel of John.

Question answer:

Philo did not know Jesus. There is nothing about it in his writings. Hints can be found in his book Quod omnis probus liber. These allusions say - they are quite clear - that the "what or "how he taught was common practice among the Essenes. Nowhere is there any mention of any personality whom he knew as a contemporary. On the other hand, there is a continuous tradition, apart from internal reasons. This completely different way of explaining the Old Testament. This leads back to certain personalities, with regard to whom it must be conceded that they must have lived before our era. I think there is an ongoing tradition. This is most beautifully developed among the Druze people. They have a peculiar kind of religion, a form of religion that contains all these things that can be described as essential Christianity. - In addition, this people has also absorbed a certain shade of Mohammedanism. - In this sect there is a legend of Christ, who lived at about the time of the [gap in transcript] according to this legend. This is a view of the Druze. But we have no historical basis at all, apart from the well-known passage from Josephus, for the assumption of a Jesus of Nazareth in the years 1 to 33. The Gospel of John cannot be taken in any other way, otherwise it becomes what it has become for fifty years with Protestant theologians, a complete nothing. The first three Gospels then represent only a sacred legend. I would like to elaborate on the origin of the Gospel of John and Philo. One might think that Philo takes a polemical stance against this new worldview. But no, the new doctrine does not appear in such a way that he, as a philosopher, would have felt compelled to fight it. They are based on what later became Christianity. The life of John, Moses' view of the creation of the world, also some elements from Persian, influences from Judaism, his demonology, which is ancient Jewish. Many things can also be traced back to Persian influence.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

In the previous lectures I have endeavored to show the components of which Christianity is composed. I would now like to note again that I am only trying to present Christianity in the way in which it can be understood as a mystical-theosophical doctrine. I will try to show that the narrative that is before us, on the one hand in the three Gospels, in the Synoptics—Matthew, Mark and Luke—and on the other hand in the Gospel of John, but then also specifically in relation to the Christian doctrine, as we have it in the various creeds of the Western Christian churches—I will try to show how this doctrinal content is nothing other than a result of the so-called Egyptian initiation, the Egyptian initiation process to which every individual who wanted to ascend to a theosophical worldview had to submit.

This is summarized and described as a single historical event, as the life, suffering and death of an individual, a saviour, not as a process to which every human being is subjected. These initiation processes, which were different in degrees, are dumped on a single personality and summarized, merged into a single process. That is what I endeavored to show.

I endeavored to show how the matter has become a historical event. I do not see the initiation process as an allegory. I want to repeat Leadbeater's words here, not as an opinion of mine, but as a theosophically established fact: "Then it happened that one of the most monstrous misunderstandings dawned over the spiritual horizon of the old world, which then spread from there over the whole human race. This allegorically contained the descent of the Logos, which, however, was not an allegory at all, but the bodily descent. Nothing could be more misleading" and so on.

Now that we know what the inner spiritual content was that was handed down to people and was incorporated into people in the initiation process, we see it permeated by a philosophy, with the Philonic philosophy, and then again as a creed, as an external view of life with the therapists and Essenes. In these strange soul-seekers and God-seekers we find on the one hand the preparation and on the other the philosophical deepening by Philo. So, having seen where what we have seen in Jesus of Nazareth comes from, it is up to us to see how Jesus of Nazareth, this personality we are dealing with, takes up his mission himself, how Jesus of Nazareth fits into this whole thing.

Based on the various studies I have made of the Church Fathers, the Gnostics and so on, I have come to the conclusion that it is quite impossible to get away with the view of current theology. [Bunsen] wrote about the Gospel of John. The confession of this scholar corresponds pretty much to the theosophical one, but must be modified somewhat, as it follows here.

The Gospel of John is either a communication from eyewitnesses or a revelation. Those who stand on the standpoint of exoteric Christianity, which is the standpoint of the sensory perceptibility of the personality of Jesus, must base themselves on this sensory appearance. But if one stands on the positive Christian standpoint, then one must have the view [Bunsen's] about the Gospel of John, which concludes something like this: If the Gospel of John is a myth, then there is no historical Christ, and without this the whole of Christianity is a delusion, the worship of God is a hoax, the Reformation a crime.—You see, this scholar cannot get over two things: either the Gospel of John is valid for us, or it is not. If it is regarded as something that was devised afterwards or something similar, then the basic idea, the basic essence of Christianity cannot be upheld.

We have to think of the Gospel of John in relation to the others. From the relationship of John's Gospel to the other Gospels we will get an idea of how this personality [of the evangelist] has positioned himself in relation to the foundation of Christianity. We all know that in the Gospel of John a passage is quoted from which it emerges that the one from whom the messages of the Gospel originate is to be regarded as an eyewitness, as one who was present at the events and knows how to write about them, how to describe them, as one who was chosen to grasp the Master's teachings most deeply.

Note the final passage: "But what is this?"—"If I will that he remain until I come."—"This disciple will not die." The one of whom it is said, "I will that he abide till I come", is the disciple who testifies of these things. He has written this and we know that this "testimony is true." [May] we find the opportunity, through mystical-theosophical immersion, to [understand] the words of this final passage of John's Gospel in such a way that they show themselves to us in the right light.

We must realize that the first three Gospels, when we go through them, show us a very different view of Christianity than the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John shows us a much more spiritualized view of Christianity. One cannot but come to the conclusion that the Gospels emerged from two spiritual currents. Firstly, from what they heard from the Master himself, whom we are dealing with here; and secondly, from what they associated with it. From sentence to sentence, from verse to verse, we can distinguish between the true, deeper teachings, spiritual Christianity, and what has been linked to it. The three authors of the synoptic gospels relate what they heard from the Master and what they took over from the old views, from Judaism. They lived in traditional Judaism and have drawn many ideas from it. Some of these ideas are confirmed to them. But in their blood lives the idea of the Messiah, through whom the Jewish people were to regain their power and glory. They have thrown these two things together, and we must definitely keep these two things or currents apart. This work will also show us which passages of the first three Gospels do not have corresponding passages in the Gospel of John.

First and foremost, we must mention the one important fact that we have no passages in the Gospel of John for various passages in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. In chapter 24, verses 32-33 of the Gospel of Matthew it says:

"Learn a parable from the fig tree. When its branch now becomes lush and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see all these things, know that the kingdom of God is near."

These words, which are found in the Synoptics, have no corresponding passage in the Gospel of John. The parable of the fig tree symbolizes the decline of Judaism and the rise of the new teaching. This passage could easily be taken to mean that a world order, as it lives in the exoteric teaching, would be replaced by a new purely earthly world order. As I said, I believe that individual passages of this kind can be understood in this or that way, more or less deeply. [However, we may well assume that the "Master" of Nazareth is concealed in these words, if they are understood in the right way.] Let us take another passage, Matthew chapter 16, verse 28:

"Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

This passage is found in all three synoptics, but not in John. These words shed a deeply meaningful light on the relationship of John's gospel to the others. John is referred to [by the disciples] as the one—[not] by Jesus himself—who does not die. "This disciple does not die." But Jesus does not say, "He does not die," but rather, "I want him to remain until I come." John was Jesus' favorite. He was seen as the one who would not die before the Messiah came. So when John wrote the Gospel, he refuted the external fact—not outwardly—but John did not die before he saw the kingdom of God coming. So what was previously said in the earlier gospels, for example in Luke, was actually fulfilled in John:

"The children of the world are free and will be free. But those who are resurrected will neither be free nor let themselves be free. They are like angels and children of God." [Luke 20:34-36]

There is again no place in John for this. John is therefore described as the one who experiences the resurrection, in which there will no longer be talk of people with earthly bodies, but of people who will be like angels.

[The end of John's gospel was written after John had written his gospel]. And it all sounds like a jubilant song throughout the gospel. John does not need to report on these prophecies, he had a much more significant event to report on. He had experienced the hour that is said to come like a thief in the night, which only the Father—according to Jesus' own words—knows about.

John did not have to tell of a prophecy, but of an experience. Therefore, he only had to describe a fact. He only had to say: What Jesus predicted has been fulfilled in me; I have experienced the new kingdom and the spiritual resurrection. He could therefore say that the kingdom had really come. Therefore, the relationship of the Gospel of John to the three earlier ones is that of the spiritual view as opposed to the view of the three synoptics, which is saturated with Jewish elements.

When the times are fulfilled, he can say:

"Verily I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it is alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates it will keep it until eternal life." [John 12:24-25]

John had recognized this. He had recognized the word of the Master: "The kingdom will come, and I have nothing to proclaim to you but what must be fulfilled in you. He who believes in me does not believe in me, says the Master. He has true faith who does not believe in me, but in the one who sent me.—It can only be born in each one of you, prompted and inspired by me. "And he who sees me sees the one who sent me."—[The Father] has built into me what I am to say and do.

"Truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and he will do even greater ones, because I am going to the Father." [John 14:12]

It is clear that the Master who spoke this did not teach: I am one with the Father.—Rather, he taught: I am sent by the Father to teach you the path that can lead you to infinity, to teach you to do works that lead to infinity.—It would make no sense at all to say that he is able to take away sin from the other, whom he himself says will do greater works than I.

We stand before a great awakener who has shown the disciples the path. So we see in the Master an initiator who led his disciples along a certain path, and we see how everyone wanted his Master's words to be understood. They should continue to have an effect like powers behind which there is a deeper meaning. Then the higher powers will arise in human souls. Some will experience the kingdom of God, especially the favorite disciple John. And when he had experienced it, he let out a shout of joy that he had recognized the truth. That's when he wrote his gospel. He had understood what it meant to follow Christ. He had understood what it meant to really be a Christian. He had understood that you can only get on the path that Christ has laid out if you celebrate the resurrection in your spirit.

"He who loves his life will lose it, but he who hates it will not lose it." [John 12:25]

Jakob Böhme says:]

"He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies."

[Goethe says]:

"And as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a gloomy guest on the dark earth."

This is the relationship between the Gospel of John and the three synoptic gospels. John understood how to grasp the word not exoterically, but esoterically as a story of consciousness.

We also understand how John set out his esoteric view right at the beginning of this Gospel, as if to show that his teaching can only be interpreted in an esoteric way. It speaks of the building of the temple in three days. Jesus speaks of the temple of his body. [When John has Jesus speak of the temple, he has him speak of the relationship between the divine and the worldly.] He has him speak of a parable, of something that symbolically expresses that the divine power descended to the material in order to then find its way back to the divinity. John wants everything he says to be understood esoterically.

We will see what it means why John is called the true eyewitness who has to confirm what he has seen as a witness.

The existence of Christianity depends on the Gospel of John. Christianity had to admit that it was a mere spiritual conception when the predictions were not fulfilled. This explanation can be found among the shallow enlighteners. With John we will still see the kingdom of God come, or so they thought. But even with John, we would not have experienced it, and so we would inevitably have arrived at a spiritual view. What was meant was the esoteric view of Christianity. The kingdom of God will come unexpectedly. Watch and pray so that you do not miss out when the kingdom of God comes. When he tells us about experiencing the coming of the kingdom, we have to admit that John understood what the Master was saying. He knew that it was something spiritual that the Master was telling him and not an exoteric view of Judaism.

Now I would like to lay another foundation that will lead us to the deeper, the more spiritual side of Christianity. I would like to point out facts that are basically simple but are usually ignored. We have seen that at the time when Christianity was spreading, there were the Therapeutae in northern Egypt and the Essenes in Palestine, and we have come to know the teachings and also the way of life of the Essenes. The Essenes undoubtedly exerted a profound influence on the teachings of early Christianity with all their views. And if we go through the gospels that have been handed down to us as synoptic gospels, if we hold them up to ourselves, then you will see that in the individual synoptic gospels we are definitely dealing with teachings that have their origins in the Essene sect.

One example of this is the tenth chapter of Matthew:

"But go and preach, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. You have received it freely, give it freely. You shall not have gold or silver or brass in your belts. Nor shall you have a bag to carry away, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor a stick. For a laborer is worthy of his food." [Mt 10:7-10]

These words become particularly interesting when we combine them with a passage from the Jewish historian Josephus, where the way of life of the Essenes within their community formation is described as follows. "They do not have one city. In fact, everyone lives in many cities. The house of every friar is open to them as their own. So they go to live with people they have never met before, as if they had known them for a long time. They do not change clothes or shoes, they do not buy and sell among themselves. Each gives and takes what he has and needs."

If we compare this passage with this and further compare it with the passage in Luke, ninth chapter:

"And he called the twelve together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases, and sent them forth to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick. Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money. Nor shall any man have two coats, shoes or a staff. For a laborer is worthy of his food." [Luke 9:1-5]

We see that the way of life Josephus describes to us is the one that Jesus recommends the disciples to adopt. At the same time, we know that among Jews such a way of life cannot originate from Judaism. This is therefore a reproduction of Essene teachings. He speaks to them as one of the Essene community who was striving to spread Essene life among his disciples.

But there are many other things we can compare. There is one fact that we also know about the Essenes. They did not take part in the Jewish sacrificial service. They did send sacrificial animals to the temple to pay tribute to the political power, but they themselves did not go to the Jewish temple. They did not participate in the Jewish religion insofar as it was represented by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They themselves had stone halls in which their teachers taught the doctrines, but there too we find the teachings that we find in the Gospel of John. There we hear talk of the temple and know that this refers to the body of man. And then again the sense of togetherness, the community feeling of the Essenes. The Essenes considered it idolatry to have a temple other than this one.

We could take a whole series of passages from the Essaean teachings. The Essenes had an aversion to the sacrifices of the Jews because they saw the body of man and mankind as the temple of God. We encounter this in the Gospel of John. We can also find in the Pauline letters that Essene influences were at work and that the body should be understood as the temple of God.

We also find strange allusions in various writers of the first century, which we can hardly explain, which are taken for granted and for which the first Christian writers no longer have any real feeling because they no longer know their origin. We are told that Christians do not turn their faces to the Temple of Jerusalem at morning prayer, as the Jews do, but to the rising of the sun. The Christian church writers take it for granted that Christians turn their faces to the east. The Essenes did not sacrifice to Judaism. They did not turn their faces towards the temple in Jerusalem, but towards the east. From here to Jakob Böhme's book "The Dawn", to "Faust", where he admires the dawn, all these ideas lead back to the old Essene idea of turning the face to the east in prayer.

Another thing. In Clement of Alexandria we find an omission about the clothing of the first Christians. We hear that the colorfulness of clothing corrupts people, promotes opulence, because it stimulates the lust of the eyes. But those who are pure are permitted to wear white, uncolored clothing. This passage regarding the wearing of white garments can also be traced back to the customs of the Essenes among the first Christians.

Then baptism with water and the Lord's Supper are also descendants of genuine Essene customs. The Essenes baptized with water; they knew no other sacrifice than the communal meal. In the sacrifice that Jesus instituted, we see nothing other than the Essene meal that we see the Essenes celebrating every Sabbath.

Then there is the idea of the holiness of the oil, which led to a sacrament and the anointing with oil. It corresponds entirely to the view of the Essenes. They believe that anointing with oil is a mystical act that gives mystical power to the person to whom it is given. The peculiar shyness towards oil in our time can definitely be traced back to an Essene view and can only be understood from this perspective.

And now, in order to bring this consideration of the relation of Essaeanism to Christianity at least to a certain conclusion, and thereby to have gained a basis for the consideration of the Master himself, I would like to point out-what might at first appear to be an allusion-namely, some ancient communications which we find in writers of the first Christian centuries.

In particular, I would like to point to a passage in Eusebius, to an old tradition from the brother of Jesus, James. We have not received these messages directly, but in a roundabout way. We are told that he led a special kind of lifestyle. This is then described to us in more detail. It is none other than exactly the way of life that Philo describes to us of the Essenes. He lived like them. We can only understand this whole narrative if we assume that such a way of life was a matter of course for the Essenes. We see Jesus himself speaking to his disciples as if he wanted to give them instructions like those given everywhere in the Essaean community. John the Baptist baptized in the spirit of the Essaean community. The first Christian teachings and views were like those of the Essenes.

Furthermore, we find a clear awareness of personalities who exerted a deeper influence on the first Christianity. In Epiphanius we find a new passage that seems more significant to me than many others. We read there: In the beginning all Christians were called "Nazirites, but for a short time they had the name [Judeans] before the term "Christians" came into use at Antioch.—So here we have a hint, which we will explore further, of how there was an awareness there that the Christians, or Christians as they were called, were nothing other than a continuation of the Essenes. We are therefore dealing with the first times of our era and with the view that in Palestine the Essene influence within Judaism grew and grew and developed into a new religious current. We have the awareness that the Essenes were the first Christians and then the later ones took the name Christians.

Now there is a testimony [on which everyone can form their own opinion], but which should not [go completely unnoticed]. It is clear that there were Essenes. That cannot be denied. It is also clear that they had a great influence on Christianity. We hear about Pharisees and Sadducees in the New Testament. The entire New Testament contains not a word about the Essenes. The writers of the first centuries, even Philo, contain nothing about the Christians. We have nothing, we read nothing there about a Christianity and in the first writings of Christianity nothing about the Essenes. That is an important fact. This fact cannot be explained other than by the simple fact that the first to write in the spirit of Christianity were aware that they were only speaking of others, not of themselves. This explains why the first Christians did not use the name of the Essenes and Philo did not use the name "Christians". They spoke of others, but not of themselves.

If we live in any time and hear that something is said about this or that person, we must think to ourselves that he has told us this, but he will not speak of himself in such detail. We will become convinced that he is not talking about himself, but that he is this third party. So we can conclude that at that time there was an awareness that Essenism and Christianity were one and the same. And this will open up the source of Christianity for us next time.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

Before I move on to my next topic, I would like to take up a few remarks that have been made with regard to the recent lecture and the whole approach in general. I would like to take up two facts of recent spiritual development and show what our task here actually is. I would like to show, if this task is grasped, how from the deepest grasp of the mystical and theosophical content of the most diverse - I am not just saying religious systems, but - world teachings, how from this content emerges the actual consciousness that man has to form in the course of his life. I would therefore like to refer to two events in the lives of important people from the last period of the development of spiritual life who, at a certain moment in their lives, recognized that there is a higher, an upward ascent, that knowledge is not something that can be presented to us once and for all in a certain form, but that it is nothing other than the treading of a path that opens up the perspective towards the eternal.

It must have been a great moment when the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte expressed his consciousness in Jena with strong power and deeply penetrating words at the moment when what is called the actual spiritual layer of consciousness was revealed. This is not understood by the historians of philosophy.

I would like to quote here the words he spoke to his disciples at that time: "That which is called death cannot abort my work; for my work is to be completed, and it cannot be completed in any time, therefore no time is appointed for my existence - and I am eternal. By taking on this great task, I have usurped eternity. I lift my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging torrent of water and to the striving clouds swimming in a sea of fire, and say: "I am eternal, and I defy your power! All of you come down upon me; and you earth and you sky, mingle in the wild tumult! And all of you elements - froth and rage and in the wild battle, crush the last speck of sunlight from the body that I call mine! My will alone with its firm plan shall hover boldly and coldly above the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more permanent than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it."

This is one fact that expresses the effect that is exerted on a person who is imbued with the conviction that he has entered infinity with knowledge, a fact that expresses the influence this has on the personality.

The other refers to Goethe, who came to the same inner effect in a different way, who also realized in a flash that in the phenomena of the world we have a book from which the divine can be read. When he stood before the works of art in Italy, he wrote the following words to his friends: "I have a suspicion that they have proceeded according to the very laws that nature follows and that I am on the trail of. But there is something else that I do not know how to express." "These high works of art, like the highest works of nature, were created by people according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses, there is necessity, there is God." Goethe became aware of God in Italy in 1787, when he stood before the works of art into which the mysteries of ancient secrets had been revealed.

He also realized that only those who have good will and faith can see the divine. He can only recognize it. For the person who has faith, the moment occurs in his life when the field of our life is illuminated in a flash and he enters the path of the eternal. This assurance, which flows from such facts, must guide us if we want to penetrate into what the religions of all times, but also what the other teachings have contributed at a more or less elementary level and what we must know if we truly want to penetrate into the mystical content and reality of Christianity. If we want to penetrate, we must not take anything away from Christianity.

It is not my job to teach religion, nor is it my job to teach theology. My task is only to expose mystical-theosophical teachings. I could not do that if I were not imbued with it - just as it was with Goethe, where he says that only now do I realize the divine in these works of art, only now do I understand the ancient mysteries - if I were not so convinced that in a certain moment something lights up that makes it possible to recognize the eternal, the divine, then I could not speak in this way.

I started from Johann Gottlieb Fichte's awareness of the eternal in an individual human soul, and I can show you the deeper reason in Christianity in no other way than to trace this awareness in a very old time, in the time of the ancient Egyptian religious teachings, and then to show you how these teachings of the ancient Egyptians shine forth in the teachings of the Essaeans, in order to prove that at the moment when the God-Man appeared to men, there could indeed only be men in such a brotherhood who were sufficiently prepared to understand what was about to take place.

John the Baptist, who probably belonged to the Essaean League, was prepared. This can be seen from the words of his sermon: "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Prepare the way for the Lord and make his paths straight. - He answers the question: "Are you Christ? I am not Christ. It is he who is coming after me, who was before me, whom I am not worthy to untie his sandals. There is one coming after me who is stronger than I am.

If these words are to point to what appears in Christianity, then we must first get to know the preconditions that were able to open John's eyes. It is not a matter of following the events of history, but of recognizing the divine ideals.

In religious development, death and resurrection confront us first in the Pauline teachings, and they confront us before we get to know the other content of the teachings historically. We can only understand them if we go back to the teachings that were present in the Egyptian priesthood for thousands of years, to those teachings which in Egyptian mystery life also represent nothing other than the overcoming of life through death, that is, in other words, the possibility of understanding death and life as the greatest symbols of becoming, as those symbols that show precisely the deepest existence, the deepest being in the development of the world.

Through the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we also have the opportunity today to penetrate the teachings of the Egyptian mysteries. We know what ideas the Egyptian priests had about the transition from life to death. But we also know that the Egyptian priests tried to arrange the whole human life of those who wanted to enter the path of knowledge in such a way that such a person embarking on the path of knowledge was prepared for those stages of development which the Egyptian Mystery Teacher demonstrates when the disciple passes through the gate of death. The tests that were required are described to us in ancient documents.

I have come to realize from the study of the Egyptian teachings, as far as they can be traced according to our Western knowledge, that we are dealing with an expression for the deepest secrets of human life, for the same secrets that the Greek Mystery Teachings also had. Indeed, it has become clear to me that they are based on practical mystery exercises, which were also practiced in the Egyptian priestly schools.

What is meant by these tests will become clear to us from individual passages that I would like to read to you. It will show you what kind of confession those people had to make, according to the Egyptian priests, in order to enter the higher worlds, in order to climb the higher levels of existence. We will see what preconditions he must have fulfilled.

But intimately linked to all these Egyptian teachings is an idea of the Egyptian priestly view that man himself comes to where he can then be addressed by the gods with the name of the god who is closest to the god Ra. Man is addressed with the name Osiris. Becoming Osiris is what we are told in ancient Egypt. After man has gone through the trials, after he has practically entered the path and ascended, he becomes similar to the god whom the Egyptians regard as the mediator between the highest god, between Ra himself, the expression of the infinite spirit, and the material, the earthly, the human.

Osiris, the son of the supreme god, had to perish according to Egyptian legend. His body had to perish. The pieces are buried here and there, and he sits at the right hand of God. Man is called to undergo the development that makes him Osiris. At the entrance through the gate of death he has to make the confession that enables him to continue along the path that leads him to Osiris.

I would now like to share a few passages from this confession with you. You will see to what great, powerful views these thousand and thousand-year-old mystery teachings lead. [The person to be initiated] calls upon God in order to receive a share in the higher life. There will be words that would go too far to explain. It only depends on the spirit: "Hail to thee, Harmachis Khepra, who gives himself form! Radiant is your rising on the horizon, illuminating the twofold earth with your rays. All the gods are in joy when they see you, king of heaven, with the serpent on your head, the crown of the south and the crown of the north on your forehead, and they sit down opposite you and work at the front of the barque to destroy all your enemies for you."] The barque is the chariot of the sun god. ["The inhabitants of Tiau go to meet your majesty to see this radiant sign. I come to you, I dwell with you, to see your disk every day. May I not be imprisoned, may I not be cast out. May my limbs be renewed"] and so on. ["Great Light, emerged from the Nun! You sustain the existence of mankind through the stream that emanates from you."] - We will also encounter this current in Christian mysticism. - ["Protect Osiris N. in the divine underworld."] Then the name of the person concerned was mentioned. - ["Let him enter the Amenti, let him conquer evil; stand behind him as patron against his sins; place him among the blessed and the exalted."].

[The title of the important 125th chapter is:] "Chapter, to enter the hall of twofold righteousness and to separate man from his sins, that he may behold the face of the gods". The dead man is then immediately introduced in speech: "Blessed be the God, the Lord of twofold justice! I have come to you, my Lord; I have been brought to the sight of your glory. I know thee, I know the names of the forty-two gods who are with thee in the hall of twofold righteousness, who live in the vigilance of sinners and drink of their blood on this day of the weighing of conduct before the "Good Being" (Osiris). Patron of the beloved twins, his eyeballs, Lord of the twofold justice is your name. Shield me! I come to you, and I bring you justice; I keep away unfairness."

Now he is tested to see whether he really knows the names of the 42 gods. After he has undergone purification, he must describe how he came to know the gods.

Now I will show you how he thanks the gods after they have recognized him as worthy. Invisible powers confront him and put his knowledge to the test before he can enter the bosom of Osiris. He has acquired his mystical knowledge through contemplation under the fig tree. "What did you see?" - On entering, he has to say the names to the beings at the gate: "[Arm of Shu, ready for the umbrella of Osiris], "Children of the serpent is [your name]."

[If the deceased has passed the test, then Thoth speaks: "Step forward, you have passed the test. Brod is for you in the Uzat Eye. Osiris N truly lives forever."]

[Gap in transcript] These are prayers as they were tied to this turning point of man and which were imposed on the one who wanted to go the way. He also had to go through the ceremonies of initiation, and prepare himself through his life to understand the true life essence of these teachings.

After I have shown you the ideas that have prevailed in Egypt for thousands of years, after I have shown you that death and life are only two expressions for one and the same thing, after I have shown you that the god Osiris represents nothing other than the goal that man himself has to strive for, after I have shown you that everyone is called to become an Osiris, and everyone is to be brought onto the path of Osiris, I want to jump off to an idea that is formed in the distant Orient, which will show an inner relationship that will present itself as a kind of continuation, as something that leads this down to the earth itself.

In the Egyptian mystery teachings we find within them the conviction that the one who has actually become similar to Osiris, who has passed the test, has the ability to appear as a god himself on earth, and that he has the ability to appear on earth in such a way that when he takes on human form, he is recognized by the secret knowers as a deity in disguise.

Let us skip back in time and think of that great judgment of the dead that was held between Osiris and Ra, let us visualize it and imagine that within this judgment of the dead it was discussed whether a god should not be sent down to bring people a new teaching, a new view, new concepts, new ideas, whether the means should not be resorted to of sending down a god Osiris and letting him become human.

We encounter such an idea in Indian teachings, which first appeared around the sixth century before our era. It is thus discussed in the bosom of the gods whether an enlightened one, an exalted divine being himself, should not descend among men and be born among them. If we are to express this in the words of the Egyptian sages, then we must say that an Osiris should descend and take on human form, a savior, in other words, or as the wisdom teachings of the Indians say, a true physician, one who is truly experienced in medicine, should descend among men and it should be proclaimed that an enlightened one should be born to a queen, Maja by name. This king shall be named Bhagavad>, the glorious one. He will later be recognized as the Savior, the Buddha. It is said that he will be born in the form of a white elephant. According to the ancient wisdom teachings, this is the form in which God can embody himself. He will be a high-minded king, a king of kings. He will leave the region of light to enter this world out of love for all. He will be honored as king of the three worlds.

This prophecy was to be fulfilled for Gautama of the Siddhartha lineage. Brahma himself gave a drop of dew to the divine entering the earthly realm. Kings and priests appear with gifts before the child. Heavenly hosts appear and declare: "The world is at ease, happiness is established in the universe, a master of wisdom is born." - This is what the Indian tale tells us happened when Buddha was born.

And from another side it was said: This child will become Buddha. He is depicted in the temple at the age of twelve. Here the child smiles and remembers his divinity. It is said of him that a king has been born whose kingdom is not of this world. The twelve-year-old Buddha has gone missing. He is found by his relatives in the forest, where he sits among the singers of ancient times, transported to heavenly regions, and as he interprets the ancient holy books to these old sages, they marvel at his wisdom. The awareness of his calling awakens in him.

I read this passage from the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, verse 40, and others for the reason that you will see for yourself as you follow these verses. "But the child grew and became strong in spirit, full of wisdom; and the grace of God was with him. And his parents went to Jerusalem every year for the Easter feast. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. And when the days were fulfilled and they returned home, the child Jesus remained in Jerusalem, and his parents did not know it. But they thought that he was among his companions, so they traveled a day's journey, looking for him among friends and acquaintances. And when they did not find him, they went again to Jerusalem to look for him. And it came to pass, after three days, that they found him sitting in the temple in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and questioning them; and all who listened to him were astonished at his understanding and his answers."

The twenty-nine-year-old Buddha is prompted by the sight of human misery, by the sight of suffering and illness, by the sight of evil on earth, to leave his wife and child to see in solitude what path he must walk; and we hear that on his way through solitude he recruits disciples from among those who have already chosen solitude, and that he then speaks a number of beatitudes. We hear from the mouth of the thirty-year-old Buddha: Blessed are the lonely. Blessed are those who are free from all lust. Blessed are those who rise above the thoughts of their own ego. Truly, this is supreme bliss.

Blessed is the mother, blessed is the father, blessed is the wife, cries the crowd in the street. But he says: Blessed are only those who are in nirvana. On the other hand, the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, verses 25 to 28: "And when they come in, they dwell there, and afterward it is worse with that man than before. And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the people lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the body that bare thee, and the breasts which thou hast sucked. But he said, "Yes, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it."

We hear from Buddha that he has recruited five disciples. Bathing by the river, he is celebrated by the sons of the gods. He goes under the fig tree. Here he is then [granted] enlightenment, the mystical knowledge that is attained through contemplation.

John 1:45-48: "Philip finds Nathanael and says to him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth. And Nathanael said to him, "What good can come from Nazareth? Philip said to him, 'Come and see. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and said to him, "Behold, a true Israelite, in whom is no guile. Nathanael says to him, 'How do you know me? ' Jesus answered and said to him, 'Before Philip called you, while you were under the fig tree, I saw you.

The tempter "Mara" approaches Buddha and invites him to worship him by promising him a kingdom. - I do not desire a worldly kingdom, Buddha replies. Mara's daughter appears. Buddha approaches her with the holy books of the Indians. When Mara saw that Buddha confronted him with divine wisdom, he said: My wisdom is gone.

Mark 1:12-14: "And immediately the spirit drove him into the desert. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan and being with the beasts, and the angels ministered to him. And after John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God."

Now he recruits disciples. Two brothers are his first disciples, one of whom is one of the most important. - Let us compare John 1, verses 45 to 48 - Five more disciples are now to be found on his teaching tours. - In the first Buddha biography we hear of twelve disciples and his favorite disciple Ananda.

We also hear from the Buddha biography that the Buddha used parables to make the talks understandable, that he expressed all his teachings in such parable speeches. [...] The rain pours down on the righteous and the unrighteous. The Brahmin who does not have enlightenment is like a blind man. He can only be a teacher for the blind.

This includes the words of Matthew 15:12-14: "Then his disciples came to him and said: Knowest thou also that the Pharisees were offended when they heard the word? But he answered and said, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them go. They are blind leaders of the blind. But if one blind man leads another, they will both fall into the pit."

[Stenographer's note:] A few more Buddha words.

The Buddha's favorite disciple did not want to let a despised girl approach him when she wanted to approach the Buddha. So he replied in the presence of his favorite disciple: "I am not asking about your caste, not about your family, my sister."

Compare this with the passage in John 4:1-7: "Now when the Lord knew that Jesus had come before the Pharisees, making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples did), he left the land of Judea and went back to Galilee. But he had to travel through Samaria. There he came to a town of Samaria called Shechar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. So Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down at the well; and it was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

Far from there, Buddha sends out his disciples with words that come to us like a kind of Pentecostal sermon within the Buddhist teachings. Buddha himself speaks to his disciples: Each shepherd should speak in his own language. Do not deliver the teaching to scorners and mockers and not to those who are intoxicated with desire.

And Matthew 7, verse 6: "Do not give the sanctuary to the dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and tear you apart."

Now [Buddha] says in one of his last teachings that he will be with his disciples as long as they spread his teaching. He will be invisibly present to them. The corresponding passages are in Matthew and John.

He prophesies that one will come after him in heavenly glory. And the evil one and his kingdom will then be completely overcome.

We hear that they were united after the Buddha had returned to the divine, after he himself had seen his death approaching and had withdrawn into solitude.

From his wisdom his body became a shining body.

At his death a meteor fell, the earth was on fire, a thunder shook the world. He had descended to hell to comfort those in it. This is a kind of continuation of what the ancient Egyptians have in their passage from life to death.

I had to preface all of this before I can continue. I can't even quite make it clear why I had to make it all clear because the time is already too advanced. I had to show what context was present in the wisdom teachings and religious ideas centuries before our era. I had to show what was positive in them. This way of looking at things will lead us to truly understand what happened at the turn of our era.

[Answer to question:]

[The book "Buddha and Christ"] by Rudolf Seydel is very good, but historical. It brings together essential moments, but doesn't know what to do with them. - There is also a very good book by [Oldenberg].

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

Hardly anything can make such a sublime impression as the Egyptians' idea of eternity, that man can enter the path of eternity. And on the other hand, there will hardly be a correspondence of two personalities of spiritual life in all details such as we could trace between Buddha on the one hand and the personality of Christ on the other.

However, anyone who wanted to go even further back into the old ideas of Indian religion would find that the Buddha as a personality, as he appears to us and as it is also according to the ideas of Indian religion, is only the last Buddha [of many]. It is therefore more a repetition than a first appearance of a [personality of such a nature]. Christians have lost this idea because they only know the one. We cannot follow the various Buddha figures in the life of the Indian religion.

We can only gain an insight into the origin of the Christian world once we have become aware of the origin of the Judeo-Christian idea, insofar as this is possible with an [esoteric] mystical deepening. In particular, we will become aware of how this idea of Christ living in the Egyptian religion was transformed into a historical event.

The Egyptian idea of Christ confronts us in the form that everyone who was found suitable by the Egyptian priesthood and whose talent could awaken the ability to undertake the ascent was subjected to the process of initiation by the Egyptian priests, the deeply initiated.

What does this process of initiation mean? One must first be clear what the whole basic idea of initiation is. According to the views of the Egyptian priesthood, it was intended to introduce people to the deepest secrets of existence, to the primal mysteries of the world. It is therefore the introduction of those who were admitted to initiation into that which was carefully kept hidden from the great multitude by the Egyptian priests and which was only communicated to those who wanted to make progress. Those who wanted to rise to the highest truths that could be conveyed in the Egyptian priestly schools and cults, to descend to the depths of the mysteries of the world, could only do so in a precisely prescribed way, because it was believed that only those who had gone through the entire sequence of stages could have the inner life to have certain views alive within them.

In abstract terms, this is the basic idea that leads to Egyptian initiation. It was believed that the person concerned should not only receive spiritual teachings, not only spiritual shells, for the reception of which it was sufficient if he could think logically, no, it was believed that the whole physical should also be transformed in such a way that his whole sensual perception served the spirit to a much higher degree than was the case with another.

The spiritual process that took place when the disciple was to be introduced to the Mysteries was often reminiscent of the Eleusinian drama of the Greeks and the ancient Osiris drama. The whole myth of Osiris and Isis, in which the ancient priests brought true - I do not say mere fantasy, but - imagination, insight into the deepest mysteries of the world, was to carry out practically what was to lead into this wisdom.

The cosmological, physiological and astronomical were not considered sufficient. It was believed that the whole body of man had to be transformed, that man had to be given a completely different view. They did not believe that man was born with fully developed abilities, as Western science believed. It was believed that man, as he had developed step by step up to now, had to be developed further so that life was not lost. It is therefore a matter of transforming body and mind in such a way that man can not only understand the highest knowledge logically and abstractly, but that he can also experience the deepest [life] of the world.

The priest depicted the entire development of the world in three symbols. First in the symbol of the pyramid. It has four sides. These correspond to the four elements: Earth, fire, water, air. At the top, these sides converge into a point. Each side is therefore represented by a triangle, in which the priest saw the three worlds represented externally.

In the pyramid he saw the physical nature, the primordial elements [and their] composition. In the sphinx, where animal and human are connected, he saw the symbol of the incarnation. The fact that an organic development from animal to human has taken place is again a theosophical view today.

Finally in the phoenix bird, which consumes itself in fire and then rises again from the ashes. It is the symbol of the soul. It is composed of the [mythical] primordial spirit, the [materialistic] skeleton of the world, the purely natural existence of the intermediate stages and the human soul, which is supposed to redeem the spirit from nature. The development presents itself in three stages: in the original spirit, the human soul and then in nature.

The individual human being is now included, integrated into this whole chain of development, and he should not only use his life, as the Egyptian priests were clear, to recognize the world, but to bring it a step forward. For they believed that if man is aware of his immense responsibility, he must not merely accept life, but that he must use it to do divine deeds when he works, to carry on the deeds of the gods.

With him who was at a sufficiently high level, who was as far as I have just indicated, the initiation was made. This initiation means nothing other than a repetition of the old myth of Isis and Osiris. We know that Osiris is one of the oldest gods of heaven and earth. Together with Isis, he rules heaven and earth. "Osiris can also incarnate in human form, so that they once lived as real people. They are said to have ruled our earth before the Hyksos invaded. They are therefore identical to the incarnated deities. Later, however, they all withdrew into service. That which was once worldly withdrew and was worshipped in service.

Osiris is murdered by his brother Seth-Typhon, who is the god of the abyss and fire. The god Seth-Typhon was tricked into murdering Osiris [in a coffin]. He was then dismembered and thrown out into the world.

When Isis realized this, she equipped a ship and gathered the pieces back together. Where she found a piece, she placed a church on it where it could be worshipped. Then she also found the heart again and was able to revive it through her love. It is just like in the Greek legend of Dionysus, where the heart also continued its development. Once again the god Osiris is resurrected through her love, once again [Isis] sees his head, once again a ray of light shines.

Through the ray of light, of love, she gives birth to her son Horus, who is thus in a sense a virgin-born son. He [replaces] his father. Isis and Horus continue to reign. Isis can even celebrate [the resurrection of Osiris] in a new body. Something takes place over his coffin that has been performed again and again as a kind of divine service. Thus, we are told, while their son Horus rules the people on earth, although he, according to the stay, completes his orbit on earth, also sits, as it were, at the right hand of the father.

I mean that the god Horus appears to us as the one who spiritually permeates the whole world and, according to the Egyptian priests, constitutes the soul of the world. This is a view that not only lived as a myth, but was actually dramatically presented in a tremendously grand and solemn manner to those who were to be accepted into the Egyptian priesthood. Once the imagination had been trained in a figurative way and the human spirit had assumed the form in which the god Osiris could fully live out, fully merge in the dust of the world and rise and be born on the other side, once the disciple had settled into these ideas, only then could he be led beyond the myth, then he was shown what is contained in the myth, then he was told that it is nothing other than the Logos himself, who has poured himself out into the infinite sea of worlds.

As a sign that the spirit had been poured into the infinite world sea - matter was imagined as a lake - the ceremonies were performed in places where there was a lake that represented the world sea in which the world spirit had become matter.

Horus was to be nothing other than the divine-human soul, which was poured into matter and was to bring matter back to its original existence. This cosmological truth, which relates to the individual human being, was handed down to the disciple. If he has not merely absorbed it in an abstract way, but if he has really lived into it, then he was considered worthy, since he does not merely grasp the external intellectual matter, but comprehends the great holiness of cosmology as something sublime, through which he himself believed to have become better.

Once the disciple had reached this stage, only then were the real processes undertaken with him, only then was he to experience that as a human being he is not only called to recognize, to be introduced into knowledge, but that this knowledge has to gain life.

This is expressed in a profound symbol in the Osiris myth and especially in the cult. Isis and Horus were depicted as people lying on the ground with their hands outstretched sideways. Below them they placed the cross [...]. This was the symbol for the resurrection of that which had fallen to the dust. In the cross we have the same idea as we have in Platonic philosophy, in which God, the All-Spirit, is crucified. Here it becomes a symbol and at the same time the awakener. Passing through the cross, at the coffin of Osiris, he will rise again and then be ruler anew.

This process took place for centuries in the Egyptian 'temples. The young priest was actually introduced to a new world. Mere recognition would be something egotistical. But the moment man realizes that he is only advancing a little in his development, he comes to the insight that he has made a living contribution to bringing the deity back from its envelope into its original form.

Once he had arrived here, the priest was to be shown that he must not only recognize, but that he must penetrate matter itself, that he must divinize matter, that he must not merely keep the spirit to himself, but that he must proceed from and spend the spirit for the salvation of matter.

This is one of the most important acts that should be indelibly inscribed in a soul seeking initiation. Only when this act had been completed, only when the human being had understood in a physical-spiritual way that he had to represent a symbol that had to represent eternity, the content of eternity according to Egyptian representation, only when the disciple had understood that he had nothing else to represent here as a human being in this life than a symbol of these eternal world processes, then he was able and worthy to embark on the path, which was the path of Egyptian initiation.

This process actually consisted of man allowing the process of re-awakening to take place in the physical world. This is the point to which the Egyptian priests progressed, and this is also what made the deepest impression on their disciples. They put the disciple into a three-day sleep. They completely freed the organism. The spirit should live for itself [during this time] and then take possession of its body anew. And then, when it took possession of the body again, it had the body in a new, spiritualized way. For this reason, those seeking initiation were asked to lie down on a wooden cross or simply to lie on the ground and spread out their arms. He was left in this position for three days. The fact that he regarded himself as a living symbol of resurrection was symbolized by the fact that he was carried towards the rising morning sun. The rising morning sun awakened the one who had been dead for three days to a new existence.

Now we must believe the reports we have, for what I am about to say cannot be proved experimentally. Now he had passed through the gate of death. Now he was worthy to be initiated into the deepest mysteries. It was this process which made man a symbol and through which the individual, small ego was extinguished, this process which placed him in the service of the divine world order. He had become a symbol for the eternal great world fact.

Through this, man practically experienced what Jakob Böhme wanted to say with the words: "He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies." Because his spirit was able to leave the body and take possession of it again, he was able to embark on the path to deification, to becoming Osiris himself, in a completely different way. We have seen from the Egyptian Book of the Dead how the Egyptians imagined eternal life in contrast to physical-sensual existence; we have seen how this initiation was brought about.

Now it is a question of making this priest a servant of humanity, so that already in this life he was brought a little further along the path of Osiris, that he did not merely transmit truth, but prepared his spirit, transformed it, so that what for others is merely external truth was for him a sacred truth, which was connected with quite different feelings and sensations. In fact, an Egyptian priest was something quite different from another person. He was a person who led a spiritualized, an internalized life because he had gone through the process of descending to the dead. He had left his body and had been in the realms of infinity, and after three days he had taken possession of his body again, awakened by the rising sun and by the father of heaven and earth, the god Ra. This process, which signifies initiation at the lowest level, was undoubtedly what the Essaeans also experienced in a higher degree. They knew the initiation process and undoubtedly took it over from Egypt with their views and customs.

The question now is: Why, how did it come about that the deepening of this ancient form of religion occurred in such a way that the undoubtedly much more exoteric worship of the Jews was again brought closer to the great worship of the Egyptians?

First of all, there are no historical, external indications. The same basis led to the birth of a Buddha so many hundreds of years ago and the same basis later led to the birth of a Christ. We must be clear about the fact that the entire Jewish spiritual life grew out of the Egyptian spiritual life. If you follow the first chapters of Genesis and the commandments in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you will find the same striking correspondence between Buddha and Jesus that I mentioned the other day. He will find in the first five chapters of Genesis what was common practice in the Egyptian priestly world. But we must be clear about the way in which Genesis came to the Jews and how it was propagated by them.

The one thing that must be clear to anyone who knows how to read Genesis is that Moses probably knew the Decalogue in the form in which he gave it. This results from the great correspondence we have in the Decalogue and in the commandments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And we must be clear that in ancient Egypt there was no other way to get this across than by being initiated.

Moses was an initiate. His task was to create other initiates in the Jewish priesthood. I will now show how even in outward appearances there is a similarity between Genesis and the ancient Egyptian myths. I will indicate one external feature which will speak sufficiently for the whole. You will see in what way the myths have been transformed. But a demonstration here would lead far too far.

The Osiris myth knows Osiris on the one side and Seth-Typhon on the other. Both are a kind of brother and sister. They are hostile to each other. They are both descended from heaven. They are sons of heaven. They are presented as incarnate deities. Next to Osiris we have Seth-Typhon. You also have this pair of brothers in Genesis as Cain and Abel.

The fact that we still have traces of the Egyptian priestly religion in Genesis is proven by the passage in the fifth chapter, which deals with the human race. Adam was 130 years old, fathered a son and named him Seth. It is the same figure. In him you have a real son of Adam. In Adam we only have to recognize a kind of god-man, actually only a figure of Ra, the highest heavenly god, translated more into human form. His sons are to be equated with the sons of Ra. [In the Seth of the Cain and Abel story we would see the Seth of the Osiris myth.] This correspondence is not accidental. It is clear that we are dealing with a profound correspondence.

I have only mentioned this to show the method. You can recognize the ancient Egyptian priestly religion in Genesis. This is how Genesis came about. The Egyptian priestly religion has been lost, but was later rebuilt from what was planted by tradition. This is why it is difficult for us to recognize the original form of what Moses handed down to us. But within the Egyptian priestly religion we can. When we reconstruct them, they correspond to the old mythical forms, to the oldest forms, so that we are in fact just as surprised by them as we were by the correspondence between the life of the Buddha and the life of the Christ.

This contemplation will give us a view of the actual reason for the emergence of the Christ figure. If we go back to the sacred books of the Indians, which were completed two thousand years before the birth of Christ, we find a most curious legend that confronts us in the form of the Indian Vedic literature. It introduces us to the whole Indian world view. You will find the legend of [Adhima] and [Heva]. The two were created as human beings on Ceylon in paradise. They are presented to us in full innocence. A serpent comes to them. It says to them: Why do you want to stay within these realms? They then wander through these areas and [Adhima] says to [Heva]: Let us see what kind of land this is that we see in the distance. - The serpent also invited them to do so and said: 'When you get there, you will be like Brahma and realize the deepest secrets of the world. - It all seems great to them. But when they get there, the whole thing dissolves into a kind of mirage and they are in harsh, barren realms. But they are comforted by Brahma, who tells them, after the world had appeared to them as an insubstantial reflection: I will send Vishnu to you.

It is the same as what we find in Genesis as the prophecy of God foretelling the coming of the Christ. You can find the sagas of the ancient Vedic literature in Genesis as well. This legend is intimately connected with the Indian world view. This Adam and Eve myth is in the deepest harmony with the teaching that has been propagated up to Buddhism and has become personal in Buddha, with the world view that what we perceive with our senses is basically a mirage, an illusion, a deceptive image and that man has a completely different goal in the eternal, in Nirvana. What is beyond nirvana is a vain appearance.

God himself made man, that is the meaning of the ancient myths. Brahma creates the first man in his own image. It is Brahma who incarnates in the first man. The primal human pair then descends further. It continues to connect with matter, and from the imprinting of the spirit in the dust arises the life that we recognize as human life.

This human life is nothing, since its only purpose is to give birth to the divine again. But a sacrifice is to descend to penetrate matter. [Brahma] must descend to attain his true, great life. This is expressed in the ancient Indian myth and this is also expressed in the Indian worldview, which sees everything in the world as illusory.

So you also have a similar harmony between the ancient myth of the Vedas and the [Jewish] worldview. They are in complete agreement with each other.

To grasp this view of the nothingness, of the mere appearance of the world, was one of the insights that the initiates were to be taught in a living way. He was not to see that which was to be seen in a coarse, crude manner. But that which the [non-initiated] people do not see, they should see. Wherever we go back to the mystical sources, be it in the ancient Vedas or in Genesis, wherever there is a deeper understanding, there is also the perception that we are dealing with a mere mirage - as in the Indian. [And this can only become what it must become when the deity appears in its form and when man not only contributes to bringing knowledge into the world, but also to permeating matter with spirit, so that not only the spirit becomes alive, but also that matter becomes alive with the spirit at the same time.

The fact that God himself has become dust is the fault of the serpent, which has to take up dust again and again. The dust-born is nothing other than the deity incarnating in matter and emerging from it again. We are dealing here with something that is not just a falling away, but a sacrifice. The deity pours itself out in order to be redeemed again. This falling away is depicted to us. The serpent is nothing other than the antitype of the deity, it is the deity in a different form. This is why the snake is the symbol for the initiation process in all religions. It consists in the fact that man not only recognizes, but that by recognizing he redeems matter from being mere matter, that he gives birth to spirit out of mere matter. The snake is the symbol for this process.

Goethe also used the symbol of the snake in the "Fairy Tale", but only at the time when he was familiar with the mystical symbols. In the myth of the Fall of Man, we are dealing with a view that we can trace both in ancient Egyptian priestly beliefs and in Genesis. We are dealing with ancient beliefs from which Buddhism and Christianity then arise. And when we look at the Egyptian priestly religion, we are dealing with a deification of man - as [with] Heraclitus.

This becoming immortal, this becoming God was the task that was to be symbolized by the three-day burial and the resurrection process. We see this process revived as a historical event in the story of Christ. We see what everyone who wanted to be initiated into the Egyptian mysteries had to go through, the coming to life after taking up the symbol of the cross, [in the Christ event] emerge in all [publicity] in an individual.

This could only take place in a time and in a community that had done the groundwork, as in Essaeanism, which could understand what was happening. From this we see that a necessary process took place, a process that must always occur if one could say - as the process took place with John the Baptist - that this is a Christ, as Brahma could say with Buddha. So it had to be prepared in advance.

In Essaeanism lived the belief [of the Egyptian initiates] that man could become divine if he stepped up to the judgment steps of Osiris in order to become God himself. To have this highest task, which man sets himself, once as a historical process before him as something lasting, that is what confronts us at the bottom of Essaeanism.

Now we come to pursue this. You must bear in mind that what took place in the Egyptian priest centuries ago, what took place in countless people, took place in a single process, but in such a way that we recognize in it exactly the plan of the Egyptian idea of eternity.

Let me add this one more passage in order to have a point of reference for the next time, namely that he who sought the entrance through the gate of death in order to enter the land of Osiris had to undergo a series of trials. He is led before 42 judges of the dead. These are nothing other than the people who have become "Osiris" in the realm of the dead; people who once lived and have already become "Osiris". He appears before them, so that the one who visits the world beyond appears before his most distinguished ancestors. And the one who is called to become an "Osiris" is nothing other than a new form, a renewed form, a link in the forty-two-membered series.

This series plays a role in the Essaean community. It is nothing other than what was already present here on earth. These 42 judges of the dead appear to us right at the beginning of the Gospel in a different form. They are nothing other than the 42 ancestors of Jesus. He has become "Osiris", the forty-second in the line. He is the one who is called to judge the living and the dead. This is why the most important progenitors of the human race are also cited as the progenitors of Jesus. It is a direct translation of an Essaean tradition that can be traced directly in the Gospel of Matthew. It is nothing other than the translation of the judges of the dead in Egyptian terms.

The fact that we are confronted with the incarnation of Jesus immediately after the genealogy has been presented: "[Mattan] begets Jacob, Jacob begets Joseph" and so on, may strike us. Next time, we will examine and get to know the reason for this.

[Answer to question:]

I just wanted to point out that we are dealing with two gender registers. One has gone through the Essaean view and the other from Matthew belongs to a different set of ideas and is linked to it.

42 members = 3 times 14 = 6 times 7 - at the boundary of the sixth round and at the entrance to the seventh round. The seven parts into which the ancient Egyptians divided man. The number 7 is not sacred because it is seven, but because they recognized the secret of the world in it. So it is not a superstition. Development is a continuous overcoming of matter by the spirit. Just as the globe once bore no people, but now people live on it, these people will develop more and more and progress to greater spirituality.

Dear guests!

Last time I concluded with a reference to the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Today I would like to follow on from this remark that the Gospel of Matthew begins by tracing the birth of Christ back to a forty-two-member family tree. In fact, this beginning of Matthew's Gospel shows us how the nature of Jesus Christ was understood by those from whom Matthew actually took his view of this nature. The forty-two ancestral line can only be understood if we manage to understand that we are dealing with the Egyptian view of the 42 judges of the dead, before whom the one who wants to ascend to divinity, i.e. who wants to become "Osiris", has to appear. This is also a factor in the Essaean doctrine. [The Essaeans] know this series, which must be gone through. According to the Essaeans, every person who is on the path to becoming God is about to pass through these 42 stages. They symbolize the 42 points of passage. When he has then reached the forty-third stage, he is already in the higher spheres, where becoming God already begins, or - if I express myself in Egyptian terms - where he becomes "Osiris". The fact that there are still divisions there, too, is of little interest to us for the time being.

The main point is that man now appears on a level in which he is "Osiris, divine being. I have said that these are views that Matthew has simply adopted. This can be seen from the fact that Matthew speaks of 3 times 14 ancestors = 42 ancestors. However, since he only really lists thirteen in the end, we can assume that he is well aware that the number 42 plays a major role, but that he has unconsciously omitted the last step. We therefore have to look less at how the matter is expressed in detail.

We are therefore dealing with the view in Matthew that man has 42 stations on his path to ancestors and that when he has passed through [these stages], he enters divinity

ness. These stations, these ancestors, can be spread over many lives. But only the one who has passed through forty-two stages can enter the world as Buddha" or "Christ. It is quite the same. Buddha also had to go through the same series of ancestors. With Buddha we also have 6 times 7 = 42 stages or embodiments. It is therefore the case that we not only have a deep similarity between Jesus and Buddha, but that we also have before us in the transcendent Jesus nature the same thing that is in the Buddha nature. We are dealing with a person at a higher stage of development who has gone through all the stages that one has gone through when one has survived life with all its trials and when one has entered the stage where one can be the judge of the dead. He will return again after he has come down to judge the living and the dead, he will enter the realm of the judges of the dead, he, Jesus, who has passed through the forty-two-link chain of the judges of the dead. It is just as it says in the Buddhist legend, where the Buddha passed through forty-two stages. He then entered the stage where he himself became God; the man who has become God is now no longer dependent on passing through the eternal necessity of the limbs. He appears on a divine counsel. Hence we are told with Jesus and Buddha that they are sent by divine decree and [...] by the will of the Father. The individual links in the chain of ancestors proceeded according to a world order.

So with the Essaeans we are dealing with a Christ, with the Buddhists with a Buddha, with an entity which, after having undergone all the trials that have to be passed through, appears within mankind as a man who has become God. This tells us nothing other than the Egyptians' and the Buddhists' way of looking at things. We are therefore dealing here with a real Buddha and a real Christ.

This can only be understood from this point of view. You will [otherwise] never understand how Matthew came to juxtapose the chain of ancestors and [the supernatural descent] of Jesus. He says in chapter 1, verse 17: "All the links from Abraham to David are fourteen links. From David to the Babylonian captivity are fourteen members. From the Babylonian captivity to Christ there are fourteen members." [Up to verse 17] you have given the natural genealogy of Jesus and immediately afterwards you have told how Joseph is told by the angel that there is a supernatural birth and that it is about Jesus coming into the world through the Holy Spirit. This is a complete contradiction in terms. However, it is a doctrine that must stand as such, a doctrine that we find everywhere where it is a question of indicating the reincarnation of a personality that has already reached the "Osiris stage". Such a personality experiences a double birth.

It is extremely difficult to talk about this. For Theosophy and for a real Theosophist, this is incredibly elementary. For those who have already penetrated a little deeper into the Theosophical teachings, it seems understandable when they say that they have reached the forty-second stage. For others, however, it is quite incomprehensible. Perhaps I can make myself understood by suggesting a path that almost every modern, thinking person will have to take if he wants to move from the most modern views into Theosophy. This path throws a weighty light on all these things. We must indeed say that for the Occident, at least for our European education, there is no more plausible way of arriving at those things which we find expressed here in such a difficult-to-understand way than from natural science. This is also the same path that leads to what underlies what Matthew drew from. I am convinced that - more than all Western religions are capable of - this path will lead to the goal if the teachings of natural science are to flow into Theosophy.

I would like to shed some light on the path that natural science will take in order to reach the point where Theosophy stands when it draws on ancient wisdom teachings. We must not take a completely pessimistic view of our Western development of spiritual life, even if we see how disregarded some people are of religious beliefs. This is because they have no idea of what is esoterically written in these scriptures. When we also see how amateurish the latest phenomena are.

It was only a year ago that a detailed discussion of Messiah Consciousness was published by Wrede, not August Wrede. Before that, one could be pessimistic. But science can no longer do anything other than end up where Theosophy seeks to take Western humanity. This is not too difficult to say. But in order to fully feel the thought, to penetrate it completely, to understand its full implications, where it shines into the whole of spiritual life, where it no longer lets us go once we have grasped it, [for this it is necessary to have suffered from the scientific ideas and to have carried them around with us as a confessor; for this it is necessary for those who go through the natural science of our days with their minds, the realization, the metamorphosis of that process, without getting completely caught up in this materialism. ]

Anyone who has confronted materialism and - like Goethe - has seen it with spiritual eyes, and who is able to see and understand these mysteries in their full scope, will not be able to harbor pessimistic views, even if he looks at the natural sciences of the last decade in particular.

I have personally had the best experiences with the natural sciences. In 1889, I wrote an essay in which I stated that, according to our scientific findings, the concepts of substance, matter and force are not even scientifically clear in the sober, mindless conception of force and substance found in Büchner and Strauss. Anyone who penetrates the facts of nature scientifically comes to the conclusion, directly as an experience, that natural science provides us with the proof that there is no substance, but that everything we call substance is nothing other than another form of spirit. Substance is only an apparent form of spirit that is expressed in a certain way. The world is spirit. That will have to become our confession.

The person who knows how to look at natural science with the eyes of the spirit comes to this realization. At that time I stated that what natural scientists have imagined as matter does not exist, that matter is nothing other than the lowest manifestation, the lowest form of spirit, and that natural science itself will come to this realization. Soon afterwards, in the richly fragmented literature of natural science, a natural scientist emerged with a work in which he expressed exactly the same thing in almost the same words as I did.

Whoever realizes that [natural] science can only be a factor in spiritual life, only a part of spiritual life, must be pleased when a chemist comes along who explains that what has been regarded as a substance cannot be justified scientifically as long as the substance is regarded as the carrier of natural science.

Unfortunately, Ernst Haeckel could not bring himself to accept what sprouted from our natural science. There is no doubt that we are no longer dealing with the old theory of matter. Only [today] the chemist - and also the physicist - will say that he is dealing with energies, because he is only dealing with expressions of force. The other, however, sees spirit in it. Natural science will go its own way in order to finally rise to the view that even that which underlies an apparently material process is nothing other than that which underlies the Indian wisdom teachings, that it is nothing other than that which materializes the Logos. Pessimism no longer clings to us today.

Natural science has incorporated a great good into us, namely the idea of development. Science has rediscovered this idea for itself in the field of biology. It has treated a special chapter in the way in which the theosophists of all times have regarded spiritual beings. They have looked at living beings from the point of view of development. And what does this development consist of? You need only put together the views of an eighteenth-century naturalist and those of a nineteenth-century naturalist. Linn& says that there are as many plant and animal species on earth as were originally created by so many acts of creation. The natural sciences of the nineteenth century allowed the juxtaposed forms to emerge one after the other, one after the other. What came into being later arose from what came before. In this way, natural science has eliminated the miracle from the world. In the past, there were only juxtaposed miracles. Theosophy has always stood on [the standpoint of development]. It transformed everything side by side into a succession. When a higher living being leads back to an earlier product of life, he who looks at it from a spiritual point of view sees stages of development.

The human being who has reached a higher stage, who has attained a higher degree of perfection, has not done so through a genius fallen from heaven. Genius, of which those who do not know what it is speak the most, is nothing other than the miracle transferred to natural science. Natural science has long since set aside this concept, which is still in use today - especially among the so-called aesthetes - in its own field, and has long since consigned it to the dustbin. Theosophy has never regarded genius as a miracle, but as a higher stage of development [of the personality]. It has seen in it nothing other than a personality that has gone through exactly the same thing as any other individuality, only it has gone through what another individuality goes through in this period in an earlier stage of development. What is experience for me today, what is stored up in me today, appears to me [later] as something self-evident, as a mature product, seemingly like a miracle. But it is only what I have acquired. I had to practise for a long time before I acquired, let's say, a movement that I then perform unconsciously. I also had to learn for years to grasp mathematics. But once I have the concept, it soon becomes a habit.

This is theosophy. Transfer that to the big world whole, to the big world events. What you have absorbed as experience appears as that which reappears on a higher level. In this way we can explain the most varied experiences of life and natural science through spiritual insight and deepening and make them fruitful for Theosophy. By contrasting two personalities, you will see that there is a spiritual explanation for a large number of things and phenomena in ordinary life, and that basically we are not dealing with anything other than attention and spiritual comprehension. You can thus see the beginnings of theosophy in scientific books.

[Perhaps take an elementary book of natural science, such as Topinard's "Anthropology", which explains how the individual organisms have developed. It tells us how the lowest levels of organization developed first, then we come to animals, apes and humans. Topinard repeats how Ernst Haeckel wrote about these things and says that Haeckel forgot something; he forgot to enumerate "the twenty-third degree in which Lamarck and Newton shine". You can continue to write this anthropology for the spirit, you can transfer what the natural scientist undertakes to the spiritual. There are countless degrees in the spiritual life. When you consider this, you realize what it is all about.

Goethe and Schiller are the two personalities I am referring to. They attended a meeting of natural scientists in Jena. Batsch had given a lecture, but it did little to satisfy Schiller and Goethe. Basically, Schiller and Goethe lacked the intellectual bond, the big picture. Schiller sensed this. And when he left the meeting with Goethe, he said: "It is dreary to see plant after plant lined up next to each other without an overview of the whole. There must be something common in all plants." Goethe answered him by talking about the original plant, of which all the others are only special forms. Then he said, "But that can be made clear in another way," took his pencil and drew the original plant with a few strokes, noting that it does not exist, but that this original plant can be recognized in every plant. Yes, said Schiller: "But that's not experience, it's an idea." But you can only achieve this if you go through all the plants and examine what they have in common. Then you get the general idea. "If that is an idea," Goethe replied, "then I see my ideas with my eyes." In fact, Goethe did not need to know all the plants. He only needed to see the essence of the individual plants. He saw the spirit, the truth of the plant. Schiller is quite right from his point of view when he says that [this was an] idea. And Goethe is also right when he says that he sees this idea, sees the whole thing at a glance. He is on a higher level. That is also what Schiller recognized without envy. This can be seen from Schiller's letters, where he described Goethe's nature in a magnificent way. We can see from this that such a spirit also had to go through this work. You can study this throughout Goethe's life. His whole conception was to see the spirit in nature. A seven-year-old boy does not otherwise do what Goethe did at that age. The embodiment of Goethe is a further, higher stage of development that Schiller still had to go through in Goethe's life. The seven-year-old Goethe took the stones from [his father's] mineral collection and used them to build himself an altar on the music stand, took a small incense burner and lit it through a burning glass by the light of the sun because he wanted to offer his service in this way.

Why does Goethe see the idea of the primordial plant and Schiller does not? Either we do not see the spiritual in the same way or we absolutely must extend our view of nature to the spiritual. Then we arrive at that spiritual development which is a content of all times.

I need not tell those who are familiar with theosophical literature that theosophical authors would present us with miracles in exactly the same way as the natural science of the eighteenth century, which presented the individual plants and animals and their genera as miracles. But through the ability to judge the spiritual as well as the physical, the views of the advanced natural science of the nineteenth century have passed over to the theosophical point of view. It is a question here of being able to judge the spiritual in the same way as the physical.

It is undoubted that with consistent thinking and when the natural sciences are supplemented by younger forces, a spiritual science will emerge from the natural sciences, as has already happened in the field of chemistry. Whoever thinks scientifically and has the inner courage to extend this scientific way of thinking to the spiritual world and to observe it after awakening the spiritual sense organs, must be led from natural science to Theosophy and its views.

Let us now turn again to Matthew's views on the personality, the essence of Jesus. We are dealing here with the view that sees Jesus as a personality who emerged after attaining the greatest possible number of re-embodiments. It is a personality that has reached the highest level of developmental possibility, which brings into the world as a finished disposition everything that other personalities are only on the way to achieving. Out of it is born that which others must first struggle for. That which appears as the spiritual when the transition from the forty-second to the forty-third stage takes place is the beginning and the transition of the human into the divine. Just as the purely physical and chemical in the organism has a higher nature and perception, so the physical on the level of divinity also has a higher nature and perception. The physical body, the physical organization is no longer what it was or what it is. It disappears in relation to the spiritual process. In fact, it has a metaphysical, transcendental past within itself. Just as it is born of the flesh, it is born of the divine. We must be clear about the fact that a new higher level of development of materiality has been reached and that the material itself has spiritualized to a higher level, so that we are not dealing with a birth out of the physical, but with a taking up of the physical birth by higher divine powers. We are therefore dealing with a direct emergence from primordial matter, which only becomes worldly at the moment of birth. There this primordial matter, which was not yet embodied, which was still decided in the pure spiritual, first passes over into the material. So in the forty-third degree, on the forty-third stage, we are dealing with the birth of primordial matter that has not yet entered into union with physical matter. This is what the ancient teachings refer to. The Egyptians say of the birth of Horus that the eye of Osiris shone above Isis, that a purely spiritual birth took place. In the birth of Horus you have the birth of the god out of still virgin matter.

If we go back to the Egyptian myth, we are dealing with three eternal great symbols for what we call the father, the mother and the child. This juxtaposition of Osiris, Isis and Horus is the original symbol. The child has remained on the Christian cross. The material on the one side has become merely evil, the father principle on the other side merely good. On Golgotha we see this symbolized in the three crosses. On the left we have evil, on the right good and in the middle the child. This symbol has been transformed, has become something else.

Now I come to a very important point. The striking thing that confronts us is the following: We can still trace the origin of the Christian symbol from the Egyptian symbol in the Christian myth of the earliest times. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in all the other contemporary literature - apart from the Gospels themselves - although this myth is discussed in the most diverse ways, including by Jewish mystics, we do not find one thing that we actually only find in Matthew and Luke, namely the Holy Spirit. This is something that is actually not present. This is in addition. This Holy Spirit is nothing other than the transformed Isis. As a result, the virgin birth, which is still conveyed in the Osiris myth, was actually replaced by the real, natural birth. God the Father brought about this virgin birth through his magical influence, so that this birth is mediated on the one hand by the Father and on the other by the Holy Spirit, who is now the representative of the Father.

We encounter this Holy Spirit in the first period of Christianity [...], where the Christian view [of the virgin birth] emerges. We can therefore say that because the Holy Spirit first appears in Christianity, we see in it a division of the originally feminine principle of the world symbol. We have a spirit that gives the child its origin. [The origin from the divine tree arose within the Essaean community, where one actually stood on the standpoint of asceticism, where one already saw something evil in the sexual in itself. There it was impossible to receive the feminine in the same way as in ancient Egyptianism, as was the case with the Osiris service of the Egyptians, where the overshadowing of Osiris by Isis is transformed into the overshadowing by the Holy Spirit]. This is a temporary means by which the ancient Egyptian teaching was transformed into the Christian one. We have thus seen that we are actually dealing with the same way of looking at things. The Christian view sees in the Christ-personality a deified human being in exactly the same way as the Mystery Cult has always seen these [deified] human beings.

What doctrines may have underpinned this whole view? Anyone who really knows how to read the Gospels sees nothing in the Gospels other than, I would say, a more detailed account of the ritual, which was intended to initiate the Mystics into the Mysteries. And if we visualize what the initiation is about, if we want to be clear about what such a Myst wanted to achieve, should achieve, why he, the Myst to be initiated, the Myst was placed on a cross, why he was placed in a death-like state, we must say to ourselves, remember, that it is about the awakening of a higher life force, that it is about bringing him to resurrection on the third day. And if we ask ourselves how the initiation was accomplished for the mystics, we must say to ourselves that the mystical view was clear about the fact that the individual human being has to go through the whole process of creation in his own body. This was presented as a return to the Godhead, as a continual deification of the world.

Matter is what the spirit pours itself into in order to return to divinity via a detour through matter, in order to be as a soul what it originally was as a spirit. That is where we get the path. The Myste should bring matter within himself to the point of dying so that matter is no longer the ruling force in him. His soul should be reborn so that his material body also reaches a higher level. They were to be spiritualized at higher levels. It was not a higher scientific education that the myst was striving for, but for the myst to spiritualize matter, to bring matter one step further in its development. Everything that the myst had to go through had as its goal the [resurrection] with a spiritual body, with a reborn body.

The Myste had to go through this path of [returning] the soul to the Godhead. It was also made clear to him that he was not going through what he was going through for himself, but as part of the great universe, which was going through a degree of development in him. We know that the whole process at the initiation is described to us in such a way that when the sun awakens the Mystic on the third day, the thunder rolls, just as it did at the resurrection of Jesus. These events are told to us as components of the mystical process.

The mystic should be made aware that his own process has its foundation in the cosmic world process, that God has carried out the world process with the help of the Creator Word, the Logos, that this God is himself, and that the world process is carried out in reality in the mystic, that the process which man has to go through is like the world process. The world process is synonymous with the description of the path that the mystical individuality has to go through. This was an important part - not only with the Egyptians - of what was demonstrated to the mystics and then became flesh and blood.

Take together what is communicated individually, but which we must keep together. Take the whole parallelism between the Gospels and the Old Testament [and the Egyptian tradition], then if you follow the matter in this way, you will indeed be able to see that indeed the most devout confessors of Christianity in the later centuries had traces of the human process being the great cosmological world process. In some passages of St. Augustine's "Confessions" you can find such traces and hints. They may not be entirely clear, but he shows that in the individual events such as the birth, transfiguration, ascension of Christ and so on, he is dealing with nothing other than a repetition of the cosmic process. Thus he says at one point: "God also created the Christ of our earth. Our earth was desolate and empty. Ignorance weighed upon us. We left our darkness and turned to you. We were once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord." - He describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ with the words of Genesis. So here there was still an awareness of what was in the Mysteries themselves. In the Mysteries there was no difference between the process that the Myste had to undergo and the cosmic process. Therefore, every ritual was written in the same way as the description of the creation of the world. If we could compare within the Egyptian teaching the description of the path of the Egyptian mystics, we would see that it is one and the same as the cosmic development process. It is translated into the microcosmic what has taken place in the macrocosmic.

I would like to point out that such traces are not only to be found in Augustine. We also find them in other church scholars [for example in Eusebius] when they describe the life of Jesus. However, we have to go back to the fourth century, where the descriptions were even more fluid; we even have to go back to the third and second centuries. When we read or hear descriptions of the whole course of life, when we hear stories of the resurrection and ascension, then for those who are able to judge these things, it sounds like the translation of the Mystery initiation process.

After all, the Gospels, which later became authoritative and in which the view was crystallized and fixed, can no longer be interpreted. Eusebius was still Myste. So I think that if we look at the Gospels, we can still see from the style that something has remained of these old institutions of correspondence between the cosmological process and the initiation or initiation process:

Take the Gospel of John. What is it but a betrayal of the mystical - in style and layout nothing but individualized cosmogony? "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God" and so on. This beginning of the Gospel of John starts in exactly the same way as Genesis. We are dealing with a Genesis. These phenomena show us directly the clear traces of the fact that we are actually dealing with initiatory writings in the Gospels, which did not exist in the first centuries of the Christian era. Only [oral] tradition existed at that time. We essentially owe the Gospels to the second century.

If we hold all this together, we will see even in the Gospels how this trace is still present of the correspondence between cosmogonic and individual development. Such a thing as is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew cannot be understood at all if it is not interpreted theosophically, if the same thing is not seen in it that the Buddhists have gone through in forty-two stages. We are absorbed by God and born out of him again.

He who has developed this way of looking at things within Essaeanism, who has stepped out of the first teachings before he stepped out, must have been deeply imbued with this fact, must have had clearly before his eyes through a higher revelation what every other man must first laboriously gather together. It must have dawned on him in a single great glance.

Now we have in the Gospels - and this is the question I still have to raise - the indication that we are dealing with a personality who, in a single glance, encompassed everything that can be described as teachings of the past, as the result of past experiences. In a single vision we have the content of the Gospel, and now we must ask: Is it a real renewal in this period of time of this world mystery that is otherwise present in the symbol, this world mystery that is present to us in Father, Mother and Child? Is there such a view? I believe that it is the whole personality, the real personality, which underlies this, which radiates out as if renewing the past. This seems to me to be the apparition on the holy mountain, the apparition that Jesus had when he had only his most intimate disciples with him - Peter, James and John, his brother - and the apparition of Moses and Elijah.

If we visualize this apparition, if we understand it in this way and interpret it, then it becomes clear to us what we are dealing with here. Only from this apparition can we come to a full understanding of what this personality was through whom Christianity came into the world.

We can now understand what was going on, and once we have understood that, then we come to a mystical understanding of Christianity. This is the most important moment of this vision, where the founder of Christianity is not actually something isolated, but something in which the deepest mystery of existence was resolved, in which the deepest experience of man is concentrated.

It is impossible, since the time is too far advanced, to show what is radiated in the teachings and in the life of Jesus. When we understand this phenomenon, the necessary light will spread within us.