The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Some poetry will be recited now and a corresponding mood in profound sense can only be created because the largest part of the friends present here have lately been deeply concerned with material concerning the spiritual world in relation to the entire historical development of humankind. What will be presented here in this lecture will bring to our awareness how spiritual science or Theosophy is not only something merely announced to the world through the Theosophical Society but that Theosophy as a teaching is based on the greater occult truth and wisdom which has already flowed through ancient times through the best minds searching for the Higher Worlds. We can find personalities in olden and recent times who can in actual fact show that in their imagination, ideas, feelings and experience, in their life mood they were totally permeated with a world view we could call theosophical and from which they worked, and that their entire life's activity unfolded in harmony with this. One such extraordinary personality lived in Novalis during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.

Not even reaching thirty years of age was Novalis, and we hope that through the lecture of his “Hymns to the Night” an awareness will be able to develop, which speaks out of these Hymns—so complete, as it was only possible in the last three decades of the eighteenth century—in an all encompassing manner, the precise knowledge of these spiritual scientific truths.

Out of a highly respected aristocratic family, Friedrich von Hardenberg, called Novalis, was born on 2 May 1772. Whoever has the opportunity to visit Weimar must not hesitate to view the impressive Novalis bust. It belongs to the classic records of Weimar, and clearly expresses how closely the spiritual high culture was connected to this time, the end of the eighteenth century. Whoever views this extraordinary bust will, if he or she has any sensitivity for it, get the impression that, one could say, out of this sphere of humble humanity the physiognomy of his soul expresses that he was totally established in the occult, in the spiritual worlds. To add to this, Novalis is one of those personalities who is a living proof of the possibility to connect this spirituality, this self-elevation in the highest sense of human beings reaching the spiritual worlds, to connect this to a solid practical `standing on the ground' physical reality. Basically Novalis never entered an angry conflict with the still conservative traditions in which his family circle lived, but we can take into consideration, that this family always had an open receptivity for everything noble and good, also when coming into contact with unknown people.

When we study Novalis' biography—it is in itself a work of art—and we allow it to work on us, his father is shown as having a practical, applied nature. Novalis was actually in his civil life educated for a totally practical career, for which knowledge of law and mathematics was necessary. He became a mountain engineer. Here is not the place to explore how he actually became a delight in this career for those whom he worked. It is also not the moment now to show how the mathematical-materialistic sciences, which lay at the foundation of this career, not only in full theory and practice came to be controlled by him completely, but that he was a diligent mathematician. What is most important is that Novalis as a spiritual being allowed mathematics to penetrate into his inner development.

When mathematics showed him how it is suitable for the elevation of pure sense-free thought, then we have where relevant, to refer to a classic example as here with Novalis, where outer observation doesn't have a say. For him life in the mathematical imagination became a great poem which filled him with delights, allowing his soul to experience an elevation when he dived into numbers and sizes. For him mathematics became the expression of divine creation, divine thought as it flashes through space in powerful directions and in measures of power and crystallize out there. Mathematics became for his mindset the warmest way to the spiritual life, while for many people, who only know mathematics from outside, it remains cold. It is so much more meaningful that we meet this spirituality in Novalis in a gentleness and refinement, as we would not meet in one or other of the most important intellects.

Novalis was a contemporary of Goethe. One should not place the kind of spirituality within Novalis, on the same level as what Goethe had. Goethe came to it through a regulated, out of a Higher World directed course towards an initiation, up to a particular stage. Novalis, by contrast, lived a life which one can best describe by saying: This young man, who left the physical plane at the age of twenty nine and who gave the German intellectuals more than a hundred thousand others could give, he lived a life which was actually a memory of a previous one. Through a quite specific event the spiritual experiences of earlier incarnations appeared, presented themselves to his soul and flowed in gentle, rhythmically woven poems from his soul.

Thus we can see that Novalis understood how the human being's soul can be lifted up into a higher world. For Novalis it gave the possibility to see that waking everyday awareness is only a fragment in a current human life, and how the soul who in the evening leaves the daily awareness and sinks into unconsciousness, in actual fact sinks into the spiritual world. He was able to experience deeply and to know, that in these spiritual worlds which are entered by the soul at night, lived a higher spiritual reality, that the day with all its impressions, even the impression of sun and light, only formed a fragment of the entire spiritual worlds. The stars, surreptitiously sending away the light of day during the night, appeared to him only in a weak glow, while in him spiritual truths rose up in his consciousness, which for the clairvoyant appears illuminated in a dazzling bright astral light when during the night he shifts himself spiritually into this state. During the night the actual spiritual worlds appeared to Novalis and thus the night from this perspective became valuable.

What enabled his memories of an earlier incarnation to appear? How did it happen that the experiences of the occult world, which we can reveal today in occult knowledge, rose so uniquely in him? His life unloosened him from the soul in whose knowledge slumbered earlier incarnations. One must take the result, which these spiritual experiences lifted out of this soul, back into the light of a spiritual observation, if one wants to understand it. Only childlike folly could place these experiences on the same footing as Goethe's meeting and Friederikes zu Sesenheim. This would be a coarsely unrefined comparison.

During his stay in Grüningen he became acquainted with a thirteen year old girl. Soul secrets played here which one could never, without abandoning the gentleness of a soul, call this a love relationship. Basically there was in Sophie von Kühn—that was her name—something like the lives of various beings. She became ill and soon died. The moment her spirit loosened from Sophie von Kühn, it wrestled with Novalis' inner life, awakening inner spiritual abilities.

Perhaps you could, when you allow yourself to admit it, obviously see the inability of a way of thought bound by outer experience coming to the fore here in what we must experience in judging these relationships, which can only be understood if we want to understand it in its spirituality, in our present materialistic time. People say science must be based on documentation; it must absolutely lead from everything concrete on the physical plane. Such natural scientists, who surely present a distorted side, the farcical side of natural science, have allowed us to experience what they believe in, that by presenting documents, Novalis basically had fallen prey to an illusion. The poetry is nice—they say—but show us the documents, let us look at who Herr von Rockenthien was where Sophie von Kühn lived. Look at—so the “Novalis adherents” said—various letters Sophie von Kühn wrote to Novalis. Sopie von Kühn made not only in every line but nearly in every word, a writing or spelling error! - concluding Novalis had fallen victim to a big deception.

In Jena, where she spent the last years, she also encountered Goethe—and made a deep impression on Goethe! Whoever can't comprehend that these unique words of Goethe are more valuable than documents which can be dug up—because all documents can lie—whoever wants to come with proof to show something, will not consider producing counter evidence, it will not help him, despite all his science.

What was the result for Novalis? Sophie von Kühn passed away and Novalis lived within a mood of: “I will emulate her in death” (Ich sterbe ihr nach!). Nevermore was he separated from her soul. Pouring out of the deceased soul of Sophie von Kühn came a force which he had in his own soul experienced as a mediator in the night, and within him rose enormous experiences which he depicted in his poetry.

Once again another feminine individual crossed his path: Julie von Charpentier. To him however, she was only the earthly symbol of Sophie von Kühn's deceased soul. Dissolved out of his soul were the elements of wisdom which he poured into the “Hymns to the Night”, through this first soul bond.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) read the first two Hymns at this point.)

So far does this poem transport us into the worlds in which Novalis lived as a spirit, when he experienced from within the everlasting elements of wisdom.

You might often have heard that such reaching into the higher worlds is linked to a penetration of other secrets of existence. Out of this, a backward glance into the prehistoric times is necessary, where that, which now lives in the world, only existed as a sprig in the Divine and had not yet come down into an earthly form. When the soul of the natural kingdoms still existed in pure spirit, only perceptible in the astral world, all this contributed to the impressive images unfolding to Novalis the seer, when he glanced back. He saw the time when the souls of plants, animals and people were still companions of divine beings, when an interruption in awareness had not yet happened as it did later to human beings in the exchange between night and day—while nothing was influenced by any interruption, as is expressed in the words: birth and death. Everything living flowed in the spiritual-soul where there was no sense of death in this prehistoric past.

Then the thought of death struck into the life of these gods and divine earthly beings, and down into the earthly world the spirits moved. The godly beings were concealed in earthly bodies, the godly beings were enchanted into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Those who were able to return to the spiritual worlds found the gods within all phenomena, they recognised the earlier gods as linked to the human beings before an earthly existence began. They learnt what the life of a soul was, learnt to recognise that the day with its impressions creates a weaker fragment out of the great world of the beings whose existence was endurance, eternity. They learnt to become disenchanted by the world of nature.

This happened to Novalis' soul when he united his eternity to Sophie's soul by emulating her in death. In this emulation his spirit flourished. He experienced “die to live” and in him rose what he called his “magical idealism”.

(Now followed the recitation of the fourth hymn, from part 20, and the start of Hymn 5.)

In this way Novalis could glance back to a time in which gods moved among men, when everything took place spiritually because spirits and souls had not yet descended into earthly bodies. He perceived a point of transition: how death hit the world and how the human beings during this time placed death as their earthly shadowing and how he tried to brighten it up through fantasy and art. But death remained a riddle.

Then something of universal significance happened. Novalis could perceive the universal meaning of what had happened at that time on earth. Souls from the kingdoms of nature descended to the earth. Forgotten were the memories of their spiritual original existence, yet a unique spiritual Being remained in this universal womb of creation from which everything descended. One Being provisionally held back; it had held itself above and only provisionally sent its gift of grace downward, and then, when human beings needed it the most, it also descend into the earthly sphere. It remained in the spiritual spheres above the being of the spiritual light, this Being was hidden behind the physical sun. It held itself in heavenly spheres and descended when human beings needed to once again be able to rise up to spiritual worlds. It descended with the Mystery of Golgotha when Christ appeared in a physical body.

Humanity understands Christ in His universal unfolding when the life of Jesus of Nazareth is followed back to His spiritual origins, to the unsolvable riddle of death. The Greek spirit of death appears as a pondering muse, as an enigma which cannot be solved. Even the Greeks sensed that the riddle which is hidden in the youth's soul, found its solution with the Event of Golgotha, that here victory overcomes death and as a result a new impulse is given to humanity.

This Novalis could see and as a result there appeared to him, from the mystery of faith and the mystery wisdom, the Star which the old Magi had followed. As a result he understood the actual essence of what the Christ death implied. In the night of the soul the riddle of death revealed itself to him, the riddle of the Christ. This was it, which this extraordinary individual wanted to learn—through the memory of earlier lives—what the Christ, what the event of Golgotha signified for the world.

Hymns to the Night
I

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light—with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood—the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it—but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance.—Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world—sunk in a deep grave—waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes.—The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light—how joyous and welcome the departure of the day—because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence—thy return—in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts—needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul—that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love—she sends thee to me—thou tenderly beloved—the gracious sun of the Night,—now am I awake—for now am I thine and mine—thou hast made me know the Night—made of me a man—consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

II

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.—Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep—gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes—in the magic oil of the almond tree—and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap—never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

III

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life—lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable—powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery.—As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing:—then, out of the blue distances—from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight—and at once snapt the bond of birth—the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning—the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world—Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust—and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed—I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream—and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

IV

Now I know when will come the last morning—when the Light no more scares away Night and Love—when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night—truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles—tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring—afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.

Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor—and into me pourest joyous life—but thou wilest me not away from Memory's moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me—praise the lustre of thy splendor—pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft—gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock—explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline—or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself—in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast—the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial—to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine—as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation—One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity—heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross—victory-banner of our breed.

Over I journey
And for each pain
A pleasant sting only
Shall one day remain.
Yet in a few moments
Then free am I,
And intoxicated
In Love's lap lie.
Life everlasting
Lifts, wave-like, at me,
I gaze from its summit
Down after thee.
Your lustre must vanish
Yon mound underneath—
A shadow will bring thee
Thy cooling wreath.
Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood—
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

V

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls—the earth was boundless—the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine—poured out by Youth-abundance—a god in the grape-clusters—a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves—love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies—Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape—

That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.
The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed
To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.
Mysterious was the monster's pathless road,
Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;
'Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,
With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.

Eternally from all things here disparted
That sway the heart with pleasure's joyous flow,
Divided from the loved ones who've departed,
Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe—
In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,
Seemed all was granted to the dead below.
Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss
On Death's inevitable, rocky cliff.

With daring spirit and a passion deep,
Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,
A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep—
The end, just like a harp's sigh, comes light.
Cool shadow-floods o'er melting memory creep,
So sang the song, into its sorry need.
Still undeciphered lay the endless Night—
The solemn symbol of a far-off might.

The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away—up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence—they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations—into it the gods went back—and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before—in the poverty of a poetic shelter—a son of the first virgin and mother—the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age—A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love—upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:

The youth thou art who ages long hast stood
Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;
A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom
For high humanity, a joyful start.
What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,
Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.
In everlasting life death found its goal,
For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.

Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan—his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer's departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man—He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes—in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death—Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother—then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land—countless tears wept his loved ones—the mystery was unsealed—heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper—delicately shaped from his dreams—awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world—buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.

Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave—joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee—behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father's arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee—in heavenly triumph—she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation—and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity—walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.

Uplifted is the stone—
And all mankind is risen—
We all remain thine own.
And vanished is our prison.
All troubles flee away
Thy golden bowl before,
For Earth and Life give way
At the last and final supper.

To the marriage Death doth call—
The virgins standeth back—
The lamps burn lustrous all—
Of oil there is no lack—
If the distance would only fill
With the sound of you walking alone
And that the stars would call
Us all with human tongues and tone.

Unto thee, O Mary
A thousand hearts aspire.
In this life of shadows
Thee only they desire.
In thee they hope for delivery
With visionary expectation—
If only thou, O holy being
Could clasp them to thy breast.

With bitter torment burning,
So many who are consumed
At last from this world turning
To thee have looked and fled,
Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.
Now to them we come,
To never go out again.

At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.
The gift of Love they keep,
From none can it be taken away.
To soothe and quiet his longing,
Night comes and inspires—
Heaven's children round him thronging
Watch and guard his heart.

Have courage, for life is striding
To endless life along;
Stretched by inner fire,
Our sense becomes transfigured.
One day the stars above
Shall flow in golden wine,
We will enjoy it all,
And as stars we will shine.

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss—
One everlasting poem—
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

6
Longing for Death

Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light's dominion,
Death's pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care.
We're weary of a life abroad,
And we now want our Father's home.

What in this world should we all
Do with love and with faith?
That which is old is set aside,
And the new may perish also.
Alone he stands and sore downcast
Who loves with pious warmth the Past.

The Past where the light of the senses
In lofty flames did rise;
Where the Father's face and hand
All men did recognize;
And, with high sense, in simplicity
Many still fit the original pattern.

The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,
Man's strain did burgeon glorious,
And children, for the world to come,
Sought pain and death victorious,
And, through both life and pleasure spake,
Yet many a heart for love did break.

The Past, where to the flow of youth
God still showed himself,
And truly to an early death
Did commit his sweet life.
Fear and torture patiently he bore
So that he would be loved forever.

With anxious yearning now we see
That Past in darkness drenched,
With this world's water never we
Shall find our hot thirst quenched.
To our old home we have to go
That blessed time again to know.

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more—
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling—
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Down to the sweet bride, and away
To the beloved Jesus.
Have courage, evening shades grow gray
To those who love and grieve.
A dream will dash our chains apart,
And lay us in the Father's lap.

This lecture is from the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. It is lecture 5 of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities throught Austria and Germany in the years 1908–1909.

The word “mission” is perhaps not quite the correct term for our examination of this extraordinary phenomenon at the end of the fifteenth century. Perhaps regarding connections to Savonarola's personality could urge us to say these links would be far more important than defining the mission of Savonarola. This other aspect could come to the fore as soon as members of our Anthroposophic world-view and world movement make themselves familiar with the being of Savonarola because out of his actions and characteristics various things can be learnt. In a being such as Savonarola's we may see the dawn of a new time and up to what point the development of Christianity had reached by the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is exactly clear what kind of activity was not effective. We can see what kind of activity was introduced into the development of mankind.

It is necessary to show how certain one-sided influences regarding the empowering and the presentation of Christianity became unsuitable. It didn't take long—with some single thorough strokes we would like to regard Savonarola's actions. Beside Savonarola we can place another figure, quite different in nature, of a Dominican monk. This monk of the monastery from which Savonarola's serious speeches were published, had painted the most wonderful, delicate paintings: Fra Angelico da Fiesole During this dawn of a new age it indicated how Christianity revealed itself in two gestures. This is the proof of how Christianity could be expressed through the soul at this time. This is one way, but the other way—and this is Savonarola's way—is how Christianity could be lived through during this time. One could, if one was such a person as Savonarola, with certain confidence, a strong will and a definite clear understanding, act as he did. Still comparatively young he believed that within such an Order, where the real rules of the Order should be fulfilled, a true life in Christianity could be experienced. If one still had what Savonarola had, the deepest moral courage of conviction, one could direct one's focus to everything happening in the world. One could compare Christianity with events happening in Rome, with the actual worldly life of the Pope, the Cardinals, or how it expressed itself in the wonderful creations of Michelangelo! One could observe how in all the catholic churches Mass was read according to the strictest Cult, giving people the feeling that they couldn't live without the Cult. One could also see that whoever came under the robe, the stole and chasuble, could in their civil lives honour a liberality but that this liberality which was striven for, seen in today's eyes, is by contrast mere children's games. One can take that which from a certain aspect had been striven for as a tendency, and see it become a reality up to the highest steps of the altar.

One could at that time connect the higher worlds in a glowing belief that was absolutely democratic: domination of the gods without any human rulers! This was the pull of Savonarola's heart. The Medici could be admired for all they had done for Italy and for all they had brought to Italy, but one could also, like Savonarola, see the great De Medici, of Lorenzo de Medici, as tyrants. Imagine being Lorenzo de Medici and considering allowing such a quarrelsome Dominican to preach as he wished. Lorenzo de Medici was a distinguished thinker. He could grasp various things, because things should be considered from both sides. He had drawn Savonarola to Florence but Savonarola went against the grain from the start in considering Lorenzo as his patron. When Savonarola became Prior of the monastery, he didn't even consider making the expected visit of thanks. When it was explained to him that Lorenzo had called him to Florence, he said: Do you believe that Lorenzo de Medici was the one who called Savonarola to Florence? No, it was God who called Savonarola to this monastery in Florence!

As a distinguished man Lorenzo donated something to the monastery and one can imagine Savonarola being calmed by what had been given to the monastery. However he gave all these gifts away and announced that the Dominicans were capable of regarding their vow of poverty and to gather no treasures.

Who were actually the enemies of Savonarola? All those who created the configuration and the reign on the physical plane. Nothing disconcerted Savonarola. He went straight ahead. He said: There is a Christendom. Its actual form is in fact unknown to people. The church disfigures it. It must disappear and be replaced by a new form which would reveal the true Christian spirit.—He continued preaching these proclamations. Initially his preaching was with great difficulty because he could only utter the words from his throat with great effort. However he became an orator whose following grew continuously, whose oratory talents increased ever more.

The ruling powers were initially liberal; they didn't want to oppose him. It was an Augustinian monk who felt obliged to deliver a speech which would annihilate Savonarola's power. His speech was delivered under the theme: “It doesn't befit us to know the day and hour when the divine Creator got involved with the world.” This Augustinian monk spoke in fiery words and one could say, being cognisant of the steams flooding Christian life, the entire declaration of belief of the Dominicans domain now opposed that of the Augustinians.—Savonarola prepared for battle and spoke about the same theme: “It befits us well to know things are not as they seem. It befits us to change them and know when the day and hour arrives.” The Florentine crowds cheered like they had cheered the Augustinian monk. He wasn't only considered a danger in Florence but also in Rome and in the whole of Italy. After the unbelievable agony of torture and falsified evidence he was condemned to be burnt at the stake.

Thus Savonarola lived while at the same time another Dominican monk painted a Christianity which hardly exists in the physical world. When we search for a specific word in our thoughts which was spoken by an extraordinary man regarding Savonarola, namely Jacob Burkhardt, the famous Renaissance historian, we can develop the opinion that life was so extensive in Italy that you stood directly before secularisation of the church, which meant the church turning into a worldly organisation, then we may conclude that Savonarola was the everlasting conscience of Christianity.

What caused the ineffectiveness of Savonarola despite his fiery entrance into Christianity? He is a historical figure. This was the cause: In this dawning of a new age and in this dusk of the church where Savonarola instilled his Christianity, something was introduced which worked against the external organisation of Christianity. This test proves it, not even such a figure as Savonarola could be produced again in Christianity. The spiritual-scientifically striving person should learn from this that there is something else necessary, something objective, which makes it possible for the deep springs of esoteric Christianity to be exhausted. Such an instrument can only be Anthroposophy. The figure of Savonarola is like a distant sign lit up in the future of what Anthroposophists should be learning, not through the means which one believed at the time, to re-discover Christianity, but with the means of anthroposophical spiritual science. As Anthroposophist one can learn much from this figure.

This lecture is the eighth of nineteen lectures in the volume Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. This lecture is also known as The Categories of Hegel.¹

The lecture today will be put into such a form, that through particular remarks connected with the elucidations you will be able to see where the bridge is to be made between Anthroposophy and Philosophy, and how certain philosophical concepts and knowledge can be of importance in the practice of spiritual science. Something is to be stated at the outset that will be useful to us in bringing the philosophical edifice altogether into a right relation to spiritual science. As a preparation, you have heard the logic lectures during the General Meeting (22 Oct. 1908, on the 4^th Dimension; 25 Oct. 1908, on Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). There we recognized thinking as the capacity, to place oneself over against the world in a technique of concepts. We characterized it in a certain way, when we wanted to obtain a concept from pure formal logic. We can only really speak of thinking, when it takes its course in concepts, and we strictly distinguished between perception, representation and concept. If such distinctions are said to be difficult, it must be borne in mind, that in spiritual science it is obligatory that one engage in strict soul exercises, which will increase to sharp and energetic conceptual contours.

We have learnt to know the concept itself as something, which is constructed wholly within our spirit, and this construction is a true one. All psychological disquisitions, which see in the concept only a shadow, arising through abstraction, of that which we have in the representation, remain stationary half way. The concept has not arisen thus, but in inward construction.

In order to get a picture of the place of the concept and the conceptual system, let us just represent to ourselves, what relation this world of concepts takes on the one side to sensible perception, and on the other side to the higher reality, which comes to us through super-sensible observation. The whole network of concepts that a man possess, beginning from the concept of number etc. to the concepts that Goethe constructed, but which in our western culture remain wholly in inception, you may represent as a tablet (Tafel), forming the boundary between the super-sensible and sensible worlds. Between these two spheres the world of concepts forms the boundary. If the observer of sense things were to direct only his eye or other perceptive organs to the outer world, he would merely experience representations. That was shown in the representation of the circle, which remains to us from the perception of the horizon on the ocean. If the human being on the other hand constructs the picture merely in the spirit, the pictures of all the points which are equal in distance from a point within, then in antithesis to the representation of the circle he possess the concept of the circle. Thus we could construct other concepts than mathematical ones, and could finally rise to real knowledge of the Goethean morphology, whose concepts have come into existence just as inwardly as the concept of the circle and so on. When we accordingly imagine the network of all the concepts which man can form, then one can approach the sensible reality with these concepts, and then one finds, that the sensible world agrees with one's concepts. What one has constructed as circles coincides with the circle that is given to him in the perception, through journeying out on the ocean. In this way in all true conceptual thinking we relate ourselves to the reality. The concept is decidedly not gained through observation—that is a conception which is very wide-spread today—the concept is plainly something wherein a man takes no account of the external reality. Now through this we established the place of the network of concepts in regard to the external sensible reality.

Now we must ask: how is it with the position of the network of concepts in regard to super-sensible reality? When he, who through the methods of clairvoyance discloses the super-sensible reality, now approaches this reality with his concepts, he will thus find the network of concepts coincides just as much with the super-sensible world. From the other side the super-sensible reality throws its rays as it were on the network of concepts, as on the one side does the sensible reality.

Now whence comes this network of concepts itself? Here that can only be asserted as fact, for the answer to this question can only result as the consequence of the logical path which we shall yet be able to take together. Today I will only give you a picture of this network of concepts, in order to show whence the network, which a man weaves within him, takes it origin. That is best made clear by a shadow picture. The shadow-picture of the hand would never arise if the hand were not there. The shadow-picture resembles its prototype, but it has one peculiarity! it is nothing! Through the fact that in the place of light the non-light comes, through the obliteration (obscuring??) of the light the shadow-picture comes into being.² The concepts arise in exactly the same way, through the fact that behind our thinking soul there stands the super-sensible reality.

The concepts also are really only an obliteration of the super-sensible reality, and because they resemble the spiritual world, as the shadow-pictures do the prototypes, for this reason the human being can form an inkling of the super-sensible worlds. When the perception of the super-sensible makes concept with the sensible, then these shadow-pictures arise. In the conceptual shadow-pictures you have the super-sensible reality just as little as in the shadow-picture of the hand you have the hand itself. Accordingly we have recognized here that the concepts are the boundary between the two realities, but originate from the super-sensible reality.

Now we ask ourselves: how can a man arrive at concepts, when he has no experience in super-sensible worlds? If he had only the sense-reality, he could only have representations. But it is not requisite to ascend into super-sensible reality in order to form concepts. The seer can perhaps arrive more easily at a complete conceptual world, because he has of course learnt to know the forces, which form the concepts. You will find the spiritual-scientific explanation of what is here said in my Theosophy. A man arrives at his concepts because he causes them to stream down upon him in that form (formlich). Now how is it possible for a man to arrive at a network of concepts filled with content? The majority of people have only arrived at pure concepts in mathematics. Most men, of course, believe that concepts arrive through abstractions. Naturally that is not at all the origin of concepts. Even thinking men are in general quite unclear as to this. When I tried to make clear the self-constructiveness of the concept in The Philosophy of Freedom I had the opportunity of experiencing something very curious. You find elucidated there, in adverse connection with Herbert Spencer, that to start from outer experience is a thoroughly unsatisfactory mode of forming the concept. (p. 55, 1932 ed.)

The concept cannot be gained from observation. That arises from the fact, that the growing human being only slowly and gradually forms the concepts conforming to the objects which surround him. The concepts are added to the observation.

A much read philosopher of the present day (Herbert Spencer) describes the spiritual process, which we carry out in connection with the observation as follows: when in walking through the fields on a September day, we hear a rustling a few steps in front of us, and at the side of the ditch from which it seems to come, we see the grass in movement, we shall probably go straight to the spot in order to learn what has produced the noise and the movement. At our approach a partridge flutters into the ditch, and therewith our curiosity is satisfied: we have what we call an explanation of the phenomenon. This explanation, be it remarked, amounts to the following: since in life we have so often experienced, that a disturbance of the quiet situation of small bodies accompanies the movement of other bodies situated between them, and as we have for this reason generalized the connections between such disturbances and such movements, we regard this special disturbance as explained as soon as we find that it is an example of this very connection! On closer inspection, the matter shows itself to be wholly different from the description given here. When I hear a noise, I first seek the concept for this observation. This concept only points one to something beyond the noise. One who does not reflect further, hears just the noise and is satisfied with that. But my reflection makes it clear to me, that I have to regard the noise as an effect. Thus it is only when I combine the concept of the effect with the perception of the noise, that I am led to go beyond the single observation and to seek for its cause. The concept of the effect calls up that of the cause, and then I seek for the object which causes it, and which I find in the form of the partridge. But these concepts, cause and effect, can never be gained through mere observation, however many cases it should embrace. The observation calls forth the thinking, and it is only this that shows me the way to link the single experience to another.

If one demands of a ‘strictly objective science’ that it should take its content from observation alone, one must demand at the same time that it should renounce all thinking. For thinking, according to its nature, transcends what is observed ...

If one would follow Spencer's line of thought, one would arrive at this, that concepts only arise through the crystallizing of the special observations out of the general.³ So long as I relate myself in regard to the noise, as Spencer describes it, I can never come to cognition at all.

Something is still requisite. A prominent philosopher of the present day, to whom I dedicated a copy of my book, wrote in the margin at the place just quoted: “the hare certainly does not do that”, and sent me the book back. But here we are of course not intending to write a philosophy of the hare. Our soul must be in a condition in which it is able to gain the network of the concepts when it is not in the position to get it from perception. The methods, even when they are the scientific methods, which one employs to form representations about the world through outer experience, all these methods cannot aid us to construct the real network of concepts in the human soul. But there must be a method, which is independent of external experience as well as clairvoyant experience, for the human soul ought in truth, as we presuppose, to be able to form concepts before it mounts up to the super-sensible. Accordingly a man has to proceed from one concept to another then he remains within the network of the concepts itself. That that takes place in the soul, makes it requisite that we presuppose a method having nothing to do with external observation or with clairvoyant experience. This movement in pure concepts one now calls, in the sense of the great philosopher Hegel, the “dialectic method”. That is the true dialectic method, where the human being lives only in concepts, and is as it were in a condition to cause one concept to germinate out of another. The man then lives in a sphere, where he takes no account of the sensible world and of that which stands behind it the super-sensible world.

We have pointed out what the soul does inasmuch as it continues mobile in the network of concepts. It begins to spin concept to concept in the sense of the dialectic method. It leads man from concept to concept. Granted that we have to begin somewhere, then we pass on from concept to concept. This must give as a result the sum of all concepts. They would constitute the sum of all concepts, which in the world-all are adapted below to the sense world and upwards to the super-sensible world as well. In the widest sense of the word one terms all these self-mobile concepts, adapted to the two worlds, “the Categories”. Whence it follows that at bottom of the whole human network of concepts is composed of the categories alone. With the same justice one might say: all concepts are categories, as one might say: all categories are concepts. One has, in truth, habitually called the weightiest, the radical concepts, the nodal points of the concepts, Categories. These more important concepts, following Aristotle, are called categories. But in the strict sense one can use the words ‘concept’ and ‘category’ interchangeably, so that we are justified in calling the sum of our self-mobile, self-producing concepts ‘theory of categories’. And Hegel's work—is really a system of categories.⁴ Hegel himself, of course, says this very thing: if one establishes the network of concepts in the whole ambit, one then has in it the ideas of the divine being before the creation of the world. Since we find the concepts in the world, they must have been originally established there. If we trace the concepts back, we discover the divine ideas, the categorical content of the world.

Today I cannot go into the historical development of the system of categories, but only show how in the main Hegel, the great master of categorical theory, has developed the system of concepts. Hegel is today perhaps the least understood philosopher. And when anything is ever said about him, it is worth but little. Wherefore people are still apt to say today, as they always said in his lifetime: he wants to develop the whole world in concepts. Even the Leipzig philosopher Krug understood him as though he wanted to construct the rose out of spiritual perceptions, as though one ought to develop it from concepts. Whereupon he received the answer, that it is not quite evident why the writing pen itself of the Leipzig philosopher should (not) be constructed of pure concepts.⁵

It is of extraordinary importance for Anthroposophists to make their way into these pure concepts. It is at the same time an important and strongly effective means of training the soul, and a means of overcoming a certain indolence and slovenliness of soul. These are effectively banished by Hegel's ‘Dialectic’. One has, you know, this unequivocal feeling of the slovenliness of the concepts in the perusal of modern books, when one has trained oneself in Hegel's system of concepts. True enough, one must have a starting point, one must begin with something; naturally, this must be the simplest concept, it must have the most diffused (geringsten) content, and the greatest ambit; that is the concept of “SEIN” (being: in existence, entity, mere subsistence). This is the concept that is applicable in the whole circumference of the world. Nothing is expressed about the kind of existence, when we speak of existence in the absolute sense. Hegel starts from the concept of SEIN. But how does one get out beyond this concept? However, in order not to remain at a standstill we must of course have a possibility of causing concept to germinate out of concept. This essential clue which we have not got we find in the very dialectical method itself, when it becomes clear that every concept contains in itself something still more than the concept itself, as, to be sure, the root contains the whole plant in itself which will yet grow out of it. It is so with the concept as well. If we look at the root with outer eyes we certainly do not see what impels the plant out of the root. In the same way there is something incorporated in the concept SEIN, which can cause the germination of a concept, and this, in truth, is the concept NICHT-SEIN (non-being, non-existence), the contrary of the first concept. The NICHTS is incorporated in the SEIN, so that here we have one concept germinate out of the other. If we would form a representation of the concept of NICHTS, that is quite as difficult as it is important. Many people, even philosophers, will say it is altogether impossible to form a concept of the NICHTS. But that is just the important thing for Anthroposophists. A time is coming when much will depend upon the fact that the concept of the NICHTS is grasped in the appropriate way. Spiritual science suffers from the fact that the concept of the NICHTS can not be grasped purely. From the Theosophy has become a theory of emanations.

Imagine yourself confronting the external reality and contemplating the world from a point of view which depends only on yourself. You contemplate, for example two men, one large and one small. You imagine something about them, a concept, which would never be conceived [about them] then unless you had met them both, the small and the large man. It is all one what you think about them, but the concept would never have been formed unless you had encountered them. You can find nothing in the primary causes, which could lead to the concept. It has emerged through the pure constellation, through the reference of things to each other. But now this concept, which has come out of the NICHTS, becomes a factor that continues active in you. The NICHTS becomes accordingly a positively real factor in the phenomena of the world, and you can never lay hold of this world phenomenon unless you have seized the NICHTS in this real significance. You would even understand the concept of Nirvana better if you had a clear concept of the NICHTS.

Now connect the two concepts “SEIN and “NICHTS” with one another; then you come to the WERDEN (becoming); a fuller concept, which prospectively contains the other two. WERDEN is a continuous transition from NICHT SEIN to SEIN. In the concept WERDEN you have [a] play [between] the two concepts SEIN & NICHTS. Starting then from the concept of WERDEN you arrive at the concept of DASEIN (existent there); it is that which next (das nachste) unites itself to the WERDEN; the stiffening of the WERDEN is the DASEIN (existential state), a condensed WERDEN. A WERDEN must precede DASEIN.

Now what [do] we get when we have developed four such concepts within us and gained them in this way? We get much from them. In the concept of WERDEN then, we are thinking of nothing else than of what we have learned as content of the concept. We must forthwith exclude everything that does not belong to the concepts. Only SEIN AND NICHTSEIN belong thereto. Wherefore a strictly trained thinker is so hard to understand. When a concept is spoken of, one ought really just as little to think in connection with [it] of something diverse from it as in the case of the concept ‘triangle’. Dialectic is a splendid schooling for thinking.

Already we have four sequent categories: SEIN, NICHTSEIN, WERDEN, DASEIN. We could then go on and cause every possible thing to germinate out of DASEIN, and we would obtain a rich DASEIN from this one line. But we can also go otherwise to work. SEIN can also be developed on the other side; this is very fruitful. The pure idea (Gedanke) of the SEIN (existence) is projected into reality in thinking.⁶ At the moment when we grasp the concept SEIN we must designate it as WESEN (Nature, essence, being, i.e. existent but not outwardly. Tr.)

The WESEN is SEIN retained within itself, the through and through self-penetrating SEIN. That will become evident upon reflection on the essential (wesentliche) and the inessential (unwesentliche) element in a thing. The WESEN is the SEIN at work within, the SEIN wholly devoting itself to the work, it is the WESEN-being. We speak of the WESEN of man when we associate his higher members with the lower and contemplate the concept of the WESEN as the concept attaching itself directly to the SEIN. From the concept of WESEN we gain the concept of ERSCHEINUNG (appearance or phenomenon), the self-manifestation outwardly, the contrary of WESEN, which has the WESEN within it; it is, namely, that which emerges. WESEN and ERSCHEINUNG are in a lie relation as SEIN to NICHTS. If we again connect WESEN and ERSCHEINUNG with each other, we get the ERSCHEINUNG that once more itself contains the WESEN. We distinguish between the outer appearance and the inner essence. But when inner WESEN overflows into ERSCHEINUNG, so that the appearance itself contains the WESEN, then we are speaking of WIRKLICHKEIT (Reality). No man trained in dialectics will express the concept REALITY otherwise than by thinking therein of APPEARANCE penetrated by WESEN. Reality is the fusion of the two concepts.

All speaking about the world must be permeated by those concepts which receive their contours through the inner texture (Gefuge), the organic edifice (Bau) of the whole world of concepts. We can still go on, ascend of even richer concepts. We could say: Wesen is the Sein which is in itself, which in itself has come to itself, which can manifest itself. If now this Sein not only manifests itself, but furthermore still extends its lines (Linien) to the environment, and is thus capable of expressing something yet different we arrive at the concept of BEGRIFF (concept) itself. We have our Wesen in us; it works (arbeitet) in us. But when we cause the concept to work in us then we have something in us that points outwards which embraces the outer world.⁷ Accordingly we can ascend from Wesen, Erscheinung, and Wirklichleit to BEGRIFF. We now have the concept in us, and we have seen in formal logic how the concept works in the conclusion. There the concept remains within itself. But now the concept can go out. Then we are speaking of a concept which gives back the nature (Natur) of the things. We there come to true OBJECTIVITY. In the contrast to the subjectively working concept, we come here to objectivity. As appearance (ERSCHEINUNG) relates itself to the WESEN, so objectivity to the concept. And one has only rightly apprehended the concept of objectivity when it has taken place in this way. If we now connect BEGRIFF—concept—and OBJECTIVITY, we come to the IDEE, the idea, which is at one and the same time objective appearance and contains the subjective within itself.

In this way the concepts grow on all sides out of the primary stem-concept, out of the SEIN. Thus there arises the transparent diamond-crystal world of concepts, with which only we should again approach the sense world. Then is exhibited how the sensible and super-sensible world coincide with the concept-dialectic, and the human being comes to that concordance of the concepts with the reality, in which really rightful cognition consists.

• 1. At the beginning the source document the following is written: “Aristotle's Categories or Classes or Conditions or States: 1. Substance,2. Quality,3. Quantity,4. Relation,5. Action,6. Passion,7. Time,8. Place,9. Situation,10. Habit”
• 2. In the source document ‘obscuring’ is placed above ‘obliteration’ as it indicate a correction, but the latter is not crossed out.
• 3. In the source document the sentence reads “…crystallising out of the special…”, ‘out’ appears to be crossed out, but this is not absolutely clear.
• 4. In the source document ‘theory’ is placed over ‘system’ so as to suggest ‘system of categories’ could also be ‘theory of categories’, also above “Hegel's work”, and under “sum of our self-mobile” is the sentence (hand-written): “the logic derived from Logos, which of course is also a concept”.
• 5. In the source document ‘not’ is inserted as a hand-written correction, but with a ‘?’ after it, so as to indicate that the corrector is not sure about this correction.
• 6. In the source document ‘projected’ (hard to read) is an alteration from ‘protracted’.
• 7. In the source document “… it works (arbeitet) in us. But when we cause the concept to work in us …” is inserted (hand-written) as a correction.

This lecture is known under the following titles: The Christmas Mystery, Novalis as Seer, The Christ Being, Past, Present, and Future. This lecture first appeared in English in The Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 12, 1980, No. 4.

Individuals appear in the world from time to time who are able to see in direct vision what has been realised through Feeling by thousands upon thousands of souls and hearts in the course of the centuries. But in the modern age only those who are familiar with the findings of spiritual ‘clear-seeing’ know that the effects of the event of Mystery of Golgotha on evolution are always perceptible to the true seer.

The entire spiritual sphere of the Earth was changed through what took place at Golgotha. And ever since then, if the eye of the soul has been opened through contemplation of this Event, the seer beholds the presence of the everlasting power of the Christ in the spiritual sphere of the Earth. Other men are impressed by the power of the impulse proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha and the great truths connected with that Event; they realise, too, that since then the human heart has been able to experience something that could never previously have been experienced or felt on the Earth. But to a seer this is perceptible reality.

The young German poet Novalis became a seer—we might almost say ‘miraculously’—by the grace of divine-spiritual Powers. Through a deeply shattering event which made him aware, as if by a stroke of magic, of the connection between life and death, his eyes of spirit were opened and as well as a great vista of past ages of the Earth and Cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before him. He was able to say of himself that he was one who with the eyes of spirit has actually seen what is revealed when ‘the stone is lifted’ and the Being who has furnished earthly existence with the proof that life in the spirit will forever overcome death, becomes visible.

In the case of Novalis we cannot really speak of a self-contained life in the ordinary sense, for his was like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The Initiation conferred upon him as it were through Grace, brought to life within him his achievements and experiences in earlier incarnations; there was a kind of consolidation of intuitions and insights that had been his in a previous life. And because he looked back through the ages with his own awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to affirm that nothing in his life was comparable in importance with the experience of having discovered Christ as a living reality. Such an experience is like a repetition of the happening at Damascus, when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus and rejected their proclamation, received in higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is present, and that the Event of Golgotha is unique in the whole process of the evolution of humanity. Those whose eyes of spirit are open can themselves behold this Event, for in truth Christ was not only present in the Body that was once His dwelling-place. He has remained with the Earth; through Him the Sun-Power has united with the Earth.

Novalis speaks of the revelation that came to him as ‘unique’ and he maintains that only those who with their whole soul are willing to relate themselves with this Event are men in the true sense. He rightly says that the ancient Indian, with his sublime spirituality, would have allied himself with Christ had he but known Him. Not out of any dim inkling or blind faith, but out of actual knowledge, Novalis says that the Christ whom he has seen with eyes of spirit is a Power pervading all beings. This Power can be recognised by the eye in which it is working. The eye that beholds the Christ has itself been formed by the Christ-Power. The Christ-Power within the eye beholds the Christ outside the eye.

These are truly wonderful words! Novalis is also aware of the stupendous truth that since the Event of Golgotha the Being we call Christ has been the planetary Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit by whom the Earth's body will gradually be transformed. A wonderful vista of the future opens out before Novalis. He sees the Earth transfigured; he sees the present Earth in which the residue of ancient times is still contained, transformed into the Body of Christ; he sees the waters of the Earth permeated with Christ's Blood, and he sees the solid rocks as Christ's Flesh. He sees the body of the Earth gradually becoming the Body of Christ; he sees the Earth and Christ miraculously made one; he sees the Earth in future time as a great organism enshrining man, an organism whose soul is Christ.

In this sense, and out of his deep insight into occult truths, Novalis speaks of Christ as the Son of Man. Just as in a certain sense men are the ‘Sons of the Gods’, that is to say of the ancient Gods who through untold millions of years have moulded and shaped our planet, who have built the bodies in which we live and the ground upon which we move, so, by overcoming earthly things, man's task is to build, through his own powers, an Earth that will be the body of the new God, the God of the future. And whereas the men of old looked back to the primeval Gods, yearning to be united with them in death, Novalis recognises the God who in time to come will have as his body all that is best in us and that we can offer to Him. In Christ he sees the Being to whom humanity offers itself in order that this Being may have a body. He recognises Christ as the ‘Son of Man’ in this higher, cosmological sense. He speaks of Christ as the ‘God of the future’.

All these experiences and perceptions are so pregnant with meaning that they are well able to kindle the true mood of Christmas in our souls. And so we will let one who lived a brief life at the end of the eighteenth century, dying at the age of 29, describe the experiences associated with the greatest event in his life—the sublime vision of the Christ Being.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) here recited a poem from the Spiritual Songs of Novalis.)

The Christmas Tree has not been the symbol of the Christmas Festival for any length of time. We shall find no poem on the Christmas Tree among, let us say, the works of a poet such as Schiller, although had such a custom existed in his day he would certainly have recognised its poetic possibilities and would not have found it difficult to write a poem on the subject. But in Schiller's time the Christmas Tree in its now familiar form was unknown. It is a young and quite recent institution. In earlier times men celebrated this festival in a different way. However far we look back into past ages, as long as one can speak of human beings in their present form or having the rudiments of that form, we shall everywhere find an institution that is akin to our Christmas Festival; we shall find it in constantly new forms among the widespread masses of the peoples and as an enactment in the highest Mysteries.

The very fact that the festival itself is so ancient and our present symbol of it so recent, is indicative of an element of eternity, of an eternal reality from which new forms ever and again spring forth. This Christ-Festival and all the feelings and experiences it symbolises, are as ancient as humanity on Earth. But man will always be able to find new symbols, symbols that are in keeping with the times, as outward forms of expression for this festival. Just as Nature herself is rejuvenated every year and her eternal forces bud forth in forms that are forever new, so it is with the symbols of Christmas piety; in their constant rejuvenation they betoken the eternal reality of this festival. And so in the solemnity of this Christmas hour we will bring a picture before our souls of what men on Earth have experienced at the time when we now celebrate Christmas.

As pupils of Spiritual Science we can send our thoughts back to ages in the far, far past, to begin with to the times when our souls were incarnated in Atlantean bodies, bodies very unlike those of today. In that epoch there were great Teachers who were also the Leaders of humanity. Men looked out upon a different world, where there was no bright sunlight to reveal to them in clear outlines the forms of objects in the kingdoms of Nature. Everything around them was as though swathed in mist—not only because much of Atlantis was actually covered with mist and fog through which the sunlight could not penetrate to the same extent as later on, but also because man's faculty of perception had not yet developed to the stage where external objects appeared in clear outline. When men woke in the morning they saw everything around them in divine Nature swathed in mist and surrounded by auric colours, and when they went to sleep at night they passed into a spiritual world without falling into the oblivion and unconsciousness of sleep today.

When men went to sleep in the days of Atlantis, they beheld the divine-spiritual Beings who were their companions; they beheld those divine Beings who were once experienced as realities and who in later times were preserved as memories in different regions of the Earth, bearing different names: Wotan, Thor, Baldur, in Middle Europe; the names of Zeus, Pallas Athene, Ares, and so forth, were given to those divine figures who had once been visible to man's eyes of soul in old Atlantis. But in Atlantean times the divine worlds were no longer the highest, creative worlds whence man had come forth in the age of Lemuria. Our souls were once born from the womb of divine Beings of whose sublimity and majesty there can be only a dim inkling today. These same divine Beings sent forth the cosmic orbs and all the forces surrounding us. Man was within the womb of divine Beings whose outward expressions we behold in the celestial bodies; they were the Beings who flash through the air in lightning and thunder, whose expressions are the plants and animals and whose sense-organs are the crystals. All the warmth that streams to us, all the forces in play around us—all this constitutes the body of divine-spiritual Beings from whom man has come forth.

The more deeply man descended to the Earth, the more closely he united with material substances, the more he membered into himself the substances of the Earth, the less capable he became of beholding the great Gods.

In primeval times man had as yet no faculty for cognising the material world; he could neither see with eyes nor hear with ears; pictures that were not pictures of minerals, animals or plants but of divine-spiritual Beings above him, surged through his soul. In later ages he lived more and more on the physical plane, learning through the outer sense-organs to know the physical world. In the days of Atlantis, sight on the physical plane alternated with a form of clairvoyance that had remained as a relic of the ancient state of sublime spirituality in which man once had lived. But the Gods he was still able to behold on the astral plane when by night he enjoyed the bliss of living as a spiritual being among other spiritual beings, were lower in rank than the highest Gods.

As the physical plane grew clearer, man's vision on the spiritual planes grew dim. But in ancient Atlantis there were Initiates who as well as imparting the deeper teachings concerning the Gods of old whence men had come forth, proclaimed a truth which they presented in somewhat the following way.

‘Look at the seed of a plant; see how this seed develops into a plant. It grows, sends forth leaves, sepals, blossom and fruit. One who observes the plant in this way can say to himself: I look back to the seed; the seed is the creator of the leaves and the blossom I see before me, and this blossom holds within it the seed of a new plant; the blossom forms itself into a new seed. And one can also look into the future.’—Thus did the great Atlantean Initiates speak to their pupils and through their pupils to the whole people. They said: ‘You can look back to the seeds of the Gods whence men have come forth. The spiritual and physical realities you see around you are all leaves that have sprung from the seeds of the primeval Gods. See in them the forces of those divine seeds even as the forces of the seed from which the plant has come forth can be seen in its leaves. But we are able to point to something more: in future times there will spread around man something that will be akin to the blossom of a plant, something that has, it is true, issued from the ancient Gods but—as the blossom ripens a seed—contains a seed in which the new God unfolds!’

The world is born of Gods—such was the ancient teaching. That the world will give birth to a God, to the great God of the future—such was the prophecy made by the Initiates of Atlantis to their pupils and through them to the people. For like all Initiates, those of Atlantis saw into the future, foresaw the great events of the future. Their vision reached beyond the time of the great Atlantean flood, beyond that stupendous happening whereby the face of the Earth was changed. They foresaw the civilisations that would arise in the future, in the land of the holy Rishis, in the land of Zarathustra; they foresaw the ancient Egyptian culture founded by Hermes, the conditions heralded and inaugurated by Moses, the happiness prevailing in Greece, the might and strength of Rome. All this the Atlantean Initiates saw in advance, and their vision extended to our own time and even beyond it. And to their intimate pupils they imparted hope, saying to them: ‘True, you must leave the spirit-lands where now you dwell, you must be ensnared in matter, you must clothe yourselves in sheaths woven from physical substances. There will come a time when you must labour on the physical plane, when it will seem as though the ancient Gods have vanished from your ken. But your eyes will be able to turn to where the new star can appear to you, to where the new seed comes to life, where there will spring forth the new God of the future, the God who has waited through the ages in order to appear in humanity at the right and proper time!’

When the Atlantean Initiates wanted to explain to their pupils and to all the people why man was destined to descend into the vale of Earth, they said to them that all souls would at some future time see and experience the One who was to come, who was still hidden from their sight, dwelling in a realm invisible to physical eyes as well as to the eyes of spirit which while man was still resting in the womb of the Gods, had gazed upon Him.

Then came the Atlantean flood. In a comparatively short time the face of the Earth was changed, and after the migrations of the peoples from West to East, the great post-Atlantean civilisations arose, beginning with that of ancient India.

The great Teachers in that epoch, the seven holy Rishis, taught their pupils, and indeed all the Indian people, of the reality of a spiritual world, for their life was now lived on the physical plane and they needed so to be taught. Their eyes could now see only the outer form of the physical world as the expression of the Spiritual, but the Spiritual itself they could not see. Yet there lived in the soul of every Indian something that can be called a dim remembrance of what the soul had once experienced among Gods in the age of old Atlantis. This remembrance aroused a yearning of such intensity for what had been lost, that the soul could establish no close relationship with the physical plane, could only regard it as maya, illusion, unreality. Nor could souls have endured such conditions on the physical plane had not the Rishis, filled with the fire of spiritual inspiration, been able to teach them of the glories of the ancient world that had departed from them. The teachings given by the Rishis concerning the Cosmos are still very little understood today; they were teachings based on a primeval wisdom, because the Rishis were initiated into what man had experienced when he was still within the womb of the Gods.

For man was present when the Gods separated the Sun from the Earth and ordained the paths of the celestial orbs—but during his later earthly pilgrimage he had forgotten it!

This wisdom was taught by the Rishis. And something else too was taught to those who were the most advanced and able to feel its significance. To them it was said: ‘From the world in which man is now placed, the world he now sees as maya, there will spring the Being who cannot yet be visible in this world because the human soul has not reached the stage where it can unfold the power to know this Being. But He who is still beyond your world will appear!’ Vicva karman was the name of the Being proclaimed by the ancient Teachers of India as the great Spirit of the future. To the Indian people it was said: ‘You cannot see Him yet, any more than you can see in the blossom the seed of the new plant. But as truly as the blossom contains the seed, as truly does maya unfold the germinating power that will make life in the physical world a worthy existence. The Being known in later times as the Christ was proclaimed in advance by the Teachers of ancient India; they, in true humility, were his prophets. Their spiritual gaze could turn in two directions—back to that primeval wisdom according to which the world was fashioned, and forward into the future. And to men engaged in the daily tasks of life they proclaimed the coming of One whose power would penetrate into the depths of human hearts and stir human hands to activity.

There was no age when He was not proclaimed, whenever one can speak of human culture and human understanding. If in later times men have forgotten the proclamations, this is not the fault of the great Teachers of an earlier humanity.

Then came the ancient Persian civilisation of which Zarathustra was the Leader. To his intimate pupils, and again to all the people, Zarathustra proclaimed that in everything by which man is surrounded, in the forces streaming from the Sun and from the other celestial bodies to the Earth, in all that fills the airy expanse, lives a Being now revealed to man in veiled form only.—And to his Initiates, Zarathustra was able to speak of the great Sun-Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of the God of Good. What he said to his pupils may be rendered in somewhat the following way.—‘Look at the plant. It grows from the seed, develops leaves and blossom. But the plant is pervaded by a mysterious force which arises in the heart of the blossom as the new seed. What surrounds the seed will fall away; but the innermost force that can be perceived in the heart of the blossom enables you to feel that a new plant will arise from the old. If you ponder on the power and the force of the Sun's light, Feeling that in it you are beholding merely the physical expression of a spiritual reality and letting yourselves be inspired by the spiritual power of the Sun, then you will begin to understand the prophetic announcement of the Divine Fruit that is to be born from the Earth!’

When these intimate pupils had reached a very advanced stage, they were permitted, at certain times, to listen to teachings even more secret. And in consecrated hours Zarathustra spoke to them of One who would come when men were ready to receive Him into their midst with understanding. Mighty pictures of the One who would come were presented by Zarathustra to his pupils. To one pupil he could reveal the picture itself, to a second a kind of reflection only; to the others it was only possible to give a general picture of what would come to pass in the future.—Thus He who was called Christ was also proclaimed in the civilisation of Zarathustra in ancient Persia.

So also it was in Egyptian civilisation. Hermes too had his Egyptian Initiates and through them had proclaimed the Christ in a certain way to all the people of ancient Egypt. In the legend of Osiris may be seen a reflection of the proclamation of Christ.

What was it that the legend of Osiris conveyed to men? The legend is that in olden times the people were blessed in that Osiris ruled in the Land of Egypt in true union with Isis, his spouse. His evil brother, Set, or Typhon, resolved to destroy Osiris. To this end he built a chest in which Osiris was imprisoned, and cast it into the sea. Isis eventually found the chest but could not bring Osiris to life again on the Earth. He had been transported into higher realms and since then could be seen by men only after they had passed through the gate of death. To every Egyptian it was said: After death you can be united with Osiris as truly as your hand is united with you here on Earth. After death you can be part of Osiris and call him your own higher Self, but only provided you have merited this on the physical plane. After death you can be united with the God known to you as the Most High.

To one who was an Initiate, something more could be revealed. When he had undergone all the ordeals and testings, when he had received all the teachings that must precede vision of the higher worlds, then even during physical life between birth and death the picture of Osiris was revealed to him—the picture that came before other men only after death. The Being with whom the pupil of the Egyptian Initiates must feel himself united came before him when he was outside his body, when his ether-body, astral body and ego had been raised out of the physical body; and then, one who even in his lifetime had gazed upon Osiris could proclaim to the others:- Osiris lives! But never could it have been proclaimed in ancient Egypt: Osiris dwells among us! This was expressed in the legend by saying: Osiris is a king who has never been seen on the Earth! The ‘chest’ is nothing else than the physical body. The moment Osiris is laid in the physical body, the inimical forces of the physical world, forces that are not yet ready to receive the God, assert themselves with such strength that they bring the God to destruction. The physical world is not ready yet to receive the God with whom man must be united. ‘But’—so spake those who could bear personal witness that Osiris lives—‘although we say to you that the God lives in very truth, it is only the Initiate who can behold him, when he (the Initiate) is away from the physical world. The God with whom man must become one in his inmost being, lives, but he lives in the spiritual world. He alone who leaves the physical world can be united with the God!’

At the same time men were beginning more and more to love the physical world; for it was their task and mission to work in the physical world, to establish one culture after another in the physical world. To the same extent to which the eyes looked out with clearer vision, and intelligence was better able to fathom the happenings of the physical world, to the same extent to which man's knowledge increased, enabling him to make discoveries and inventions useful for the purposes of physical life—to that same extent it became constantly more difficult for him during life between birth and death to gaze into the spiritual world. He could hear from the Initiates that the God with whom he must be united, lives in very truth; but from the physical world he could bring little that would make definite communion with Osiris possible for him in yonder world. Greater and greater darkness spread over life in the world surmised by man to be the home of the God with whom he must become one.

Then came the age of Greece when with all their delight in the physical world, men achieved that marriage between spirit and matter which bore such glorious fruit on the physical plane. In the wonderful masterpieces of ancient Greece we have a picture of how, in the epoch when the Event of Golgotha was to take place, men were related to the spiritual world. It is difficult to conceive but it is true nevertheless, that the supreme achievement of architecture—the Greek temple—corresponds with the lowest point in man's relationship with the spiritual world.

Let us picture a Greek temple towering before us. In its forms, in its perfection and wholeness, it is the very purest, noblest expression of the Spiritual—so that it could once be said, and said with truth: the God himself dwells in the Greek temple. The God was present in the temple, for the lines woven by the material were everywhere in harmony with the spiritual order of the Cosmos and with the lines pervading the physical plane as the directions of space. There is no more beautiful, no nobler example of the interpenetration of the spirit of man and physical matter than a Greek temple. It is the unparalleled example of union between the higher worlds and physical matter.

Through their works of art and the principles expressed in their creation, the Greeks were able to make the ancient Gods come down among them. And even if the Greeks did not actually behold Zeus or Pallas Athene when they had so descended, nevertheless the Gods were there, drawn and enchanted into these works of art—the Gods who had once been visible to men and among whom they had lived in the times of Atlantis. Men were able to provide a glorious dwelling-place for the ancient Gods.

And now let us see what the Greek temple represents in another respect. Suppose clairvoyant consciousness has before it a Greek temple. What will now be said holds good even of the sparse remains still surviving of the Greek temple architecture.—Think of what happens when clairvoyant consciousness has before it a relic such as one of the temples at Paestum. The harmony of the lines presented by the columns and roof coverings can literally fill one with rapture. Such perfection is there that one can picture and feel the very presence of divinity in the physical structure itself. The same feeling can arise when Greek architecture is seen through the eyes of the physical body.

And now think of clairvoyant consciousness transported into the spiritual world. There it is as if a black screen were drawn across what is to be seen in the physical world; what is to be seen there is as though obliterated. Nothing of all these splendours of the physical plane can be carried over into the spiritual world. Supreme beauty—when such indeed it is—achieved on the physical plane, is obliterated in the spiritual world. And then we realise that it is no myth when, on meeting an Initiate, one who was a leading figure in Greece uttered the words: Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades! (Homer: Odyssey, Song XI, verse 488-491)—In Greece, where man could find such bliss in the physical world, souls entered a shadowy existence when they passed into the world of the dead. Splendour in the physical world—equivalent barrenness in the spiritual world.

Let us now make two other comparisons with the experience aroused by a Greek temple.—Think of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, or Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper—works created after the Event of Golgotha and influenced by its mysteries. The sight of these pictures can fill the soul with rapture, and this is also true of clairvoyant consciousness.

When the eyes of clairvoyant consciousness rest upon these pictures on the physical plane and this consciousness then rises into the spiritual world, a man realises, although the physical is no longer seen: What I take into the spiritual world from the experience aroused by these pictures is not simply an echo of the physical; here there is not only the rapture I experienced at the sight of them, but now for the first time I realise all their glory; in the physical world I merely laid the seed of what I now experience in infinitely greater majesty and splendour!—When a man contemplates such pictures in which the mysteries connected with Golgotha are contained, he is laying the seed—but only the seed—for a greater knowledge in the spiritual world. What has made this possible? It has been made possible because the spiritual Power proclaimed so long in advance, actually appeared on the Earth. Mankind had succeeded in unfolding a blossom in which the seed of the God of the future could ripen. Through the Event of Golgotha something was communicated to Earth existence that man can not only take with him into the spiritual world but that in the spiritual worlds appears in higher glory and sublimity.

At the moment when the physical body of Christ Jesus died on Golgotha, Christ appeared among those who were living between death and a new birth. He could proclaim to them what none of the earlier Initiates, when they passed into the spiritual world, could have proclaimed. When the earlier Initiates—let us say of the Eleusinian Mysteries—passed from this physical world into the world of those living between death and a new birth, what would the Eleusinian Initiates have been able to say to those souls? They could have told them of happenings on the physical plane, but this would have caused them nothing but longing and grief. For their life had taken root entirely on the physical plane and in yonder world, where nothing physical could be found and darkness prevailed, souls could not share the Feeling which made a man of importance on the physical plane exclaim: Better it is to be a beggar on the physical plane than a king in the realm of the Shades! The Initiates who could bring such treasures to those living on the physical plane could have brought nothing to the souls then living in yonder world. Then came the Event of Golgotha. Christ appeared among the dead—and for the first time there could be proclaimed in the spiritual world an event of the physical world which forms the beginning of a bridge leading over from the physical into the spiritual world. When Christ appeared in the nether world it was as though light flashed through the spiritual worlds. For in the physical world itself incontrovertible proof had been furnished that the spiritual can forever conquer death! And thus it came to pass that man can also carry over with him into the spiritual world, experiences that come to him in the physical world.

This holds good of St. John's Gospel in an even higher degree and also of the other Gospels which tell of the Event of Golgotha. A man who studies the Gospel of St. John on the physical plane, experiences intellectual joy from the reading of this great record; but when he passes into the spiritual world he knows that what he was able to experience in the physical world was but a foretaste of what he can now perceive and behold. The fact of supreme importance is that man can now take his treasures with him from the physical plane into the spiritual world.

Since the Event of Golgotha the spiritual world has been illumined with an ever brighter, ever clearer light. Everything existing in the physical world has issued from the spiritual world. When he passed from the physical into the spiritual world, pre-Christian man could say: Here is the wellspring and origin of everything the physical world contains. What has come forth from the spiritual world are but the effects. But since the Event of Golgotha, man can say when he passes from the physical into the spiritual world: In the physical world too there is causality and what is experienced on the physical plane works over into the spiritual world.

And so it will continue—in ever-increasing measure. Everything proceeding from the work of the old Gods will die away and what will blossom forth will grow on into the future, as the workings of the God of the future. This is what will pass over into the spiritual world. It is just as when a man, looking at the seed of a new plant, says to himself: True, it has come forth from an old plant, from an earlier seed, but now the old has fallen away, has vanished, and now the new seed is there, the seed that will unfold into the new plant, the new blossom.—We too live in a world where leaves and blossom have issued from the seeds born of the ancient Gods. But more and more the new fruit, the Christ-fruit, is unfolding and everything else will fall away. What is wrought out here in the physical world will be of value for the future in so far as it is carried over into the spiritual world. Before the eyes of Spirit a world arises in the future, a world which has its roots in the physical as our world once had its roots in the spiritual. Just as men are the sons of the Gods, so, out of what men in the physical world experience by rising to an understanding of the Event of Golgotha, the body will be formed for those new Gods of the future, of whom Christ is the Leader. So do the old worlds live on into the new; the old dies utterly away, and the new springs into bud out of the old. But this could come about only because humanity was able to unfold a blossom for that spiritual Being Who was to become the God of the future.

This blossom that could unfold within it the seed of the God of the future could only be a threefold human sheath consisting of physical body, ether body and astral body, a sheath cleansed and purified by all that could be attained by man on Earth. And this sheath of Jesus of Nazareth who sacrificed himself in order that the Christ-Seed might be received, this blossom of manhood, represents the very purest essence that the spiritual endeavours of evolving mankind have been able to produce. Not until the earth was ready to bring forth her fairest blossom could the seed for the new God appear. And the birth of this blossom is commemorated in our Christmas Festival. In our Christmas Festival we celebrate the birth of the blossom which was to receive the Christ-Seed.

Christmas is a festival wherein men can gaze into the past and also into the future. For from the past has issued the blossom out of which unfolds the seed for the future. The threefold sheath of Christ was a product of the old Earth—woven and born out of the highest that it was in men's power to achieve. And no outer presentation of a mystery can make a more powerful impression upon us than the presentation of the mystery of how the fairest flower of humankind could spring from the purest calyx.

That mankind once issued from the womb of the Godhead, that man was once a spiritual being and descended into material existence—how can this be more beautifully presented than by indicating how the Spiritual gradually densifies, how man himself has densified out of the formless haze of the Spiritual? As a prophetic foreshadowing, the ancient Egyptian depicted the lion-headed Goddess, still wholly spiritual, belonging to the age when man was still hardly material, still resting as an etheric-spiritual being in the womb of the Godhead. Then, anticipating the later ‘Sistine Madonna’, we have the Egyptian portrayal of another female form: Isis with the child Horus. There we see how what is born from the clouds, that is to say from the Spirit, has densified into the calyx, into that which represents the human being developing an into the future. This conception, already foreshadowed by men of ancient time, we see in the Christian Madonna with the Child Jesus.

With supreme purity and delicacy, Raphael has breathed this mystery into form in his portrayal of the Madonna. A human being crystallises out of angels' heads and in turn brings forth Jesus of Nazareth, the blossom into which the Christ-Seed is to be received. The whole story of the evolution of humanity is contained in a most wonderful way in this picture of the Madonna. No wonder that as he stood before the Madonna, there arose in the one to whose words we have listened today, the glorious remembrance from the incarnation of which his last incarnation was again a remembrance, and who brought to life within himself all the sublime insight which this pictured mystery of mankind could awaken; no wonder that these feelings streamed to the being from whom Christ was born, to the figure who brought forth the calyx from which sprang the blossom that could allow the seed of the new God to ripen!

And so we see how in the supremely gifted Novalis, feelings free of all denominational bias quicken to life at the portrayal of this holy Mystery which was enacted at the first Christmas and is repeated at every Christmastide. It is the Mystery of the ancient Initiates, represented by the Magi, bringing their offerings to the new Mystery. The Wise Men, who are bearers of the wisdom of times past, make their offerings to that which is to go forward into the future, that which, in a human being, will one day harbour the power by which all worlds connected with the Earth are pervaded.

Novalis experienced the Christ Mystery, the Mary Mystery, in relation to the Cosmic Mystery, the light of which shone before his eyes of soul as it had shone at the first Christmas, when Beings who had not descended to the physical plane proclaimed the union between a cosmic and an earthly Power, which can become a reality in human hearts and in the Cosmos itself when the human heart unites with Christ. The Egyptian proclamation: ‘The God with whom you must be united dwells in the world that can be reached only after death’, holds good no longer. For now the God with whom man must be united lives among us here, between birth and death; and men can find Him when they unite their hearts and souls with Him in this world. Thus in the first Holy Night of Christendom the strain resounded:

Offenbarung durch die Höhen dem Gotte,
Ruhe und Stille durch die Erdenräume,
Seligkeit in den Menschen.

Revelation in the Heights to God,
Quiet and peace through all the Earth,
Blessed joy in Men.¹

Poems by Novalis (‘Marienlieder’) were recited by Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) at the end of this lecture.

• 1. This should be regarded as an approximate translation of the rather unusual rendering of the Christmas message.

Berlin, February 15, 1909

You will have been able to see from the one lecture given here on the more complicated question of reincarnation that the spiritual scientific view of the world continues its progression. Hence, what in the beginning could be presented as elementary truths is undergoing a metamorphosis, so that gradually we rise to ever higher truths. It is therefore correct to present general cosmic truths in their initial stage in as simple and elementary a form as possible. Thereafter, however, it is also necessary to advance slowly from the simple ABC's to the higher truths, because you will agree that through these higher truths we gradually attain what Spiritual Science intends to give us: the opportunity to understand and penetrate the very world that surrounds us in the sentient—the physical—sphere. Now it is true that we have a long way to go in our ascent before we shall be able to somehow draw the connecting links in the spiritual lines and forces that exist behind the world of the senses. But you will agree that this or that phenomenon in our existence has become clearer and easier to explain just by what we have been discussing in the last few lectures. So today we want to advance a little in this specific area and again take as our subject matter the more complicated questions of reincarnation—of reembodiment.

Above all, we want to see clearly that there are differences among the beings who occupy leading positions in the human evolution of the earth. We have to distinguish such leading individualities in the course of human evolution who, as it were, developed from the beginning with humanity on this earth as it exists, but with the important distinction that they progressed more rapidly. We might put it this way: If we go back in time to the most ancient Lemurian Age, we find the most varied stages of development among the human beings then incarnated. All the souls incarnated at that time have been repeatedly reincarnated—reembodiedduring the successive Atlantean and post-Atlantean periods. The speed with which these souls developed varied. Some souls are alive that developed relatively slowly as they went through various incarnations; they still have long distances to traverse in the future. But then there are also those souls who have developed rapidly and who, one might say, have utilized their incarnations in a more productive way. They are now on a high plane of soul-spiritual development, one that will be reached by normal human beings only in the far-distant future. But as we dwell on this sphere of soul life, we can nevertheless say this: No matter how advanced these individual souls may be, however far they may tower above normal human beings, yet within our earthly evolution they have made a journey similar to the rest of humanity, except that they have advanced more rapidly.

In addition to these leading individualities, who in this sense are like other human beings but stand on a higher plane, there are also other individualities—other beings—who have not gone through various incarnations as have the other human beings in the course of human evolution. We can visualize what lies at the bottom of this when we tell ourselves the following: There have been beings in the time of the Lemurian evolution under consideration—beings who no longer needed to descend into physical embodiment as the other human beings just described. They were beings capable of accomplishing their development in higher, more spiritual realms who did not need to descend into corporeal bodies for their further progress. However, in order to intervene in the course of human evolution, such beings can nevertheless descend vicariously into corporeal bodies such as our own. Thus it can happen that such a being appears; if we test it clairvoyantly in regard to the soul, we cannot say, as we can of other human beings, that we trace it back in time and discover it in a previously fleshly incarnation, then trace it farther back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on. Instead, we will have to admit that in tracing the soul of such a being back through the course of time, we may not arrive at an earlier fleshly incarnation of such a being at all. However, if we do, it is only because the being is able to descend repeatedly in certain intervals in order to incarnate vicariously in a human body.

Such a spiritual being who descends in this way into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being is called an “avatar” in the East; such a being gains nothing from this embodiment for himself and experiences nothing that is of significance for the world. This, then, is the distinction between a leading being that has emanated from human evolution and beings whom we call avatars. The latter reap no benefit for themselves from their physical embodiments, or even from one embodiment to which they subject themselves; they enter a physical body for the blessing and progress of all human beings. To repeat—an avatar being can enter a human body just once or several times in succession; but when it does, it is then something different from any other human individuality.

The greatest avatar being who has lived on earth, as you can gather from the spirit of our lectures here, is the Christ—the Being whom we designated as the Christ, and who took possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth when he was thirty years of age. This Being, who did not come into contact with our earth until the beginning of our era, was incarnated for three years in a body of flesh and has since that time been in contact with the astral, i.e., the spiritual, sphere of our super-sensible world; this Being has a unique significance as an avatar being. Although other, lower avatar beings can reincarnate several times, it would be in vain for us to seek the Christ-Being in an earlier human embodiment on earth. The difference between the Christ and the lower avatars does not lie in the fact that the latter incarnate repeatedly, but that they derive no benefits for themselves from their earthly embodiments. Human beings give the world nothing; they only take from it. By contrast, these beings only give; they take nothing from the earth. To gain a perfect understanding of this idea, you have to distinguish between such a lofty avatar being as the Christ and lower avatar beings. Such avatar beings can have the most varied missions on earth; and in discussing one of those missions, we want to avoid speculative language and take a concrete case as an illustration for such a mission.

You all know from the ancient Hebrew story of Noah that a large part of post-Atlantean, post-Noah humanity traces its ancestry back to the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japhet. It is not our purpose today to elucidate what Noah and these three tribal ancestors represent in other respects. We simply want to elucidate here that Hebrew literature, speaking of Shem as one of Noah's sons, traces the whole tribe of the Semites back to him as its ancestor. A genuinely occult perception of such a matter, of such a story, is always grounded in deeper truths. Those who are able to conduct occult research into such things know the following about Shem, the ancestor of the Semites.

When such a personality is destined to become the forefather of an entire tribe, care must be taken from his birth—and even earlier—to insure that he can become such a forebear. Now, what preparations were necessary to ensure that an individuality such as Shem could indeed become the forefather of a whole people or tribal community? In the case of Shem it was done by giving him a quite specially prepared etheric body. We know that when human beings are born into this world, they structure around their individuality an etheric or life body, along with the other members of their being. A special etheric being must somehow be prepared for the ancestor of a tribe because it has to be, as it were, the prototype of an etheric body for all the descendants in succeeding generations. And so it happens that we have in such a tribal individuality a typical etheric body, a prototype as it were. Because of blood relationship in successive generations, the etheric bodies of all descendants of the tribe are in a certain sense copies of the ancestor's etheric body. Thus, every Semitic person's etheric body had something like a copy of Shem's etheric body woven into it. Now, by what means is such a condition brought about in the course of human evolution?

Let us look at Shem more carefully. We find that his etheric body received its archetypal form because an avatar had woven himself into it. It was not such a high avatar that we can compare him with other avatar beings, but still a lofty avatar descended into his etheric body. This avatar individuality was not connected with Shem's astral body nor with his ego, however, but was woven into his etheric body alone. From this example we can study what it means when an avatar being partakes in the constitution and composition of a human being. What does it mean, then, when a human being who, like Shem, has the mission to be the ancestor of a whole people should in a way have the essence of an avatar woven into his body? It means that every time the essence of an avatar is woven into the soul of a fleshly being, any one member—or even several members—of the super-sensible constitution of this human being are capable of being multiplied and split into many parts.

The fact that an avatar being was interwoven with Shem's etheric body made it possible for countless copies of the original to come into being and to be woven into all the human beings who became the descendants of this ancestor in subsequent generations. Thus, the descent of an avatar being is, among other things, significant in that it contributes to the multiplication of one or several members of the being who is animated by the avatar. As you can see from this, an especially precious etheric body was present in Shem, an archetypal etheric body, prepared by an exalted avatar and then woven into Shem so that it could descend in many copies to all those who were destined for consanguinity with him.

As we have already said in a previous lecture, a spiritual economy exists by virtue of the fact that something of special value is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard not only that the ego reincarnates but also that the astral body and the etheric body are capable of doing the same. Aside from the fact that countless copies of Shem's etheric body came into being, his own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world because it could later be useful in the mission of the Hebrew people. Remember that all the peculiarities of the Hebrews had originally come to expression in this etheric body, and if at any time something of special importance was to happen to them—if one of them should be assigned a special task or mission, then this could be best accomplished by an individual who bore the etheric body of the ancestor within himself. As a matter of fact, an individual bearing the etheric body of Shem later played an important part in the history of the Hebrew people. We have here indeed one of those wonderous complications in the evolution of humankind that can explain so much to us. We are dealing here with an exalted individuality who, as it were, was compelled to condescend in order to be able to speak to the Hebrews in a comprehensible manner and to give them the strength necessary for a special mission. By analogy, if an intellectually advanced individual had to speak to a primitive tribe, he would have to learn its language, but this does not mean that the language in question would elevate him personally; all the individual would have to do is to take the trouble of acquainting himself with the language. In this same way, an exalted individuality had to make a strong personal effort to become one with Shem's etheric body to be able to give a definite impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This personality was the very Melchizedek¹² you find in Biblical history. In a way, he wore Shem's etheric body so that later he could give Abraham the impulse that you find so beautifully in the Bible. What was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied because an avatar being was incarnated in it, and all this became interwoven with all the other etheric bodies of the Hebrews. In addition, Shem's own etheric body was preserved in the spiritual world so that it could be borne at a later time by Melchizedek, who was to give the Hebrews an important impulse through Abraham.

This is how finely interwoven the facts behind the physical world are, facts that are needed to elucidate to us what happens in the physical world. Only by being able to point to such facts of a spiritual nature that are behind the facts of the physical world do we learn to interpret history. History can never become comprehensible through considering physical facts alone.

Now, if the descent of an avatar being affects the soul-spiritual components of the human being in that he or she becomes the bearer of the avatar's soul, and if this results in multiplication and transmission of the archetypal copy onto others, then this phenomenon becomes especially significant with the appearance of Christ on earth. Because the avatar essence of Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it became possible not only that the etheric body but also that the astral body and even that the ego were multiplied innumerable times; by ego, I mean the “I” as an impulse that was kindled in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth when Christ entered his threefold sheath. However, foremost in our consideration is here the fact that the etheric and astral bodies could be multiplied because of the presence of the avatar being.

Now, one of the most significant turning points in human history was the appearance of the Christ principle in earthly evolution. What I have told you about Shem is actually typical and characteristic of pre-Christian times. When an etheric or an astral body is multiplied in this way, the copies of the original are usually transmitted to those people who are related by blood to the ancestor who had the prototype. Hence, the copies of Shem's etheric body were transmitted to the members of the Hebrew tribe, but when the Christ Avatar Being appeared, all this was changed. The etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied and the copies preserved until they could be used in the course of human evolution. However, they were not bound up with this or that nationality or tribe. But when in the course of time a human being appeared who, irrespective of nationality, was mature and suitable enough to have his own etheric or astral body interwoven with a copy of the etheric or astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, then those bodies could be woven into that particular person's being. Thus we see how it became possible in the course of time for all kinds of people to have copies of the astral or etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their souls.

The intimate history of Christian development is connected with this fact. What is normally described as the history of Christian development is a sum of entirely external occurrences. It is for this reason that far too little attention is given to what is most important—the distinction of actual periods in Christian development. Anyone who can look more deeply into the developmental progress of Christianity will easily perceive that the manner in which Christianity was disseminated was different in the first few centuries from that of later centuries in the Christian era. In the first few Christian centuries the dissemination of Christianity was, in a way, bound up with everything that could be gained from the physical plane. We need only look at the early teachers of Christianity to see how they emphasized physical memories, physical connections, and everything that had remained in a physical state. Just consider how Irenaeus,¹³ a man who contributed so much in the first century to the dissemination of Christian doctrine in various countries, stressed that memories should extend back to those who had listened to the disciples of the Apostles. It was important to prove through such physical recollections that Christ Himself had actually taught in Palestine. It was specially emphasized, for example, that Papias¹⁴ himself had sat at the feet of the Apostles' disciples. Even the places were shown and described where such personalities had sat—people who could still be cited as eyewitnesses to the fact that Christ had lived in Palestine. The physical progress in memory was what was especially emphasized in the first few centuries of Christianity.

How much stress remained on everything that was physical can be seen from the words of the old St. Augustine¹⁵ living at the end of this era, who said: “Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to do so.” To him, the physical authority's telling him that something exists in the physical world was the important and essential thing. The determining factor for him was that a corporate body had preserved itself within which one personality is linked back to another until one arrives at one who, like Peter, was a companion of Christ. Hence, we can see that in the dissemination of Christianity during the early centuries, it was the documents and the impressions of the physical plane to which the greatest importance was given.

All that changes after the time of St. Augustine and into the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. It was then no longer possible to appeal to living memories or to consult the documents of the physical plane because they were too far removed from the present. Something entirely different was present in the whole mood and the disposition of the human beings, especially the Europeans, who were then embracing Christianity. It was the feeling, the direct knowledge, of the existence of Christ, of His death on the cross, and of His continuing life. From the fourth and fifth up to the tenth and twelfth centuries, a large number of people would have considered it foolish to be told that they could doubt the events in Palestine because they knew better. People like these were especially common in European countries, and they had always been able to experience inwardly in miniature a kind of Pauline revelation, that is the experience through which Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus.

What made it possible for a number of people in those centuries to be able to receive revelations about the events in Palestine that were in a sense clairvoyant? It was possible because the multiplied copies of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been preserved and were in these centuries woven into the etheric bodies of a large number of people who wore these multiplied copies as one would wear a garment. Their etheric body did not consist entirely of the copy of Jesus' etheric body, but it had had woven into it a copy of the original. There were indeed human beings in those centuries who were able to have such an etheric body and who could thereby have an immediate knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ.

All this, however, had the effect that the Christ image was no longer associated with the externally historical and physical transmission of the story. The highest degree of such disassociation is evident in that wonderful literary work of the ninth century, the Heliand.¹⁶ This poem was written down by a seemingly simple Saxon in the time of Louis the Pious, who reigned from 814–840. The Saxon's astral body and ego could not match what was in his etheric body because the latter had had woven into it a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. This simple Saxon priest, the author of the poem, was certain from immediate clairvoyant vision that the Christ existed on the astral plane and that He was the same Christ who had been crucified at Golgotha! And because this was a direct certainty for him, he no longer needed to resort to historical documents or to physical mediation in order to know that the Christ does exist. Therefore, he describes the Christ detached from the whole Palestinian setting and from the peculiarities of the Jewish character. This poet, then, depicts the Christ as if He were something like a leader of a Central European or Germanic tribe, and he describes those who surround Hirn as His followers—the Apostles—as if they were vassals of a Germanic prince. The entire external scenery has been changed, but the structure of the events and the essential and eternal aspects of the Christ figure remain the same. This poet did not have to hold rigidly to historical events when he was speaking of the Christ because he had a direct knowledge of Him that was built upon a foundation as important as a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. What he had acquired as immediate knowledge, he draped with a different external setting. Even as we have been able to describe this writer of the Heliand poem as one of the peculiar personalities who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into his own etheric body, we can find other personalities in this period who also carried a copy within themselves. We see, therefore, that the most important things take place behind the physical occurrences and that these things can explain history to us in an intimate way.

If we continue to trace Christian development, we come to the period from about the eleventh or twelfth up to the fifteenth century, and it is here that we discover an entirely different mystery that now carried evolution forward. If you remember, first it was the memory of what had taken place on the physical plane, followed by the etheric element being woven into the etheric bodies of the pillars of Christianity in Central Europe. But later, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, it was numerous copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that became interwoven with the astral bodies of the most important pillars of Christianity. In those days the human beings had egos capable of forming extremely false ideas about all sorts of things, yet in their astral bodies a direct force of strength, of devotion, and of the immediate certainty of holy truths was alive. Such people possessed deep fervor, an absolutely direct conviction, and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What sometimes must strike us as being so strange especially in these personalities is that their ego development was not at all equal to that of their astral bodies because the latter had copies of the astral body of Jesus Christ woven into them. Their ego behavior often seemed grotesque, but the world of their sentiments, feelings, and fervor was magnificent and exalted.

Francis of Assisi,¹⁷ for example, was such a personality. We study his life and cannot, as modern people, understand what his conscious ego was; yet we cannot help having the most profound reverence for the richness and range of his feelings and for all that he did. This is no longer a problem once we adopt the perspective mentioned above. He was one of those who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own astral bodies, and this enabled him to accomplish what he did. Many of his followers in the Order of the Franciscans, with its servants and minorites, had such copies interwoven with their astral bodies in a similar fashion.

All the strange and otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become lucid and clear to you as soon as you set this mediation in world evolution between that time and previous times properly before the eye of your soul. The important distinction that must be made for these people of the Middle Ages is whether what was woven into their souls from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth contained more of what we call the sentient soul, more of the intellectual soul, or more of the consciousness soul. This distinction is important because, as you know, the astral body must be envisioned as containing, in a certain sense, all of these three components, as well as the ego, which it encompasses. What was woven into Francis of Assisi was, as it were, the sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth, and the same is true in the case of that remarkable personality Elisabeth of Thüringen, who was born in 1207.¹⁸ Knowing this secret of her life will enable you to follow the course of her life with your whole soul. She, too, was a personality who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into her sentient soul. The riddle of the human being is solved for us by means of just such knowledge.

If you know that during this time the most diverse personalities had sentient soul, intellectual soul, or consciousness soul woven into them as copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, you will above all comprehend that little understood and much maligned science that has become known as scholasticism.¹⁹ What tasks did the scholastics set for themselves? They set out to find, on the basis of judgment and intellect, verifications and proof of those phenomena for which historical links and physical mediation did not exist and which could no longer be known with the direct clairvoyant certainty possible in previous centuries through the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people set themselves the task by saying: Tradition has communicated to us that the Being known as Jesus Christ has appeared in history and that, in addition, other spiritual beings of whom religious documents bear witness have intervened in human religion. Then, from the intellectual soul, that is from the intellectual element of the copy of Jesus Christ's astral body, they set themselves the task of proving with subtle and clearly developed concepts all that their literature contained as mystery truths. Thus arose the strange science that attempted what was probably the most penetrating intellectual venture ever undertaken in the history of human thought. One may think of the content of scholasticism as one wishes, but for several centuries this school of thought developed the capacity of human reflection and thus put its imprint on the culture of the time. Scholasticism accomplished this by an extremely subtle discernment between and outlining of various concepts. As a result, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries the school implanted into humanity the capacity to think with acute and penetrating logic.

The special conviction that Christ can be found in the human ego arose among those who were imbued more strongly with the copy of the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth, because the ego functions in the consciousness soul. Because these individuals had within them the element of consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesas of Nazareth, the inner Christ rose resplendent within their souls, and through this astral body they came to know that the Christ within them was the Christ Himself. These were the individuals whom you know as Meister Eckhart,²⁰ Johannes Tauler,²¹ and all other pillars of medieval mysticism.

Here you see how the most diverse manifestations of the astral body, multiplied by the fact that the exalted Avatar Being of the Christ had entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth, continued to work in the following age and brought about the real development of Christianity. This is an important transition in other respects as well. We have seen how humanity in the course of its evolution was otherwise dependent upon having incorporated within it these copies of the Jesus of Nazareth Being. In the early centuries people had existed who depended entirely on the physical plane; then in the following centuries there were human beings who were susceptible to having the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies. Later, human beings, one might say, became more oriented toward the astral body, and that is how the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could now be incorporated into them. The astral body is the bearer of judgment, and it was the human capacity to judge that was awakened between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries.

This awakening of the astral body can also be observed in another phenomenon. Before the twelfth century, the depths of mystery contained in the Holy Communion were especially well understood. It was not widely discussed, but rather was accepted in a manner that enabled a human being to feel everything that was contained in the words, “This is My body and this is My blood.” Christ meant with these words that He would be united with the earth and become its planetary spirit. And because flour is the most precious thing on earth, bread became for human beings the body of Christ, and the sap flowing through plants and vines became to them something of His blood. Through this knowledge, the value of the Lord's Supper was not diminished but was, on the contrary, enhanced. People in the early centuries felt something of these infinite depths, and they continued to do so up to the time when the power of judgment was awakened in the astral body. It was only then that disputes began about the meaning of the Lord's Supper. Just think about the discussions about the meaning of the Lord's Supper among the Hussites, Lutherans, and the dissenting Zwinglians and Calvinists.²² They would not have been possible in earlier times when people still had an immediate, direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper!

Here we see verified a great historical law that should be of special significance to the spiritual scientist: As long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was, they did not discuss it. They began to discuss it only after they had lost direct knowledge of it. Let us consider the fact that people discuss a particular matter as an indication that they do not really know it. Where knowledge exists, knowledge is narrated, and there is no particular desire for discussion. Where people feel like discussing something, they have, as a rule, no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of decline regarding the seriousness of a subject matter when discussions about it are to be heard. Discussions portend the decline of a particular trend. It is very important that time and again in Spiritual Science we learn to understand that the wish to discuss something should actually be construed as a sign of ignorance. On the other hand, we should cultivate the opposite of discussion, and that is the will to learn and the will to gradually comprehend what is in question.

Here we see an important historical fact verified by the development of Christianity itself. But we can also learn something else when we see how, in the centuries of Christianity characterized above, the power of judgment, this keen intellectual wisdom, is further developed. Indeed, when we focus our attention on realities and not on dogmas, we can learn how much Christianity has accomplished since its inception. Take scholasticism. What has become of it when we look not at its content, but perceive it as a means of cultivating and disciplining our mental faculties? Do you want to know? Scholasticism has become modern natural science! The latter is inconceivable without the reality of medieval Christian science. It is not only that Copernicus was a canon and Giordano Bruno²³ a Dominican, but that all thought forms with which natural objects have been tackled since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are nothing but what was developed and nurtured by the Christian science of the Middle Ages from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. There are people today who look up passages in scholastic books, compare them with recent findings of natural history, and then say Haeckel and others aver something entirely different. Such people do not live in reality but in the world of abstractions! Realities are what matters! The work of Haeckel, Darwin, DuBois-Reymond, Huxley,²⁴ and others would all have been impossible had the Christian science of the Middle Ages not preceded them. These modern scientists owe their mode of thought to the Christian science of the Middle Ages. That is the reality, and it is from that science that humanity has learned to think in the true sense of the word.

But there is more. Read David Friedrich Strauss²⁵ and try to observe his mode of thinking. Try to realize what his chain of reasoning is: how he wants to present the entire life of Jesus of Nazareth as a myth. Do you know where the keenness of his thinking comes from? He gets it from the Christian science of the Middle Ages. Everything used today to combat Christianity so radically has been taken over from the Christian world of learning in the Middle Ages. Actually, today there cannot be an opponent of Christianity of whom it could not easily be shown that he would be unable to think as he does had he not learned his thought forms from the Christian science of the Middle Ages. If one considered that fact, one would indeed look at world history as it really is.

What, then, has happened since the sixteenth century? Since that time the human ego has increasingly come into prominence and with it human egotism, and with egotism, materialism. Everything that the ego had absorbed and acquired was gradually unlearned and forgotten. Human beings now were compelled to limit themselves to what the ego could observe and to what the physical sensory system was able to give to the ordinary intelligence. That is all the ego could take into its inner sanctuary. Culture since the sixteenth century has become the culture of egotism.

What must now enter into the ego? Christian evolution has passed through a development in the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and has made its way as far as the ego. Now it must take into this ego the mysteries and secrets of Christianity itself. Following a time when the ego learned to think through Christianity and then apply the thoughts to the external world, it must now become possible for the ego to become a Christ-receptive organ. This ego must now rediscover the wisdom which is the primordial wisdom of the Great Avatar, of Christ Himself. And how is this to be done? It must be done through a more profound understanding of Christianity through Spiritual Science. Having been carefully prepared through the three stages of physical, etheric, and astral development, the inner organ would now have to open itself to its human host so that he or she could henceforth look into the spiritual environment with the eye that the Christ can open for us.

Christ descended to earth as the greatest avatar being. Let us view this in the right perspective and try to look at the world as we would be able to do after we have received the Christ into ourselves. Then we would find the whole process of our world evolution illuminated and pervaded by the Christ Being. That is to say, we would describe how the physical body of human beings originated on Old Saturn,²⁶ how the etheric body made its appearance on Old Sun, the astral body on Old Moon, and the ego on the Earth. Finally, we would find how everything tends toward the goal of becoming ever more independent and individual in order to incorporate into the evolution of the earth the very wisdom that passes from the Sun to the earth. In a way, Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of a cosmic view for the liberated ego.

So you see how Christianity has gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. In the early centuries the Christian received Christianity with his physical ability to cognize truth, later with his etheric capacity, and throughout the Middle Ages with his astral capacity to cognize truth. Then Christianity in its true form was repressed for a while until the ego had been trained by the three bodies in the course of Christian evolution. But after this ego had learned how to think and direct its vision to the objective world, it is now mature enough to perceive in all phenomena of the objective world the spiritual facts that are so intimately linked with the Central Being, the Christ. Thus, the ego is now capable of beholding the Christ everywhere in the most diverse manifestations as the foundation of the objective world.

Here we stand at the point of departure for spiritual-scientific comprehension and perception of Christianity, and we begin to understand what a task and mission has been assigned to our movement for spiritual knowledge. In so doing, the reality of this mission becomes evident to us. Just as the individual human being has a physical, an etheric, and an astral body in addition to his or her ego, so it is with the historical development of Christianity, and both continue to rise to ever more lofty heights. We might say Christianity, too, has physical, etheric, and astral bodies, as well as an ego—an ego that can even deny its origin as it does in our time. To be sure, an ego can become egotistic, but it still remains an ego that can receive the true Christ Being into itself, thereby rising to ever higher stages of existence. What the human being is in particular, the great world is in its totality; and that includes its historical evolution.

If we look at the matter in this way, a perspective of the far-distant future opens itself before us from the spiritual-scientific point of view, and we know this perspective can touch our hearts and fill them with enthusiasm. More and more it becomes clear to us just what it is we have to do, and then we realize that we are not groping in the dark. This is so because we have not devised ideas that we intend to project into the future in an arbitrary fashion, but we intend to harbor and follow only those ideas that have been gradually prepared through centuries of Christian development. It is true that only after the physical, etheric, and astral bodies had come into existence could the ego make its appearance; now it is to be developed little by little to spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. By the same token, modern human beings with their ego form and present thinking, could have developed only from the astral, etheric, and physical form of Christianity. Christianity has become ego. Just as truly as this was the development of the past, so it is equally true that the ego form of humanity can appear only after the astral and the etheric forms of Christianity have been developed. Christianity will develop on into the future. It will offer humanity far greater things, and the Christian development and way of life will arise in a new form. The transformed astral body will appear as the Christian spirit self, the transformed etheric body as the Christian life spirit. And in a radiant perspective of the future of Christianity, spirit man shines forth before our souls as the star toward which we strive, illuminated and glowing throughout with the spirit of Christianity.

• 12. Melchizedek was the king of Salem and “Priest of the Most High God,” who blessed Abraham after the defeat of Chedorlaomer (Genesis 14:18-20) and who was later to typify the priesthood of the future Messiah (Psalms 110:4; Heb. 5-7).
• 13. St. Irenaeus (c. 125-c. 202) was a Greek theologian, Bishop of Lyons in 177–78, and the first Father of the Catholic Church to systematize Christian doctrine.
• 14. Papias was a second-century Christian theologian and Apostolic Father of the Church.
• 15. St. Augustine (354–430) was the Bishop of Hippo in what is now Algiers and one of the four Latin fathers. His famous book The City of God is a justification of Christianity against pagan critics, and his Confessions is a classic of Christian mysticism.
• 16. Heliand, the title of the epic (c. 825) is an Old Saxon word for German Heiland = the Savior. The poem had 5,983 lines and was written in alliterative verse.
• 17. The Italian St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was one of the greatest Christian saints and founder of the Franciscan Order.
• 18. Elisabeth of Thüringen (1207–1231), the young widow of a German margrave who had died on a crusade in 1227, chose a life of poverty, humility, and charity and became the typical saint of the late Middle Ages.
• 19. Scholasticism was the school of thought in the Middle Ages in which theology and philosophy were conjoined. The German term Scholastik normally designates this medieval school of thought, whereas Scholastizismus, the linguistic equivalent of the English term, is used exclusively to denote sophistry and casuistry.
• 20. Meister (Johannes) Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), a Dominican-trained German theologian and the most profound of the German medieval mystics, was probably the first writer of speculative prose in German.
• 21. Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) was a German Dominican mystic and a disciple of Meister Eckhart.
• 22. The Hussites advocated communion in both kinds, i.e., both wine and bread, for laity as well as priests. Lutherans believed that a change takes place by which the body and blood of Christ join with the bread and wine. This principle of consubstantiation was rejected by the Zwinglians who saw only symbolic significance in the communion. Finally, the Calvinists believed that Christ was spiritually, but not physically, present in the Sacrament.
• 23. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was a noted Italian philosopher and mystic who, although a member of the Dominican Order in his youth, was in constant opposition to religious orthodox schools. He was tried by the Inquisition for heresy and burned to death.
• 24. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1932) was a renowned German zoologist and, like the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), developed a theory of evolution. Emil DuBois-Reymond (1818–1896) was a famous physiologist in Berlin. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist and writer.
• 25. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) was a philosopher and theologian whose writings mark a turning point in the critical study of the life of Jesus. In his main work, The Life of Jesus (2 vols, 1835–36), Strauss applied the “myth theory” to the life of Jesus and denied all supernatural elements in the Gospels.
• 26. (Old) Saturn, (Old) Sun, and (Old) Moon are names for former evolutionary forms through which the Earth has passed. The reader is referred to An Outline of Occult Science (Anthroposophic Press, 1972), for a thorough discussion of this topic.

Berlin, May 25, 1909

It is often emphasized, and with good reason, that Spiritual Science should not simply be a theory about the world, life, and the human being, but that it should become the most profound content of the human soul: that which gives life its meaning. If one approaches Spiritual Science with the right attitude, it can indeed become the very substance of life within a human being. However, let me stress emphatically that it can take on this function only gradually, little by little, because Spiritual Science is much like everything that grows and develops: first it must have a seed that keeps growing, and then by virtue of this growth it becomes ever more effective.

It is also a fact that nobody could hope to extract from Spiritual Science the right way of life just by an intellectual understanding of its truths. Judging Spiritual Science by its outward features, one may come to the conclusion that it is a view of the world, albeit one that is more comprehensive and sublime than others. But no, it is still something else, for what other theory would be able to advance those comprehensive ideas about Saturn, Sun, and Moon? What other theories of the world today would dare to make very concise statements about this? None, because they end up with abstract concepts when they attempt to raise themselves above the objects we perceive with our physical eyes and ears. Such theories and conceptions of the world can offer only vague concepts about the divine that weaves and works behind material reality. As far as other less ambitious truths are concerned, such as the doctrines of reincarnation and of karma, Spiritual Science is also far ahead of anything traditional science has to offer when it talks about the evolution of the human being. To be sure, science too could adopt these doctrines for if one really wants to draw the proper conclusions from the materialistic-scientific facts, reincarnation and karma would long have been popular ideas. However, because modern scientists have not dared to come to these conclusions, the discussion about the subject has simply been put to rest. Evolution from the perspective of natural history and of history is discussed, but nobody wants to hear anything of the true evolution of the human individuality, which continues from one life to another and carries the human soul into the future.

Those who observe life properly will be compelled by its very consequences to embrace the doctrine of the four members of the human constitution, which is also revealed by clairvoyant investigation. But because thinking in the modern age lacks all courage, this doctrine is proclaimed only by Spiritual Science, which as a body of knowledge is in many ways ahead of other conceptions of the world and of the philosophies presented to human beings at the present time.

However, when all has been said and done, all that is not the real fruit of Spiritual Science. Its fruit does not consist in the fact that one accepts its teaching as satisfying and far- reaching. We cannot have the fruit without the seed. What we develop today as the fruit of the anthroposophical world view can make our hearts happy and warm our capacity to love. Yet nobody can enjoy this fruit of our spiritual scientific world view without the seed, that is without spiritual scientific knowledge itself. People may say: Of what use are these ideas about reincarnation and karma, or about the members of the human constitution and the evolution of the world? What is really important is the development of human love and of moral character. To this I would answer: Certainly, that is important, but true human love that is fruitful for the world is possible only on the basis of knowledge—Spiritual Scientific knowledge.

As a branch of knowledge, Spiritual Science has an advantage over other world conceptions in many areas. When it is experienced by us in a truly intimate manner, when we do not tire to awaken in our souls time and again those great comprehensive thoughts and carry them with us, then we will see that this body of teaching can in a very definite sense become the content and substance of one's life. Spiritual scientific teaching is a body of ideas that leads us into super-sensible worlds, and in spiritual scientific thinking we must therefore soar to higher worlds. Every hour spent in spiritual scientific study means that the soul reaches out beyond the concerns of everyday life. The moment we devotedly give ourselves to the teaching, we are transported into another world. Our ego is then united with the spiritual world out of which it was born. Thus, when we think in a spiritual scientific way, we are with our ego in our spiritual home, at the fountainhead from which it came.

If we understand this in the right sense, then we can truly compare spiritual scientific thinking with that state of consciousness that we recognize from the spiritual point of view as sleep. When human beings fall asleep at night and sleep themselves into a spiritual world, then they have transported the ego into the world whence it was born and from which it emerges every morning so that it can pass into the world of the senses within the human body. In times to come, the soul will live consciously within this spiritual world; however, at the present such is normally not the case. And why not? It is because in the course of the ages consciousness of the spiritual world has become weaker and weaker in the ego. In the Atlantean epoch the ego during sleep saw itself surrounded by divine-spiritual beings, but after the Atlantean catastrophe the ego was pushed out into the world of the senses and increasingly lost its capacity to gaze into the world that it inhabits during sleep. The idea that the ego is blotted out at night and resurrected in the morning is absurd. It is in the spiritual world but is not conscious of it.

Spiritual scientific thinking gives us the strength to tie ourselves consciously, little by little, to these spiritual realities. By leading us—at least in thinking—into the spiritual world, anthroposophy has certain beneficial qualities in common with sleep. The cares and worries that issue from the things of the sense world are obliterated in sleep. If human beings are able to sleep and their thinking is blotted out, they forget all worries. That is the most beneficent effect of sleep, an effect resulting from the fact that the ego lets the forces of the spiritual world stream into it during sleep. These spiritual streams contain strengthening forces, the effect of which is to help us forget our worries and cares during sleep and also to repair the damage that such worries and cares have inflicted upon our organism. The injuries caused by the sense world are healed by spiritual powers—hence the refreshment, the regeneration that every healthy sleep bestows upon us. In a higher sense, these then are the qualities that spiritual scientific thinking has in common with sleep.

Spiritual thoughts are powerful if we accept them as living forces. When we elevate ourselves to the thoughts that are connected with the past and the future of the earth and allow these momentous events to work on us, then our keyed-up soul will be drawn to these events, far away from the worries of the day. Thoughts of how the ideal of our own sovereign will grows for us out of karma—this plan of destiny—give us courage and strength so that we say to ourselves: “However insurmountable some of the problems of our lives may be today, our strength will grow from one incarnation to the next. The sovereign will within us is becoming stronger every day, and all the obstacles will help us to strengthen it even more. In the process of overcoming these obstacles, our will is going to develop ever more, and our energy is going to increase. The trivialities of life, all the inferior things in our existence, will melt away as the hoar does in the sun—melted by the very sun that rises in the wisdom that permeates our spiritual thinking. Our world of feeling is made to glow throughout and becomes warm and transillumined; our whole existence will be broadened, and we will feel happy in it.”

When such moments of inner activity are repeated and we allow them to work on us, a strengthening of our whole existence into all directions will emanate from this process. Not from one day to the next, to be sure, but constant repetition of such thoughts will bring about the gradual disappearance of our depressions, lamentations about our fate, and an excessively melancholy temperament. Spirit knowledge will be medicine for our soul, and when that happens, the horizon of our existence widens and implants in us that way of thinking that is the fruit of all spirit knowledge. This resulting way of thinking and feeling, this attitude of mind and heart, must be considered the ideal state to which spiritual scientific endeavors can lead. All discord, all disharmonies of life will disappear opposite the harmonious thoughts and feelings that bring about an energetic will. Thus, spiritual investigation proves to be not just knowledge and doctrine, but also a force of life and a substance of our soul. Seen in this light, Spiritual Science is capable of working in life in such a way that it frees human beings from cares and worries. And that is how it has to work in our time, for it owes its existence not to arbitrariness, but to the knowledge that it is needed.

The individualities who in their knowledge were far ahead of normal human beings, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, knew that Spiritual Science had to flow into our culture if it was not to wither. Spiritual Science is a new sap of life, and humanity needs such new sap from time to time. Spiritual Science is the stream necessary for our time. Those who have a feeling for these great truths should hurry to us and absorb the truths so that they can be salt and ferment for the spiritual life of all humanity The striving individual must see this as a sort of duty. It is not difficult to understand why the highest authorities have issued a call for Spiritual Science in our time precisely so that those with open hearts and unprejudiced minds may be assembled.

We have been viewing with our souls post-Atlantean humanity and have traced its cultural epochs from the ancient Indian down to our own fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We have seen that during this time human beings lost their consciousness of the spiritual world bit by bit. In the first epoch, the ancient Indian, human beings still had a profound yearning for the spiritual world. The world of the senses was considered maya, illusion. Then came the ages that issued a call to human beings to do external, physical labor. Human beings had to learn to love the world of the senses because only then were they able to cultivate it. At this time, human beings no longer said that the external world was nothing but maya. On the contrary, human beings now had to immerse themselves into the world and work on it with their faculties and wisdom. That, however, resulted in human beings' gradually losing the consciousness of the spiritual world so that Zarathustra, the initiator of the Persian culture, felt compelled to tell his disciples: “All living beings are called into existence by the force that streams from the sun as physical force. But this physical force is not the only thing. In the sun lives Ahura Mazdao—the spiritual Sun Being.” It was necessary to demonstrate to people how the material world is but the physical expression of the spiritual world.

Thus it was first in the ancient Persian epoch that there arose the sentiment that would express itself as follows: “Certainly, what the sun shines upon is maya, but I must seek the spirit behind this maya. The spiritual world is always around me, but I cannot experience it with physical eyes and ears. I can experience it only with super-sensible consciousness. Once this consciousness has been awakened, then in the physical existence also can I recognize the Great Spirit of the Sun with all its subordinate beings who also belong to the Sun. But an age is approaching when my soul will no longer have this knowledge.” It was difficult to transmit this knowledge fully to human beings. They must gradually be made more mature through renewed incarnations in order to recognize the divine-spiritual element behind all physical phenomena and to understand that all of nature is permeated by it.

In the ancient Persian culture, human beings were still capable of recognizing the divine element in this life, but they were unable to take this consciousness into the time period between death and rebirth. For the peculiar thing in this epoch was that consciousness between death and rebirth became increasingly darker. By contrast, let us look at the soul of an individual in ancient India. When it passed through death into the other world, it lived there among spiritual beings in a comparatively light-filled world. In the Persian culture, such was less the case; the world between death and rebirth had become darker. Obstacles between various souls accumulated, and the soul felt lonely; in a manner of speaking, it could not extend its hand to another soul. But that is the difficult and dark side of life in the spiritual world: the soul may not share its path with others.

In the Egyptian epoch, a substantial part of the soul's capacity to link up with other souls had already been lost to such an extent that the soul longed for the preservation of the physical body, which was to be preserved in the mummy. The reason for this was that the soul sensed it had very little strength that could be taken into the life between death and rebirth. Human beings at this time wanted to preserve the physical body so that the soul might be able to look down on it as on something that belonged to it, thus compensating for the power it no longer had in the spiritual world. Cultural phenomena such as mummification are deeply connected with the evolution of the human soul.

An Egyptian had the notion that in death he would be united with Osiris. He said these words to himself: “Long ago, in ancient ages, the soul was able to gaze into the beyond. It has now lost this visionary power, but it can make up for the loss if in this life it develops qualities by which it will become more and more like Osiris himself. The soul will then itself become Osiris-like and will be united with Osiris after death.” And so, by clinging to Osiris, the soul tried to create a surrogate for everything that could no longer be preserved from ancient times.

However, what Osiris was unable to give to the human soul is told in an Egyptian legend, whereby Osiris was once living with human beings on earth, until his evil brother Seth shut him up in a wooden box similar to a casket. This means that Osiris did live on earth with human beings when they were still more spiritual. But then he had to remain in the spiritual world because he was too sublime to fit into the physical human form. Similarly, if the soul wanted to create a substitute for the lost spiritual power of vision between death and rebirth, it had to become a being that is too sublime, too good for the human form. By becoming similar to Osiris, the soul would be able to overcome its loneliness in the beyond, but it could not take into a new incarnation what it had received in the spiritual world through the characteristics it had in common with Osiris. This is so because, after all, Osiris was not suited for this physical incarnation.

The grave danger threatening humankind in those times was that incarnations were steadily deteriorating because there could be no new influx of spiritual forces. Only what had remained from ancient ages could be further developed, and all that reached its ultimate maturity in Graeco-Roman times. This was made manifest in the magnificent art of the Greeks—the mature fruit from earlier blossoms. Greek art was the finest fruit of the heritage bequeathed to humanity beginning with primeval times. But hand in hand with this accomplishment came the feeling of deep darkness in the life between death and new birth, and a noble Greek individual was right when he said: “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shadows.”⁴⁴ Yes indeed, human beings in Greece and the Roman states possessed so much to delight and satisfy their senses, but they could take nothing with them into the life between death and new birth.

Then came the event of Golgotha—the event that is of significance not only for the external physical world, but also for all the worlds through which a human being must pass. The moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, when the corpse was hanging on the cross, the Christ appeared in the underworld and kindled the light that once again gave sight to the souls below. And the soul was able to realize from that moment on that once again strength could also be derived from the world below and benefit the physical world. No longer does the soul endeavor to unite itself with Osiris in order to have a surrogate for the loss of vision. From now on, it could say to itself: “In the underworld, too, I can find the light of Christ—that which has immersed itself into the earth, for the Christ has become the spirit of the earth. And now I imbibe a new force from a spiritual fountainhead, a force that I can take back to earth when I return for a new incarnation.”

What was necessary so that this force could flow into the soul in the right way? A complete reversal in the way human beings looked at the physical world was necessary. First, let us ask what the people in ancient India experienced when we reconstruct what one of them might have said: “This world is maya, the great illusion. Whenever I perceive this world and relate myself to it, I have fallen victim to the illusion. Only by withdrawing from it and by elevating myself to primeval spiritual things beyond the world of the senses can I be in the world of the gods. Only by withdrawing from the outer world can I traverse through my inner being that has remained with me as an ancient legacy of these spiritual worlds and thus return to my ancient home. I must return to this primeval holy realm from which I once started out to the world of the senses, and I can return only by giving free rein to my spiritual powers, thereby diverting my attention from the lure of the outer world.” In the days of the ancient Indian culture it was possible for human beings to take this step back into the far-distant past. Inside of them, they had retained much of the force that could help an individual, if properly applied, to find the way back to the old gods. Thus did the human being in ancient India find his Devas, the beings from whom everything had come into existence.

Now came the epoch of ancient Persia, when the human soul had lost much of the power that was like a legacy from ancient times. If in this epoch the soul had said: “I will turn back because I do not wish to remain in this world,” it would not have found the ancient gods because the power to make that possible was no longer adequate. This fact is related to the evolution of humanity. Had the soul attempted to divert its gaze away from the outer world and consider it as nothing but maya, this would have led to its seeing not the higher gods, but rather the subordinate Devas who were evil spiritual beings that did not belong to the ranks of higher gods. Because this danger existed, the soul had to be shown how this world of the senses could be seen as the outward expression of the spiritual by starting from the world of the senses and not turning away from it. In looking up to the sun, the soul learned to see in it not only its external physical sun force, but also the Sun God Ahura Mazdao, and thereby it learned to know something of the divine-spiritual reality.

The soul of the ancient Persian had become too weak to activate the spiritual forces that could lead it back to the ancient gods. Hence, it had to be educated to pierce through the veil of materiality covering the spiritual. In the outer world the evil Asuras lay hidden, but human beings were not yet capable of seeing the beneficent spiritual beings beyond the world that was regarded as maya. That is why all names for spiritual beings came to be reversed during the time between the Indian and the Persian epochs. Devas were the good beings in ancient India, but in the Persian culture, they became the evil gods. The true reason for this reversal is evident from the continuing development of the human soul; in relation to the external world it had become increasingly stronger, in relationship to the inner world, increasingly weaker.

Preparation for what was to come was now made by those beings who guide and direct human evolution. After Zarathustra had learned to look up to the sun and see in its aura the Sun God, he knew that this Sun God was no one else but the Christ-Spirit, who at that time could reveal Himself only from outside the world. The human being in his soul here on earth could not yet perceive the Christ-Being. The being that was formerly seen in the sun and had been given the name Ahura Mazdao had to descend to earth because only then could the human being learn from within to recognize a Deva, a divinely spiritual principle, within his own soul. In the age of ancient Persia, life in the human body was not yet capable of receiving the Christ-Spirit, let alone be permeated by it. All that had to happen slowly and gradually. We must acquaint ourselves with the thought that the gods can reveal themselves only to those who prepare themselves as recipients of a revelation. Deva, the god who can be perceived through our inner forces, could appear only to that part of humanity that had prepared itself for his coming.

Everything in human evolution comes to pass slowly and gradually, and evolution does not proceed everywhere in the same manner. After the Atlantean flood, the tribes had migrated to the East. Since they settled in various regions, their development also differed. What enabled the ancient Indian to have a vivid feeling for the spiritual world? This happened because the evolution of the ego in this part of the world had taken a very special course. In the people of ancient India the ego had remained deeply entrenched in the spiritual world so that it was disinclined to make much contact with the physical world. It was the peculiar characteristic of an individual in ancient India that he or she would cling to the spirituality of preceding ages while at the same time confining relations with the physical world to a minimum. Since the individual in ancient India did not want to connect his or her ego with the physical world, the achievements of external civilization have not blossomed in India or in many other regions of the East where people by and large seem to have lacked inventive genius. By contrast, the inventiveness of the people in the West prompted them to take hold of the external world since they considered it their task to cultivate and improve it. Ancient Persia formed, as it were, the boundary between East and West. The people who paid little attention to the material existence in this world tended to settle and remain in the East. That is why the teaching of a Buddha was still necessary for the people of the East six hundred years before Christ. Buddha had to be placed into world evolution at this juncture because it was his mission to keep alive in the souls the longing for the spiritual worlds of the past, and that is why he had to preach against the thirst for entering the physical world. However, he was preaching at a time when the soul still had the inclination, but no longer the capacity, to elevate itself into the spiritual worlds. Buddha preached to human beings the sublime truths about suffering, and he brought to them the insights that could lift the soul above this world of suffering.

Such teaching would have been unsuitable for the Western world. It needed a doctrine that was in tune with the people's inclination to embrace the physical world and that could be summarized by the following explanation: “You must work in the outer world in such a way that the forces of this world are placed in the service of humanity; but after death, you can also take the fruits of your life into the spiritual world.”

The peculiar essence of Christianity is usually not properly understood. In the Roman world it did not appeal much to those who were able to enjoy the treasures and riches of this world, but those who were condemned to toil in the physical world liked Christianity. They knew that in spite of all their work in the physical world, they were developing something in this life that they could take with them after death. Such was the feeling of exaltation inspiring the souls of those who accepted Christianity. Human beings could say to themselves: “By setting up Christ as my ideal, I develop something in this world that cannot be annihilated even by death.” This consciousness could develop only because Christ had actually been on earth not as a Deva, but as a being who had incarnated in a human body and who could be a model and an ideal for every human being. For this to happen, the impulse and the proper forces had to be created, and this preparatory work had been done by Zarathustra. He had experienced so much that he was prepared to take this mission.

In ancient Persia, Zarathustra had been able to behold the Sun God in the aura of the sun, but he had had to prepare himself for that task in earlier incarnations. During the era that was still inspired by the teachings of the Holy Rishis, Zarathustra had already gone through some sublime experiences in incarnations. He had been initiated into the teachings of the Holy Rishis, having absorbed them stage by stage in seven subsequent incarnations. Then he was born into a body that was blind and deaf, which afforded him as little contact with the outer world as was possible. Zarathustra had to be born as a human being who was practically nonsusceptible to outer sense impressions, and then out of his innermost being the memory of the teachings of the Holy Rishis from a previous incarnation welled up in him. And at that moment the Great Sun God was able to kindle in him something that went ever further than the wisdom received from the Holy Rishis. That experience awakened in him again in his next incarnation, and it was then that Ahura Mazdao revealed himself to Zarathustra from without.

You can see, therefore, that Zarathustra had experienced a great deal before he could become the teacher and inspirer of the people of ancient Persia. We also know that Moses and Hermes were his disciples and that he gave his astral body to Hermes and his etheric body to Moses. Moses was the first to proclaim the teaching that emanated from the Akasha Chronicle, the teaching of the “I am the I am.” (Ejeh asher ejeh). And thus Zarathustra prepared himself slowly for an even greater and more prodigious sacrifice. When Zarathustra's astral body reappeared in Hermes and his etheric body in Moses, his ego—whose development had steadily progressed—was able to form a new astral body and a new etheric body for the new incarnation, commensurate with the full powers of the ego. And six hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra was born again in the land of Chaldaea and became the teacher of Pythagoras under the name Zarathos, or Nazarathos. Within the Chaldaean culture he then prepared the new impulse that was to come into the world. This is reflected in that passage of the New Testament that speaks of the Three Wise Men from the East who came to greet the Christ as the new Star of Wisdom. Zarathustra had taught that the Christ would come, and those who were left as disciples of this significant Zarathustra doctrine knew at what point in time the great Impulse of Golgotha would arrive.

There is always a certain connection between great individualities of the world, such as Buddha, Zarathustra, and Pythagoras, because what is at work in the world is a force—a fact. Great spirits work together, and they are born into a certain age for a purpose. Likewise, the great impulses in human evolution weave themselves into each other. Zarathustra had pointed to the One who was to make it possible, through the Event of Golgotha, for human beings to find the world of the Devas through the force of their own inner being; moreover, they would be increasingly able to do so as they developed forward into the future. And in the same epoch, the Buddha was teaching: Yes, there is a spiritual world, compared to which the whole world of the senses is maya. Turn your steps back into the world in which you were before the thirst for an earthly existence awakened, and then you will find Nirvana—rest within the divine!

Such is the difference between the teachings of Buddha and Zarathustra. Buddha taught that the human being can reach the divine by going back; Zarathustra, in his incarnation as Zarastra, taught that the time is approaching when the light will incarnate within the earth itself, which will enable the progressive soul to come closer to the divine. Buddha said, the soul would find God by going back; Zarathustra said it would find Him by going forward.

Regardless of whether you regress or progress, whether you seek God in the Alpha or in the Omega, you will be able to find Him. What is important is that you find Him with your own heightened human power. Those forces necessary to find the God of the Alpha are the primal forces of a human being. However, the forces necessary to find the God of the Omega must be acquired here on earth by striving human beings themselves. It makes a difference whether one goes back to Alpha or forward to Omega. He who is content with finding God and just wants to get into the spiritual world has the choice of going forward or backward. However, the individual who is concerned that humanity leave the earth in a heightened state must point the way to Omega—as did Zarathustra.

Zarathustra prepared the way for that part of humanity that was to become involved with the very forces of the earth. Yet Zarathustra also fully understood the Buddha, for their quest was ultimately the same. What was Zarathustra's task? He had to make it possible for the Christ-Impulse to descend to the earth. Zarathustra was reborn as Jesus of Nazareth, and because of what had transpired in the previous incarnation, his individuality was able to unite itself with many a force that had been preserved as a result of spiritual economy. The world is profound and truth is complicated!

There was also interwoven in Jesus of Nazareth the being of the Buddha. It had advanced on different paths because many powers work in the one who is supposed to have an influence on humankind. The ego of Jesus left the physical, etheric, and astral bodies at baptism in the Jordan River, and the Sun God—the Christ-Spirit—entered and lived three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. And this is how Zarathustra had prepared humanity to be the recipient of the Christ-Impulse.

An important moment in the evolution of the earth had arrived with these events. It had now become possible for human beings to find God in their innermost being; in addition, they were now able to take something with them from the life between death and new birth into the new incarnation. And now, in our own age, there are already present souls who feel strongly enough that they have been in a world illumined by the Light of Christ. The fact that this is dimly divined in many a soul means that human beings today are capable of receiving and understanding the teachings of Spiritual Science. And because such people exist today, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings have expressed the hope that such people will also feel the truths of Spiritual Science and will make them the very substance of their lives. Knowing all this, the Masters assigned the mission of proclaiming anthroposophy in the present age to those who have already attained a high level of understanding.

It is essential that Spiritual Science begin now to become a spiritual impulse of our time. Christ Himself has prepared human souls for Spiritual Science, and it is guaranteed to stay in this world for the simple reason that the Light of Christ, once kindled, can never be extinguished. Once we inspire ourselves with the feeling that the stream of anthroposophical spirituality is a necessity, then we are immersed in it in the right way, and it will always stand before us as an unshakable ideal.

Yes, the human personality had to develop to such an extent that light could descend and say in a human body: “I am the Light of the world!” The Light of the World first came down into the soul of Zarathustra and spoke to it. Zarathustra's soul understood the meaning of this universal light and sacrificed itself so that these significant words would go out to all humanity—from a human body: “I am the Light of the World.”

• 44. Homer, Odyssey, Canto 489–491. These words are spoken by the soul of Achilles after Ulysses had conjured it up from the Underworld.

Originally published with the title, Christianity in the Evolutionary Course of Mankind, this lecture is included in Das Prinzip der spirituellen Ökonomie (#109/111 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961).

You will have seen from the lecture given here on the more complicated questions of reincarnation that, with further progress in the development of the spiritual scientific view of the world, what in the beginning could be given as elementary truths becomes modified. Thus, we gradually rise to ever higher truths. Still, it was right to present the general cosmic truths at first in as simple and elementary a form as possible. It is, however, also necessary to advance slowly step by step from the simple abc's to the higher truths. Only through them will what spiritual science is intended to give gradually be attained; that is, the possibility of understanding and penetrating the world surrounding us in the physical, sense perceptible sphere. Now it is true that we have a long way to go before we shall be able to coordinate the spiritual lines and forces existing behind the world of the senses, but because of much that has been said in recent lectures, various phenomena of our existence will already have become clearer and more understandable.

Today we shall proceed a little further and speak again about more complicated questions of reincarnation or re-embodiment. To that end, we must first realize that differences exist among the beings who occupy leading places in the earth's human evolution. In the course of earthly evolution we must distinguish those leading individualities who have developed along with humanity from the beginning, but who have made more rapid progress. We might put it this way. If we go back into the past to the remote Lemurian time, we find the most varied stages of development among the human beings then incarnated. All the souls embodied at that time have since repeatedly experienced reincarnations during the succeeding Atlantean and post-Atlantean periods. These souls have developed with varying rapidity. Some have made relatively slow progress through their incarnations and still have long distances to travel in the future. But there are also souls who have developed rapidly, who, one might say, have utilized their incarnations to better advantage and are therefore at a stage of soul-spiritual development that will be attained by normal men only in the far distant future. Nevertheless, we may say that however advanced these individual souls may be, however far they may tower above normal men, they have still followed the same path in earthly evolution as the rest of humanity but have merely advanced more rapidly.

Besides these leading individualities, who in this sense are like the rest of humanity but are at a higher stage, there are also other individualities, other beings, who have by no means gone through various incarnations as other men have in the course of their evolution. We can perhaps illustrate what lies at the bottom of this by saying that there were beings in the time of the Lemurian evolution who no longer needed to descend so deeply into physical embodiment as the other men who have just been described. There were beings who could have accomplished their development in higher, more spiritual regions and who did not need to descend into bodies of flesh for their further progress. In order to intervene in the course of human evolution it is nevertheless possible for these beings to descend vicariously, so to speak, into just such bodies as our own. At any time, therefore, a being may appear of whom, if we make the necessary clairvoyant test, we cannot say, as we can of other human beings, that we trace the soul back in time and find it in a previous fleshly incarnation, trace it farther back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on. Instead, we must say that if we trace the soul of such a being back through the course of time, we may perhaps not find it at all in a former fleshly incarnation. If we do, it is only because the being in question is able to descend repeatedly to incarnate vicariously in a human body.

A spiritual being who descends thus into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being, but without gaining anything from this embodiment for himself or experiencing anything here in the world of special significance for himself, is called an avatar. This is the distinction between a leading being who has sprung from human evolution itself and an avatar. An avatar being reaps no benefits for himself from his physical embodiments, or from even one embodiment to which he may subject himself; he enters a physical body for the blessing and advancement of mankind. Thus, an avatar being can either enter a human body just once or several times in succession, and when embodied is entirely different from other human beings.

The greatest avatar being who has lived on earth, as you can gather from the spirit of the lectures given here, is the Christ, that Being Whom we designate as the Christ, Who took possession of the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year of his life. This Being, Who first came in contact with our earth at the beginning of our era, Who was incarnated for three years in a body of flesh, and Who since that time has been connected with the astral sphere, the spiritual sphere of our super-sensible world—this Being is of unique significance as an avatar being. We should seek the Christ Being quite in vain in an earlier human embodiment, whereas other, lower avatar beings can be found to be embodied more than once. They incarnate repeatedly but obtain no benefit from their earthly embodiments for themselves. They only give; they take nothing from the earth. If. you want to understand these things perfectly, you must distinguish between such a lofty avatar being as the Christ and lower avatar beings who can have the most varied missions, and so as not to flounder about in speculation, we shall give a concrete instance to illustrate such a mission.

You all know from the story of Noah that in the ancient Hebrew narrative a great part of post-Noah humanity is derived from his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Today we shall not go into what Noah and these three tribal ancestors are intended to represent in another respect, but shall simply realize clearly that the Hebrew literature that speaks of Noah's son, Shem, traces the whole tribe of the Semites back to him as its ancestor. A genuinely occult view of such a matter is always based upon deeper truths. Those who are able to carry on occult research into such things know the following facts concerning Shem, the ancestor of the Semites.

In the case of such a personality who is destined to be the forebear of an entire tribe, care must be taken from the time of his birth to make it possible for him to become this ancestor. Now in what way will care be taken that a personality like Shem, for example, can be the ancestor of a whole people, or of a tribal community? In the case of Shem it was brought about through his receiving a quite specially prepared etheric body. We know that when a human being is born into this world he fashions about his individuality his etheric or life body, along with the other members of his being. For such a tribal ancestor a special etheric body must be prepared that will be the model etheric body for all the descendants in the succeeding generations. So we have in such a tribal progenitor a typical model etheric body that, through blood relationship passes through the generations. In this wise, the etheric bodies of all the descendants who belong to the same tribe are copies in a certain sense of the etheric body of the ancestor. Thus, into all the etheric bodies of the Semitic people there was woven something like a copy of Shem's etheric body. Now by what means is such a circumstance brought about in the course of human evolution?

If we observe this man Shem a little more closely, we find that his etheric body received its archetypal form because an avatar had woven himself into it. Although he was not so exalted as certain other avatar beings, still, it was a lofty individuality who descended into his etheric body. This being was not united with Shem's astral body nor with his ego, but was woven into his etheric body alone. In this very example we are able to study the exact significance of the participation of an avatar being in the constitution and composition of a human being. What does it mean, then, that a man like Shem, who has the mission to be the ancestor of a whole people, should have an avatar being woven into his body? It means that whenever an avatar being is woven into a fleshly human body, some one member, or even several members, of the super-sensible constitution of this human being are capable of being multiplied and split into many parts.

It was really because an avatar being was interwoven with Shem's etheric body that it became possible for numberless copies of the original to be formed, and these many copies could be woven into all the descendants of this tribal ancestor in subsequent generations. Thus, the descent to earth of an avatar being is significant, among other things, in that it contributes to the multiplication of one or several members of the person in question who is animated by the avatar. There existed in Shem, as you can see from this, an especially precious etheric body, an archetypal etheric body, prepared by an exalted avatar. It was woven into Shem so that it could then descend in many copies to all those who were ordained to be related by blood to him.

Now we have already said in the lecture mentioned at the beginning that there is also a spiritual economy consisting in the fact that anything of especial value is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard that not only is the ego re-embodied, but that also the astral body and the etheric body can be re-embodied. Aside from the fact that numberless copies of Shem's etheric body were formed, his own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world because it could later be useful in the mission of the Hebrew people. In this etheric body all the peculiarities of the Hebrews had originally come to expression, and if at any time something of especial importance was to occur for them, if a special task or mission was to be assigned to some one of them, it could best be accomplished by one who bore the etheric body of the ancestor. At a later time, a man who played an important role in the history of the Hebrews actually did bear the etheric body of the tribal ancestor, Shem. In fact, we have here one of those wonderful complications in human evolution that can explain a great deal to us. We have to do with an exalted individuality who was compelled to condescend, in somewhat the way a spiritually advanced person would have to speak to a lowly tribe, to speak to the Hebrew people in a manner appropriate to giving them strength for a special mission. He would, of course, be compelled to learn the language of this tribe, but it should not be maintained because of this that the language was something that would be used to advance him personally; he needed only take the trouble to learn the language. In this same way a lofty individuality had to make the effort to use Shem's etheric body to be able to give a definite impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This personality is the one you find in Biblical history named Melchizedek. He took upon himself the etheric body of Shem so that later he could give Abraham the impulse you find so beautifully described in the Bible. So, aside from the fact that what was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied because an avatar being was embodied in it, which then became woven into all the other etheric bodies of the Hebrews, Shem's own etheric body was preserved in the spiritual world so that it could be borne at a later time by Melchizedek, who was to give the Hebrews an important impulse through Abraham.

Thus delicately interwoven are the facts existing behind the physical world that alone make explicable to us what occurs in it. We come to understand history only when we are able to point to such facts of a spiritual nature lying behind the physical ones. History can never be explained by considering physical facts alone.

What we have been discussing becomes especially significant. Through the descent of an avatar being the essential soul-spiritual members of the individual who is the bearer of this avatar being are multiplied and transmitted as copies to other human beings. This fact assumes special significance through the appearance of Christ on earth. Because the Avatar Being of Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it became possible for his etheric body to be multiplied innumerable times. This was true as well of the astral body and even the ego; that is, the ego as an impulse, as it was kindled in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth when Christ entered his threefold sheath. First, however, we will take into account the fact that through the Avatar Being the etheric and astral bodies of Jesus could be multiplied.

Now, through the appearance of the Christ principle in earthly evolution one of the most significant phenomena in humanity occurred. What I have told you about Shem is fundamentally typical and characteristic of the pre-Christian times. When an etheric or an astral body is multiplied in this way, the copies are transmitted as a rule to those people who are related by blood to the one who had the original. Hence, the copies of Shem's etheric body were transmitted to the members of the Hebrew tribe. This was changed when the Christ Avatar Being appeared. The etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied and the copies preserved until they could be used in the course of human development. They were not, however, limited to any one nationality nor to any particular people. But when in the course of time a human being appeared who, irrespective of nationality, was ripe to have interwoven with his etheric or astral body an etheric or astral copy of the etheric or astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they could be woven into his being. Thus, we see how it became possible in the course of time for all sorts of people to have woven into them copies of the astral or etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth.

The intimate history of Christian development is connected with this fact. What is ordinarily described as the history of Christian development is a sum of entirely external occurrences. Therefore, far too little consideration is given to the distinction of actual periods in Christian development. Anyone who can look more deeply into the evolutionary progress of Christianity will easily perceive that, in the early centuries of the Christian era, the manner in which Christianity was spread was entirely different from that of later centuries. In the first Christian centuries the spread of Christianity was connected with everything that could be procured from the physical plane. We need only look at the early teachers of Christianity to see how physical recollections, relationships, and relics were emphasized. Just consider the importance that Irenaeus, who contributed so much to the spread of Christian teaching in various lands in the first century, gave to the fact that his recollections extended back to those who had listened to the pupils of the Apostles. Great value was set upon being able to prove by means of such memories of physical life that Christ Himself had taught in Palestine. It was especially emphasized, for example, that Papias himself had sat at the feet of the Apostles’ pupils. Even the places where those personalities had sat who were still eye witnesses of the fact that Christ had lived in Palestine were pointed out and described. The continuing remembrance of physical happenings and places is what was especially emphasized in the early Christian centuries.

The great prominence that was given to everything of a physical nature can be seen in the words of the ancient Augustine, who says, “Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to.” The authority for the existence of something in the physical world is the important and essential thing to him. Thus, the determining factor for him is that a corporate body has been maintained that, linking personality with personality, reaches back to one, such as Peter, who was a companion of Christ. Here we can see that in the spread of Christianity during the early centuries it was the documents and the impressions of the physical plane to which the greatest importance was attached.

Now, after the time of Augustine, the situation changed. Up to the tenth, eleventh or twelfth centuries it was no longer possible to appeal to living memories, nor to draw upon the documents of the physical plane, which now lay too far in the past. Something entirely different also came into existence in the whole mood and disposition of the humanity that was then embracing Christianity. This was especially the case among Europeans. During that time, there was actually something like a direct knowledge of the existence of Christ, of His death on the cross and of His continuing life in the present. From the fourth or fifth centuries up to the tenth or twelfth there was a large number of people who would have considered it the greatest folly had they been told that the events of Palestine could be doubted because they knew better. They had always been able to experience inwardly in miniature a kind of Pauline revelation; that is, the experience through which Saul, on the road to Damascus, became a Paul.

What made it possible for a number of people in those centuries to be able to receive revelations, which were in a certain sense clairvoyant, concerning the events in Palestine? It was possible because the multiplied copies of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been preserved and were woven into a great number of people. They were able to wear them as garments that were woven into their etheric bodies. This was not Jesus’ own etheric body but copies of the original. In these centuries there were those who could possess such an etheric copy and who could thereby have a direct knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ.

For this reason, the Christ picture became dissociated from external, historical, physical existence. A most extreme dissociation is presented in that wonderful work of the ninth century, the Heliand, a poem that was written down by an outwardly simple man of Saxony in the time of Ludwig the Pious, who reigned from 814 – 40. His astral body and ego could by no means equal what his etheric body contained because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his etheric body. The simple Saxon pastor who wrote this poem had the certainty through direct clairvoyant vision that the Christ exists on the astral plane, and that He is the same as He who was crucified on Golgotha. Because this was a direct certainty for him, he no longer needed to cling to historical documents, nor did he need physical assurance that the Christ existed. He described Him, therefore, detached from the whole Palestinian setting, as something like a leader of a Middle European or Germanic tribe, and those who surrounded Him as His followers, the Apostles, he described as vassals of a Germanic prince. All external scenery was changed. Only what constitutes the structure of events, and the actually essential and eternal in the Christ figure remained. Having such a direct knowledge, which was built upon such an important foundation as the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, it was not necessary to hold rigidly to historical events when he was speaking of the Christ. Thus, he was able to invest his direct knowledge with a different external setting.

In the case of the writer of the Heliand we have been able to describe one of the strange personalities who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth interwoven with his etheric body, and we could find other personalities in this period who had similar copies. We see here how the most important occurrences, with which we are able to explain history in an intimate way, take place behind the physical events.

If we follow Christian development further, we come to the period between the eleventh or twelfth centuries and the fifteenth. Here there was an entirely different mystery that now carried evolution forward. First, it was the memory of what had taken place on the physical plane; then it was the etheric element that was directly woven into the etheric bodies of the Christians of Middle Europe. In later centuries, from the twelfth to the fifteenth, it was especially the numerous copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that were woven into the astral bodies of the most important supporters of Christianity. The egos of such people were capable of forming false notions of all sorts of things, but immediate sources of strength and devotion and a direct certainty of sacred truths existed in their astral bodies. Such people possessed deep fervor, absolutely direct conviction and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What must sometimes seem so strange to us is that in their ego development they by no means equaled what their astral bodies contained because copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were woven into them. What their egos did often seemed grotesque, but the world of their moods and feelings and fervor was grand and exalted.

Francis of Assisi, for example, was such a personality. This fact becomes explicable when we, as people of the present, study his life and are unable to understand his conscious ego, but are nevertheless compelled to hold the deepest possible reverence for the entire world of his feelings and for all that he did. He was one of those who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, and it was this that made his accomplishments possible. Many of his followers in the Order of the Franciscans also had such copies interwoven with their astral bodies.

All the strange and otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become luminous and clear to you, if you bring properly before the eyes of your soul this mediation in world evolution between that time and the past. It is also important to know, however, whether what was woven into these people of the Middle Ages from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was more from what we call the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or the consciousness soul, since the astral body must, of course, be considered in a certain sense as something containing all of this as well as enclosing the ego. All that was woven into Francis of Assisi was wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth. Wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth was also contained in that remarkable personality, Elizabeth of Thüringen, who was born in 1207. Knowing this secret of her life will enable you to follow her biography with your soul. She, too, was a personality who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into her sentient soul. The riddle of the human being is solved for us by means of just such knowledge.

One phenomenon above all will become understandable when you know that during this time the most diverse personalities had sentient soul, intellectual soul or consciousness soul woven into them as copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. From this you will be able to comprehend that little understood science, scholasticism. What task did the scholastics set for themselves? They set out to find, on the basis of judgment and intellect, verifications and proof of that with which there was no historical connecting link, and which was no longer available with the direct clairvoyant certainty that existed in previous centuries through the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people set themselves the task by saying, “It has been communicated to us through tradition that in history that Being appeared Who is known as Christ Jesus, and also that other spiritual beings of whom the religious documents bear witness have intervened in human evolution.” Then, from the intellectual soul, that is, from the intellectual element of the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they set themselves the task of proving with subtle and clearly developed concepts all that existed in their literature as mystery truths. Thus arose the strange science in which an attempt was made to achieve what was perhaps the ultimate in human intellect. One may think of the content of scholasticism as one wishes, but simply by means of this delicate discrimination and exact outlining of concepts, the capacity for human reflection was developed and impressed upon the culture of that period. This capacity to think with acute and searching logic through scholasticism was implanted into humanity between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Among those who were more imbued with the copy of what had constituted the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the special conviction arose, because the ego functions in the consciousness soul, that the Christ can be found in the ego. Because they had within them the element of the consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, the inner Christ rose resplendent in their souls. These are the individuals whom you know as Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and all the other bearers of medieval mysticism.

Here you see how the diversified phases of the astral body were multiplied because the exalted Avatar Being of Christ had entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and they worked on in the following age to bring about the real development of Christianity. This was an important transition in other respects also. We have seen how in the course of its development humanity was dependent upon having incorporated within it copies of the other bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. In the early centuries there were people who were entirely dependent upon the physical plane; then in the following centuries came those to whom the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was accessible to interweave with their etheric bodies. Later, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, people tended more toward the astral body, the bearer of power and judgment, and so the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth came to be incorporated in them.

The awakening of the astral body can be observed also in another phenomenon. Before the twelfth century, the depths of mystery contained in the Holy Communion were especially well-understood. It was not widely discussed but was rather accepted in a manner that enabled one to feel all that was contained in the words, “This is My body and this is My blood.” Christ here indicated that he would be united with the earth, becoming its planetary Spirit. Because grain is the physical earth's most precious produce, bread became for man the body of Christ; the sap flowing through plants became something from His blood. Through this knowledge the value of the Lord's Supper was not diminished but was, on the contrary, enhanced. Something of these limitless depths was felt in these early centuries and it continued up to the time when the power of judgment awakened in the astral body. It was only then that disputes began about the Lord's Supper. Just consider the discussions as to what the Lord's Supper is intended to be that took place among the Hussites, Lutherans and the dissenting Zwinglians and Calvinists. This could not have been possible earlier when direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper still existed.

Here we see verified a great historical truth that should be of special importance to spiritual scientists. As long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was, they did not discuss it. In general, when people discuss, you can consider it a sign that they really have no knowledge of the subject they are discussing. Where knowledge exists, knowledge is imparted and there is no particular desire for discussion. Where there is desire for discussion, however, there is as a rule no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of a decline regarding the seriousness of a subject when it is discussed. Disintegration of a particular trend is always proclaimed by discussions. It is important that in spiritual science we come increasingly to understand that the wish for discussion may really be taken as a sign of ignorance. On the other hand, the opposite of discussion, the will to learn, the will gradually to comprehend what is in question, should be cultivated.

Here we see an important historical fact verified by the development of Christianity itself. But we can also learn to see how, in these centuries of Christendom just described, the power of judgment, this acute intellectual wisdom residing in the astral body, is developed. Indeed, if we fix our attention on realities rather than dogmas, we can learn how much Christianity has accomplished since its inception.

When we consider scholasticism, not as to content, but as a means of cultivating and disciplining our faculties, what has become of it? It has become natural science. Modern natural science is entirely unthinkable without the Christian natural science of the Middle Ages. It is not only that Copernicus was a canon and Giordano Bruno a Dominican, but that the thought forms employed in the natural sciences since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are nothing but what was developed and nurtured by the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Those people do not live in reality but in abstractions who look up passages in scholastic books, compare them with the statements made in recent natural science, and then say that Haeckel and others maintain something entirely different. Realities are what matter. The work of Haeckel, Darwin, du Bois-Reymond, Huxley and others would all have been impossible if the Christian scholastic science of the Middle Ages had not preceded them. The very fact that these scientists were able to think as they did, they owe to the Christianized science of the scholastics of the Middle Ages. That is the reality, and it is by this means that humanity has learned to think in the true sense of the word.

Furthermore, read David Friedrich Strauss. Try to observe the mode of his thinking; try to analyze his thought pictures and how he insists upon representing the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a myth. Do you know where the keenness of his thinking originates? He gets it from the Christian scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Everything used today to combat Christianity so radically has been learned from the Christian scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Actually, today there cannot be an opponent of Christianity of whom it cannot easily be pointed out that he would be unable to think as he does had he not learned the thought forms of the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. This, indeed, would be to observe world history in its reality.

What, then, has happened since the sixteenth century? The ego has come gradually into prominence, and with it human egotism, and with egotism, materialism. What the ego had previously acquired was unlearned and forgotten and it became necessary for man to limit himself to what the ego can observe, to what the physical sensory system is able to give to ordinary intelligence. That alone could the ego take into the inner sanctuary. The civilization since the sixteenth century is one of egotism. What must now enter into this ego? Christian evolution has passed through a development in the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and has penetrated as far as the ego. Now it must take into this ego the mysteries and secrets of Christianity. Following a time when the ego learned to think through Christianity and to apply the thoughts to the outer world, it must now be possible for it to be made into a Christ receptive organ. It must rediscover the primordial wisdom of the Great Avatar, Christ. By what means must this come about? By a more profound understanding of Christianity through spiritual science. Having been carefully prepared through the three stages of physical; etheric and astral development, the concern should now be that the organ within man be opened so that he may henceforth see into his spiritual environment with the eye that can be opened for him by the Christ.

As the greatest Avatar Being, Christ descended to earth. Let us view this in the right perspective and try to look at the world as we shall be able to see it when we shall have received the Christ into ourselves. We then find the whole process of our world evolution illuminated and pervaded by the Christ being. That is to say, we see how man's physical body gradually came into existence on Saturn, how the etheric body made its appearance on the Sun, on the Moon the astral body, and then on the earth, the ego. We find how everything tends toward the goal of becoming ever more independent and individual in order to incorporate into the evolution of the earth the wisdom that passes over from the Sun. In other words, the Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of the cosmic view.

So you see how Christianity has gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. In the early centuries the Christian received Christianity with his physical capacity for knowledge, later with his etheric capacity, and throughout the Middle Ages with his astral capacity. Then for a time Christianity in its true form was repressed until the ego had been trained by the three bodies in the course of Christian development. But since this ego has learned to think and to direct its vision to the objective world, it is now capable also of seeing in all phenomena spiritual facts that are intimately connected with the Central Being, the Christ. It is capable of beholding the Christ everywhere in the most varied forms as the foundation of the objective world.

Here we stand at the starting point of spiritual scientific comprehension and knowledge of Christianity. We begin to understand the task and mission that has been assigned to this movement for spiritual knowledge, and we come to realize its reality. The individual human being has physical, etheric and astral bodies, and ego, and continues to rise to ever more lofty heights; it is the same in the historical development of Christianity. We might say that it, too, has physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego—an ego that can even deny its origin, as in our time, since it can become egotistic. But it is still an ego that can receive the true Christ Being into itself, thereby rising to ever higher stages of existence. What the human being is in particular, the great world is in its totality, and that includes its historical development. When observed in this light, a perspective of the far-distant future opens before us from the spiritual scientific viewpoint, and we realize how it can lay hold upon our hearts and fill them with meaning. We comprehend evermore what we have to do, knowing that we are not groping in the dark. We have not devised ideas that we intend arbitrarily to project into the future, but we intend to harbor and to follow only those ideas that have been slowly prepared through the centuries. It is true that, after the physical, etheric and astral bodies had come into existence, the ego appeared and is now to be developed little by little up to spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. It is also true that modern man, with his ego form and present thinking could only be developed from the astral, etheric and physical forms of Christianity. Christianity has now become ego. Just as truly as this was the development of the past, so it is also true that the ego form of humanity can appear only after the astral and etheric forms of Christianity have been developed. Christianity will develop on into the future. It will offer humanity far greater things and the Christian development and standard of life will arise in new form. The transformed astral body will appear as the Christian spirit self; the transformed etheric body will appear as the Christian life spirit. In a radiant perspective of the future of Christianity, spirit man shines forth before our souls like a star toward which we strive, illuminated and glowing through and through with the spirit of Christianity.

You will have been able to see from the one lecture given here on more complicated questions of reincarnation that, with further progress in the spiritual-scientific world-view, what we could give in the beginning as elementary truths becomes modified—we gradually rise to higher and higher truths. Still it was right to present the general cosmic truths at first in as simple and elementary a form as possible. It is, however, necessary also to advance slowly step by step from the abc to the higher truths, for only through these higher truths will that gradually be attained which, among other things, spiritual science is intended to give: namely, the possibility of understanding and penetrating the world which surrounds us in the physical, sense-perceptible sphere. Now it is true that we have a long way to go before we shall be able to coordinate the spiritual lines and forces existing behind the sense world. But because of much that has been said in recent lectures various phenomena of our existence will already have become clearer, more understandable. Today we shall proceed a little farther in this regard, and here also we shall speak again about more complicated questions of reincarnation, of re-embodiment.

To that end we must today clearly realize first of all that differences exist among the beings who occupy a leading place in the earth's human evolution. We have to distinguish in the course of our earth evolution those leading individualities who from the beginning, so to speak, have developed with the humanity of our earth just as it is—only that they have made more rapid progress. We might put it this way: If we go back into the past to the very remote Lemurian time, we find among the human beings then incarnated the most varied stages of development. All the souls embodied at that time have again and again experienced reincarnations, re-embodiments, during the succeeding Atlantean and our post-Atlantean periods. These souls have developed with varying rapidity. Some have made relatively slow progress through the various incarnations, and still have long distances to travel in the future; but there are also souls who have developed rapidly, who, one might say, have utilized their incarnations to better advantage, and are therefore at a stage of soul-spiritual development which will be attained by the normal man only in a very, very distant future. But, continuing to speak of this soul sphere, we may say nevertheless that however advanced these individual souls may be, however far they may tower above the normal man, still they have followed the same path in our earth evolution as the rest of humanity; they have merely advanced more rapidly. Besides these leading individualities, who in this sense are like the rest of humanity, only at a higher stage, there are also in the course of human evolution other individualities, other beings, who have by no means gone through various incarnations just as other men have. We can perhaps illustrate what lies at the bottom of this by saying: There were beings in that very time of the Lemurian evolution to which we have alluded who no longer needed to descend so deeply into physical embodiment as other men, as all the beings who have just been described—there were beings who could have accomplished their development in higher, more spiritual regions, who, in other words, did not need for their own further progress to descend into bodies of flesh. It is nevertheless possible for these beings, in order to intervene in the course of human evolution, to descend vicariously, so to speak, into just such human bodies as ours. At any time therefore a being may appear of whom, if we make the clairvoyant test, we cannot say, as we can of other human beings, that we trace the soul back in time and find it in a previous fleshly incarnation, trace it farther back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on—but we must say instead: If we trace the soul of such a being back through the course of time, perhaps we do not find it at all in any former fleshly incarnation; but if we do, it is only because the being in question is able to descend repeatedly, at intervals, and incarnate vicariously in a human body. A spiritual being who descends thus into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being, without gaining anything from this embodiment for himself, so to speak, without experiencing anything here in the world of special significance for himself—such a being is called in oriental wisdom an Avatar. And this is the distinction between a leading being who has sprung from human evolution itself and one called an Avatar: namely, that an Avatar-being reaps no benefits for himself from his physical embodiments, or from the one physical embodiment to which he subjects himself, for he enters into a physical body for the blessing and advancement of mankind. Therefore, as we have said, such an Avatar-being can either enter into a human body just once, or several times in succession; and he is then something entirely different from other human beings.

The greatest Avatar-Being Who has lived on earth, as you can gather from the spirit of all the lectures given here, is the Christ—that Being Whom we designate as the Christ, Who took possession of the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth in the 30th year of his life. This Being, Who first came in contact with our earth at the beginning of our era, Who was incarnated for three years in a body of flesh, and Who since that time has been connected with the astral sphere, that is, with the spiritual sphere of our super-sensible world—this Being is of unique significance as an Avatar-Being. We should seek the Christ-Being quite in vain in an earlier human embodiment, whereas other, lower Avatar-beings could be embodied more than once. They incarnate repeatedly, but they obtain for themselves no benefit from the earthly embodiments. They only give; they take nothing from the earth. But if you wish to understand these things perfectly, you must distinguish between such a lofty Avatar-Being as the Christ and lower Avatar-beings. The latter can have the most varied missions on our earth, but we can speak first of one such mission; and in order not to flounder about in speculation, we shall at once give a concrete instance to illustrate this kind of mission.

You all know from the story of which Noah is the center that in the ancient Hebrew narrative a great part of the post-Noah humanity derives from the three ancestors, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Today we shall not go into what Noah and these three tribal ancestors are intended to represent in another respect; we shall simply realize clearly that the Hebrew literature which speaks of Shem, one of the sons of Noah, traces back the whole tribe of the Semites to Shem as its ancestor. A genuinely occult view of such a matter is always based upon the deeper truths. Those who are able to carry on occult research into such things know the following facts concerning Shem, the ancestor of the Semites.

In case of such a personality, who is destined to be the ancestor of an entire tribe, care must be taken from the very time of his birth to make it possible for him to be just this ancestor. Now in what way will care be taken that a personality—like Shem, for example—can be the ancestor of a whole people, or of a tribal community? In the case of Shem it was brought about through his receiving a quite specially prepared etheric body. We know that when the human being is born into this world he fashions about his individuality his etheric or life body, with the other members of his being. For such a tribal ancestor a special etheric body must be prepared which is the model etheric body for all the descendants in the following generations; so that we have in such a tribal progenitor a typical etheric body, a model etheric body; and then through blood relationship this passes through the generations so that in a certain sense the etheric bodies of all the descendants who belong to the same tribe are copies of the etheric body of the ancestor. Thus in all the etheric bodies of the Semitic people there was inwoven something like a copy of Shem's etheric body. Now by what means is such a thing brought about in the course of human evolution?

If we observe this man Shem a little more closely, we find that his etheric body received its archetypal form because into this very etheric body an Avatar had woven himself. Although he was not so exalted as certain other Avatar-beings, still it was a lofty Avatar-being who descended into his etheric body. This being was not united with Shem's astral body nor with his ego, but was woven, as it were, into his etheric body alone. In this very example we are able to study what the exact significance is when an Avatar-being participates in the constitution, the composition, of a human being. What does it mean, then, that a man like Shem, who has the mission to be the ancestor of a whole people, should have an Avatar-being woven into his body? It means that whenever an Avatar-being is woven into a fleshly human body, some one member, or even several members, of the super-sensible constitution of this human being are capable of being multiplied, of being split into many parts.

It was really because an Avatar-being was interwoven with Shem's etheric body that it became possible for numberless copies of the original to be formed; and these many copies could be woven into all the descendants of the tribal ancestor in the successive generations. Thus, the descent to earth of an Avatar-being has the significance, among other things, that it contributes to the multiplication of one or several members of the person in question who is animated by the Avatar. There existed in Shem, as you can see from this, an especially precious etheric body, an archetypal etheric body, prepared by an exalted Avatar, and then woven into Shem, so that it could then descend in many copies to all those who were ordained to be related by blood to this ancestor.

Now we have already said in the lecture mentioned at the beginning that there is also a spiritual economy consisting in the fact that anything of especial value is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard that not only is the ego re-embodied, but that also the astral body and the etheric body can be re-embodied. Aside from the fact that numberless copies of Shem's etheric body were formed, his own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world; for it could later be very useful in the mission of the Hebrew people. In this etheric body all the peculiarities of the Hebrew people had originally come to expression; and if at any time something of very especial importance was to occur for the ancient Hebrew people, if a special task, a special mission, was to be assigned to some one, it could best be accomplished by one who bore the etheric body of the ancestor. At a later time a man who played an important role in the history of the Hebrew people actually did bear the etheric body of the tribal ancestor. In fact, we have here one of those wonderful complications in human evolution which can explain a great deal to us. We have to do with a very exalted individuality who was compelled to condescend, as it were, in order to speak to the Hebrew people in an appropriate manner, and to give them the strength for a special mission—in somewhat the way a spiritually advanced person would have to speak to a lowly tribe. He would of course be compelled to learn the language of this tribe; but no one should maintain on this account that the language is something which would serve to advance him personally, for the one concerned need only take the trouble to learn the language. In the same way a lofty individuality had to make the effort to use Shem's etheric body, in order to be able to give a very definite impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This personality is the one you find in the Biblical history named Melchizedek. He took upon himself, as it were, the etheric body of Shem, in order later to give to Abraham the impulse which you find so beautifully described in the Bible. And so, aside from the fact that what was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied, because an Avatar-being was embodied in it, and then became woven into all the other etheric bodies belonging to the Hebrew people, Shem's own etheric body was preserved in the spiritual world, so that it could be borne at a later time by Melchizedek, who was to give to the Hebrew people an important impulse through Abraham.

Thus delicately interwoven are the facts existing behind the physical world which alone make explicable to us what occurs in that world. We come to understand history only when we are able to point to such facts: to facts of a spiritual nature which lie behind the physical ones. History can never be explained out of itself, if we consider physical facts alone.

What we have just been discussing becomes especially significant: namely, that through the descent of an Avatar-being the essential soul-spiritual members of the personality who is the bearer of this Avatar-being are multiplied and transmitted to other human beings, and appear in copies of the original. This fact assumes very special significance through the appearance of the Christ on earth. Because the Avatar-Being of Christ dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it became possible for the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth to be multiplied innumerable times, as well as the astral body, and even the ego,—that is, the ego as an impulse, as it was kindled in the astral body when the Christ entered into the threefold sheath of Jesus of Nazareth. But first we will take into account the fact that through the Avatar-Being the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be multiplied.

Now just through the appearance of the Christ Principle in the earth evolution, there occurred in humanity one of the most significant phenomena. What I have told you about Shem is fundamentally typical and characteristic for the pre-Christian time. When in this way an etheric body or an astral body is multiplied, the copies of it are transmitted as a rule to those people who are related by blood to the one who had the original; hence, the copies of Shem's etheric body were transmitted to the members of the Hebrew tribe. That was changed by the appearance of the Christ Avatar-Being. The etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied, and these copies were preserved as such until, in the course of human development, they could be used. They were not, however, limited to any one nationality nor to any particular people; but when in the course of time a human being appeared who—irrespective of nationality—was ripe, was fitted to have interwoven with his own astral body an astral copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, or an etheric copy of his etheric body, these could be woven into his being. Thus we see how it became possible in the course of time—let us say—for all sorts of people to have woven into them copies of the astral body or of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The intimate history of Christian development is connected with this fact. What is ordinarily described as the history of Christian development is a sum of entirely external occurrences; and therefore far too little consideration is given to a fact of very great importance: namely, to the distinction of actual periods in Christian development. Anyone who can look more deeply into the evolutionary progress of Christianity will easily perceive that in the early centuries of the Christian era the manner in which Christianity was spread was entirely different from that of later centuries. In the first Christian centuries the spread of Christianity was connected, as it were, with everything that could be procured from the physical plane. We need only to take a look at the early teachers of Christianity to see how at that time physical recollections, physical relationships, and physical relics are emphasized. Just consider what great importance was given by Irenæus, who in the first century contributed much to the spread of Christian teaching in various lands, to the fact that recollections extended back to those who had themselves listened to the pupils of the Apostles. Great value was set upon being able to prove by means of such physical recollections that Christ Himself had taught in Palestine. It was especially emphasized, for example, that Papias himself had sat at the feet of the Apostles' pupils; even the places were pointed out and described where those personalities had sat who were still eyewitnesses of the fact that Christ had lived in Palestine. The physical continuance of remembrance is what was especially emphasized in the early Christian centuries.

What great prominence was given to everything of a physical nature that still existed can be seen in the words of the ancient Augustine, who says: “Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to.” The physical authority for the existence of something in the physical world is to him the important and essential thing: that a corporate body has been maintained which, linking personality with personality, reaches up to one who was a companion of the Christ—such as Peter. For him that is the determining factor. Thus we can see that in the spread of Christianity during the early centuries it was the documents, the impressions of the physical plane, to which the greatest importance was attached.

Now the situation changes after the time of Augustine up to, let us say, the 10th, 11th, or 12th century. During that period of time it was no longer possible to appeal to the living remembrance, nor to draw upon the documents of the physical plane, for they lay too far in the past. At that time also something entirely different came into existence in the whole mood and disposition of the humanity which was then embracing Christianity ; and especially was this the case among European peoples. During that time there was actually something like a direct knowledge that a Christ exists, that a Christ died on the cross, and that He continues to live. From the 4th or 5th century up to the 10th or 12th there were a large number of people who would have considered it the greatest folly had they been told that the events of Palestine could even be doubted, for they knew better. They had always been able to experience inwardly a kind of Pauline revelation in miniature—what Paul, who up to that time was a Saul, experienced on the road to Damascus, and through which he became a Paul. How did it happen that in those centuries a number of people were able to receive revelations which were in a certain sense clairvoyant concerning the events in Palestine ? It was possible because in those centuries the multiplied copies of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, which had been preserved, had been woven into a great number of people; because it was granted to them to wear these as a garment, so to speak. There was inwoven with their etheric bodies, not Jesus' own etheric body, but only a copy of the inborn original one of Jesus of Nazareth. In these centuries there were those who could possess such an etheric body, and who could thereby have a direct knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, and also of the Christ. This was the reason also that the Christ picture became dissociated from external, historical, physical existence. And the most extreme dissociation is shown to us in that wonderful poem of the 9th century, known as the Heliand poem, which originated in the time of Ludwig the Pious, who reigned from 814–840, and which was written down by an outwardly simple man of Saxony. His astral body and his ego could by no means equal what his etheric body contained, for into his etheric body was woven a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. The simple Saxon pastor who wrote this poem had the certainty through direct clairvoyant vision that the Christ exists on the astral plane, and that He is the same as He who was crucified on Golgotha! And because this was a direct certainty for him, he no longer needed to cling to the historical documents. He no longer needed the physical mediation to assure him that the Christ existed. He described Him, therefore, as detached from the whole Palestinian setting. He described Him as something like a leader of a Middle-European or Germanic tribe; and those who surrounded Him as His followers, the Apostles, he described as vassals of a Germanic prince. All the external scenery was changed; only the actually essential, the eternal, in the Christ Figure remained,—only what constitutes the structure of the events. Having such a direct knowledge, built upon such an important foundation as the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, it was not necessary to hold himself rigidly to the immediate historical events when he was speaking of the Christ. He invested what was for him direct knowledge with a different external setting. And just as in the case of this writer of the Heliand poem we have been able to describe one of the strange personalities who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth interwoven with his etheric body, so we could find other personalities in this period who had similar copies. Thus we see how the most important occurrences of all, which are able to explain history to us in an intimate way, take place behind the physical events.

If we now follow Christian development farther, we come, let us say, into the period between the 11th or 12th century and the 15th. Here there was an entirely different mystery, which now carried the whole evolution forward. First it was, so to speak, the memory of what had taken place on the physical plane; then it was the etheric element which was directly inwoven with the etheric bodies of the bearers of Christianity in Middle-Europe. In the later centuries, from the 12th to the 15th, it was especially the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth which in numerous copies was woven into the astral bodies of the most important bearers of Christianity. Such people then had an ego which as ego was capable of forming very false notions of all sorts of things; but in their astral bodies there existed immediate sources of strength, of devotion, a direct certainty of sacred truths. There existed in such people deep fervor, absolutely direct conviction, and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What must sometimes seem so strange to us in these very personalities is that in their ego their development by no means equalled what their astral body contained, because the latter had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into it. What their ego did often seemed grotesque; but the world of their moods and feelings, of their fervor, was grand and exalted. Such a personality, for example, was Francis of Assisi. And when we, as people of the present time, study Francis of Assisi and are not able to understand his conscious ego, but are nevertheless compelled to have the deepest possible reverence for the entire world of his feelings and for all that he did,—that fact becomes explicable from such a point of view. He was one of those who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth inwoven. Because of this he was able to accomplish just what he did accomplish, and many of his adherents from the Order of Franciscans, with its servants and minorites, had similarly such copies interwoven with their astral bodies.

All the strange and otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become luminous and clear to you, if you bring properly before the eyes of your soul this mediation in world evolution between past and future. The important question was whether what was woven into these people of the Middle Ages from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was more what we call the sentient soul, or more the intellectual soul, or more what we call the consciousness soul. For the astral body of man must of course be considered in a certain sense as something containing all this; that is, it must be thought of as enclosing the ego, and containing sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. All that was in Francis of Assisi was wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth, so to speak. Wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth was contained in that remarkable personality whom you will follow biographically with the soul when you know the secret of her life: Elizabeth of Thüringen, born in 1207. Here we have a personality who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into the sentient soul. The riddle of the human being is solved for us by means of just such knowledge.

Above all, one phenomenon will be understandable when you know that during this time the most diverse personalities had sentient soul, intellectual soul, or consciousness soul woven into them as copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. You will be able to understand that science, otherwise so little understood, which we ordinarily designate as scholasticism. What kind of a task did the scholastics set for themselves? The task of finding, on the basis of judgment and intellect, verifications, proofs, for that with which there was no historical connecting link, and concerning which there was no direct clairvoyant certainty, such as existed in previous centuries because of the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people had to set themselves the task in this way: They said to themselves: It has been communicated to us through tradition that in history that Being appeared Who is known as Christ Jesus; that other spiritual beings of whom the religious documents bear witness have intervened in human evolution.—From their intellectual soul, from the intellect element of the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they set themselves the task of proving with subtle and clearly developed concepts all that existed in their literature as mystery truths. Thus arose that strange science which tried to achieve what was perhaps the ultimate in sagacity, in intellect, that has ever been reached by humanity. One may think of the content of scholasticism as one wishes, but through several centuries, simply by means of this very delicate discrimination and exact outlining of concepts, the capacity for human reflection was developed and impressed upon the culture of the period. It was between the 13th and 15th centuries that humanity had implanted into it through scholasticism the capacity to think with acute and searching logic.

Among those who, in turn, were more imbued with the consciousness soul—that is, the copy of what had constituted the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth—there appeared the special conviction—because the ego functions in the consciousness soul—that the Christ can be found in the ego. And because they themselves had within them the element of the consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, the inner Christ rose resplendent in their souls. These are the individuals whom you know as Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and all the bearers of mediæval mysticism.

Thus you see how the very diversified phases of the astral body were multiplied because the exalted Avatar-Being of Christ had entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth; and they worked on in the following age and brought about the real development of Christianity. In other respects also this was an important transition. We see how in the course of its development humanity is dependent in other ways also upon having incorporated within it these fragments of the Jesus of Nazareth being. In the early centuries there were people who were entirely dependent upon the physical plane; then in the following centuries came those who were accessible to the interweaving with their etheric bodies of the element of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. Later people tended more, so to speak, toward the astral body; hence the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could now likewise be incorporated in them. The astral body is the bearer of the power of judgment, which awakened particularly between the 12th and the 14th centuries. You could observe this from another phenomenon also.

Up to that time it was especially well understood what depths of mystery the Holy Communion contained. At most there was only slight discussion about it, but it was accepted in a manner that enabled one to feel all that lay in the words : This is My body and this is My blood,—because the Christ indicated that He would be united with the earth, would be the planetary Spirit of the Earth. And because the most precious thing coming out of the physical earth is grain, bread became for man the body of Christ; and the sap which flows through the plants became for him something from the blood of Christ. Through this knowledge the value of the Lord's Supper was not diminished, but was on the contrary heightened. Something of these limitless depths was felt in these centuries, up to the time when the power of judgment awakened in the astral body. It was only from then on that disputes began about the Lord's Supper. Just consider how among the Hussites, among the Lutherans and the dissenting Zwinglians and Calvinists, there was discussion as to what the Lord's Supper is intended to be. Such discussion would not have been possible earlier, because there was still a direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper. But we see verified here a great historical law which should be of special importance for spiritual scientists: namely, that as long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was they did not discuss it. In general you can consider it a sign that people really have no knowledge of a certain matter .when they begin to discuss it. Where there is knowledge, knowledge is imparted, and no particular desire for discussion exists. Where there is desire for discussion, there is as a rule no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of a decline as regards the seriousness of a subject when discussion begins. Disintegration of a particular trend is always proclaimed by discussions. It is very important that in the spiritual-scientific field we come to understand more and more that the wish for discussion may really be taken as a sign of ignorance; on the other hand, that which is the opposite of discussion, the will to learn, the will gradually to comprehend what is in question, should be cultivated.

Here we see a great historical fact verified by the development of Christianity itself. But we can learn something else besides, if we see how in these centuries of Christendom just described the power of judgment—which resides in the astral body—this acute intellectual wisdom, is developed. Indeed, if we fix our attention upon realities, not dogmas, we can learn how much Christianity has accomplished in the course of its progress. What has become of scholasticism, if we consider it, not as to its content, but as a means of cultivating and disciplining the faculties? Do you know what became of it? It became modern natural science. Modern natural science is entirely unthinkable without the Christian natural science of the Middle Ages. It is not only that Copernicus was a canon, and Giordano Bruno a Dominican, but that all the thought-forms employed in the natural sciences since the 15th and 16th centuries are nothing but what was developed and nurtured by the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Those people do not live in reality, but in abstractions, who look up passages in the books of the scholastics, compare them with the statements of more recent natural science, and then say: Haeckel and others maintain something entirely different. Realities are what matter!

A Haeckel, a Darwin, a DuBois-Reymond, a Huxley, and others, would all have been impossible if the Christian scholastic science of the Middle ages had not preceded them. For the very fact that these modern scientists were able to think as they did they owe to the Christianized science of the scholastics of the Middle Ages. That is the reality. By this means humanity has learned to think in the true sense of the word.—The matter goes further still. Read David Friedrich Strauss. Try to observe the mode of his thinking; try to analyze his thought pictures: How he insists upon representing the whole life of Jesus of Nazareth as a myth. Do you know whence he has the keenness of his thinking? He gets it from the Christian scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Everything by means of which Christianity is so radically combated today has been learned from the Christian scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Actually there could not be today an opponent of Christianity concerning whom it could not easily be pointed out that he would not be able to think as he thinks at all, had he not learned the thought-forms from the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. This, indeed, would mean to observe world history in its reality.

What then has happened since the 16th century? Since the 16th century the ego itself has come more and more into prominence, and with it human egotism also, and with egotism, materialism. What the ego had acquired as content has been unlearned and forgotten. It was therefore necessary for man to limit himself to that which the ego can observe—to that which the physical sense-instrument is able to give to the ordinary intelligence—and that alone could it take into the inner sanctuary. The civilization since the 16th century is a civilization of egotism. What must now enter into this ego? Christian evolution has passed through a development in the external physical body, a development in the etheric body, and also in the astral body, and has penetrated as far as the ego. Now it must take into this ego the mysteries and secrets of Christianity itself. Following a time when the ego learned to think through Christianity, and applied the thoughts to the outer world, it must now be possible for the ego to be made into a Christ-receptive organ. This ego must now rediscover the wisdom which is the primordial wisdom of the Great Avatar, of Christ Himself. And by what means must this come to pass? By a profounder understanding of Christianity through spiritual science. Carefully prepared through the three stages of physical, etheric, and astral development, the matter of concern should now be that the organ within man be opened, so that he may henceforth see into his spiritual environment with that eye which the Christ can open for him. As the greatest Avatar-Being, the Christ descended to earth. Let us get a perspective view of this; let us try to look at the world as we shall be able to see it when we shall have received the Christ into ourselves. We then find the whole process of our world-becoming illuminated and pervaded by the Christ-Being. That is to say, we describe how upon Saturn man's physical body gradually came into existence, how on the Sun the etheric body made its appearance, on the Moon the astral body, and then on the Earth the ego is added; and we find how everything tends toward the goal of becoming ever more independent and individual, in order to incorporate in the Earth evolution that wisdom which passes over from the Sun to the Earth. In other words : for the liberated ego of modern times the Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of the cosmic view.

Thus you see how Christianity gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. In the early centuries the Christian received Christianity with his physical capacity for knowledge; then later with his etheric capacity; and throughout the Middle Ages with his astral capacity for knowledge. Then for a time Christianity in its true form was repressed, until the ego had been trained by the three bodies in the course of Christian development. But since this ego has learned to think and to direct its vision to the objective world, it is now capable also of seeing in all phenomena in this objective world spiritual facts which are intimately connected with the Central Being, with the Christ Being: it is capable of beholding the Christ everywhere in the most various forms as the foundation.

With this fact we stand at the starting point of spiritual-scientific comprehension and knowledge of Christianity. We begin to understand what task, what mission, has been assigned to this Movement for Spiritual Knowledge, and we realize at the same time the reality of this mission. Just as the individual human being has physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, and gradually rises to ever more lofty heights, so is it also in the historical development of Christianity. We might say that Christianity has also a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego—an ego which can even deny its origin, as in our time, since the ego can in any case become egotistic—but still an ego which can at the same time receive the true Christ Being into itself, and can gradually rise to ever higher stages of existence. What the human being is in particular, the great world is in its totality, as well as in its course of historical development. If we observe the matter in this light, there opens before us from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint a perspective far into the future. And we know how this can lay hold upon our heart and fill it with meaning. We comprehend more and more what we have to do, and we know also that we are not groping in the dark; for we have not devised any ideas which we intend arbitrarily to project into the future, but we intend to harbor and to follow only those ideas which have been gradually prepared through the centuries. Just as it is true that the ego must first appear and be developed little by little up to Spirit Self, Life Spirit, and Spirit Man, after the physical body, the etheric body, and astral body were already in existence, so is it true that the modern man with his ego-form, with his present-day thinking, could only be developed out of the astral, the etheric, and the physical form of Christianity. Christianity has become Ego. As it is true that this was the development in the past, just so true is it that the ego-form of humanity can appear only after the astral and etheric form of Christianity has been developed. Christianity will develop on into the future; it will offer humanity far greater things, and the Christian development and the Christian standard of life will arise in new form: the transformed astral body will appear as the Christian Spirit Self; the transformed etheric body as the Christian Life Spirit. And in a radiant perspective of the future of Christianity, Spirit Man gleams forth before our souls like a star toward which we strive, illuminated and glowing through and through with the spirit of Christianity.

Eight days ago, we discussed important connections between the human organization, the physical build and the astral world on the basis of the Germanic creation myth. We have seen the interesting connection between the twelve pairs of cranial nerves and the twelve currents that our ancestors saw through their kind of clairvoyance in the astral plane, and which are nothing other than the inflows of that which then forms the twelve pairs of cranial nerves in the human being. We have also seen how the softer parts of the human body, so to speak, what belongs to the larynx, what belongs to the heart and to the lower organic parts, how all this is connected with the roots of the world ash - which is of course an astral phenomenon - and how the formation of the human brain is connected with the treetop and branches of the world ash. Here we have looked deeply into the connection between what the myth tells us and what we can acquire through our knowledge. We have also seen that the signs and symbols that the myth offers us are not things that have been thought up or invented by the imagination, but that they correspond to real observations in the astral world. This must be emphasized again and again, that all the beating about the bush with regard to symbols and signs that comes from the intellect and from speculation is worthless. For the real symbols that play a role in occultism are renderings of experiences and encounters in the spiritual world.

Today we will take an even deeper look into this area. We will come to a chapter that can really only be discussed in a working group that has been dealing with these questions for some time. Now, younger members are still being added to such working groups. They have to get used to hearing things that may still be shocking to them. But we would not make any progress if we did not want to discuss what applies to the advanced. This does not mean advanced in terms of study and knowledge, but what is meant by “advanced” is that the members who have been here for a long time have acquired a certain feeling that one of other worlds in the same way as if they were things or people that one encounters in the physical world, and with whom one can, under certain circumstances, associate and converse as familiarly as with the beings one encounters when one steps outside into the street. In this sense, I mean “advanced” so that they are not shocked when the spiritual worlds and their inhabitants are spoken of in an unbiased way. And the younger members may at least for the time being have the good will to listen to such a thing and accept it as naturally as a story from the ordinary sensory world. The composition of the lecture today will also be somewhat colorful. But that does not matter. We will get an overview of an important chapter of the spiritual world on the one hand and on the other hand we will get the connection with our own human physicality.

You know that within our sensual world there is a second world that we call the astral world, which initially presents itself as a flowing sea of light, in which colors and forms flow. For the researcher in the astral world, these color formations arrange themselves into certain entities, which he recognizes as astral entities, which are just as real there as plants and animals are here in the physical world. Then there is the world of spiritual sound, the harmonies of the spheres, the world of Devachan, which can be recognized by clairaudience. We will discuss this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to the astral world from a few points of view.

Anyone who studies the astral world with the means that those who study these things in depth can gradually learn through their own development will find that this world is much, much more populated than our physical world. For the astral world has a property that the physical world does not have, and in occultism this property is called 'permeability'. Astral beings can pass through each other; physical beings cannot do that. From this you can already see that the astral world can be much more populated, can contain many more beings than the physical world. This is also the case.

Just think back to the time when a large number of people were still able, even without occult training, to see into the spiritual world through their natural abilities. You will get a slightly different idea of some of the old pictures that earlier painters have painted. I would just like to remind you of the 'Sistine Madonna', which is in Dresden. Even if some have not seen the Sistine Madonna themselves, they are at least familiar with the good engravings that exist of it. You will have seen that in the background the whole atmosphere is filled with the heads of angels or genii. Just as the observation of nature otherwise makes cloud formations grow out of the air, so here angelic or genii figures grow out of them. This is not mere fantasy, but something that is a complete reality for those who can see the astral world. The astral world, which surrounds us as a surging sea of light, is filled with beings that, as it were, spring from space at every point with infinite vitality. This is how the astral plane appears in every respect; it is a moving spiritual life. Now it is not to be said that the painters who lived at the time of Raphael had this full understanding. That would be too much to say; but there were great predecessors of these painters, whose works have long since been lost, who in some respects were real clairvoyants, who, from their clairvoyance, indicated the tradition in such a way that a painter like Raphael, even if he was not clairvoyant, knew from tradition: this is how it is, and was therefore able to reproduce it appropriately. Even more appropriate are older pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries. If you go back to a time that is best known through the painter Cimabue, you will see how the strange phenomenon of the gold background appears in the pictures, and how angelic or genie-like figures emerge from it. This, too, corresponds fully to the reality of the astral vision. Down to the golden background, this corresponds to reality. For indeed, when we enter the higher regions of the astral plane, the flowing sea of light, which shines and is illuminated in other color tones, transforms into such a flowing sea of light that appears to be glowing with gold. This is beautifully depicted in a painting by Raphael, in a fresco, the “Disputa”, opposite another painting called “The School of Athens”, a name that should actually be crossed out. In the “Disputa” you have at the very bottom the disputing people - who are believed to be church fathers, popes, doctors of the church - then the region of the apostles and prophets begins, and then the region that Raphael depicts in the heads of the genii is divided, which is the region that we can call the lower astral plane. Higher up on the same picture, you can see the region of the higher astral plane, glowing with gold. That is why the pictures of these old painters are so convincing, because those who know these things find the truth of the inner vision reflected in them. They are also convincing for those who do not know this, because they can feel in their subconscious the deep truth from which these things are created. I mention this to draw attention to the way in which people in earlier times were aware of these higher realities and also reproduced them in pictures.

Today we want to discuss something about this world, which we have now tried to characterize as the painters have reproduced it in pictures. Today we want to draw attention to very specific entities that the clairvoyant person encounters in the astral world, partly in the lower, partly in the higher astral world. There are such entities that are shaped like a very complicated bird body, but of tremendous beauty, endowed with mighty wing-like organs and with a head similar to the human head; that is how they appear formed and shaped. These are definitely realities of the astral plane. The great teachers of the religions, who were able to see into it, were well acquainted with this type of being. And when in the most ancient times one tried to depict these beings - the cherubim, or the somewhat less correct, but at least well-intentioned griffins - then one painted such strange figures, which are something between a genius and a mythical creature.

If we recall the old legends, we see in them an attempt by people to recreate these higher, genially beings. They are shaped in the most diverse ways, and those who worked in the secret schools and knew them have, as it were, characterized this choir of beings. These types of entities are grouped into six classes. There are six regents, six leaders of these hosts. They have been named in various ways, these six main geniuses of the higher astral plane, the golden region. The Persian Secret Doctrine calls them “Amshaspands”; it speaks of the six Amshaspands.

A second type of such astral entities, occurring in a somewhat lower region, looks different; it does not at all resemble forms that exist here on the physical plane. But one can at least make oneself understood by trying to express their forms through those of the physical plane. This is what the secret teachers did when they gave the mythologies to the nations and the art of which we have spoken, which emerged from the secret teachings. There are no figures that look exactly like these beings, so we can only characterize them by depicting them as having a kind of human body with all kinds of different animal heads. The Egyptians, who knew a great deal about this area of the astral plane and were quite familiar with the spiritual beings of this sphere, tried to recreate this category of astral plane spirits in the various forms, such as human forms with the head of a sparrowhawk or human forms with other animal heads. These are not arbitrarily invented fantasies either, but rather forms with which one can interact on the astral plane just as one can with humans and animals on the physical plane.

Then there is a third kind of entity. There are now innumerable such beings, and it is no longer really possible to characterize them by drawing comparisons from the animal or human world, but rather by trying to draw the plant kingdom or the lower animals for their physicality and the human head as their head, so that the whole is somewhat similar to a plant body from which a human head grows, or a fish body with a human head. All this roughly gives a picture of the beings that are present on the astral plane.

As I have told you, there are six types of such genies, which the Persians called “Amshaspands”. You now also know the second type, which is best characterized by human form with an animal head; they are formed in the most diverse ways. If you go through these figures, you get about twenty-eight to thirty-one groups, and each of these groups is headed by a regent, so that you have twenty-eight to thirty-one such entities as regents in the astral plane. The Persian secret teachers called these regents the twenty-eight or thirty-one “Izards”. Those beings that I have discussed as the third category, they called “Farohars”. These are innumerable, and one would not be finished if one wanted to divide them all into classes according to their number. Today we are only interested in the six Amshaspands with their hosts and the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards with theirs, because they have a very remarkable significance for all human life. Those who have insight into the spiritual world can answer the question that someone might ask: What do these beings of the astral plane actually occupy themselves with? What do they do all the time? It would be quite wrong to believe that these geniuses and spirits are only there to form groups. One could easily think, if one takes certain poetic descriptions, that they are only assigned to the different spheres to form groups. That would, of course, be a very boring existence for these spirits. The formation of living groups is not an issue in the spiritual world. All these beings have their mission in the world plan. These entities, which the Persians called Amshaspands and Izards, were also known to the ancient Germans, the ancient trotters and druid priests, they only list them differently. According to some traditions there are twenty-eight, according to some thirty or thirty-one. We will hear in a moment why the number is uncertain. Those entities that the Persians call Amshaspands are higher spiritual entities that preside over and guide the natural forces around us. The natural forces, that which causes plants to grow, animals to flourish, and humans to live, these forces that are around us, that we call light, heat, electricity, magnetism and so on, nervous energy, blood power, reproductive power – call it what you will – are not merely unspiritual forces. It is a superstition to think that they are unspiritual forces. These forces are the external expression of spiritual entities. The great forces of existence, light, air, warmth, electricity, and the great chemical forces that permeate the world, they are all the external expression of the working Amshaspands and their hosts. There they work within. If I may express myself trivially: they “boil” in the world. For the senses they are behind the scenes. But you can still get an idea of them if, for example, you think of them as in a puppet theater, an actor, a performer who is not visible himself, but can be recognized by the way he works through wires and strings. Just as in a puppet theater the actor works behind the figures, so the spiritual beings stand behind the forces of nature. It is bad for a materialistic superstition if it only sees the puppets and is unaware that spiritual entities are behind them. This is the business of the Amshaspands, the six great genii who, as the Persian doctrine of the gods says, stand by the good god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd as executive genii.

They are assisted by the twenty-eight Izards. What is the significance of these? This is best revealed by direct clairvoyant observation, observing them day after day. You will understand me best if I talk quite bluntly about these twenty-eight Izards. If the six Amshaspands were to work with light, air, warmth and so on without the Izards, this world structure of ours would not come about as it is. There must be a lower level of assistance for this world to come about. There must be subordinate, executive spirits. These are the twenty-eight Izards. And there is a very curious hierarchy to be observed. If you observe the way they work, day after day, you will see that the six great group genii, the Amshaspands, work constantly, continually, evenly. They are tireless. But the subordinate twenty-eight Izards have a substantially shorter working time. They relieve each other, so that on one day you see one category of Izards as helpers, on the second day the second category, and on the third day the third, and so on. This is what makes it possible for the world to move forward at all. When a certain type of plant comes up in spring, the Amshaspands are at work. Although they are always working tirelessly, one of them takes the lead for a period of time; this one is the most active. The others are also active, but they are not in the lead. After some time, another one takes the lead. When a plant species emerges in spring, the Amshaspands work in the manner of the great natural forces, and the lower forces, the Izards, work in such a way that everything fits and is right on a specific day. For example, one category of Izards ensures that the climate is right, that the temperature is just right on that particular day. Plant growth would not be able to continue if another category of Izards did not arrive on the other day. After twenty-eight days, however, the first category arrives again, and so it continues. This is actually the mechanism in the spiritual order that underlies nature. There we look right into the workings, we see how the work is done on the astral plane.

Let us now recall what we said eight days ago. We said that the part of the Germanic myth that we discussed then ties in with the exodus of the chosen few near present-day Ireland, which was once part of Atlantis, whose population had advanced in development and then moved east. What is called the more advanced race of the Atlanteans founded the eastern cultures. The story of the World Ash expresses the becoming of the new man as it was seen in the astral world at that time. It was seen how the twelve currents, which we described last time, flow down from the north and have been flowing in for a long time. These twelve currents are really present on the astral plane, even today. If you follow the twelve pairs of nerve cords that pass through your head and extend the lines further out into the world, they all merge with the twelve basic currents that are present on the astral plane. They actually flow in through the six openings of the head, through two eyes, two ears and two nostrils. Inside, they become twelve currents again, two and two. And who sends them in there? After light and air, which work outside as natural forces, are directed by the six Amshaspands, at the highest level of human formation these twelve currents are sent into our head to form our head nerves. The secret teachers saw this in the six Amshaspands. They saw the six directing spirits sending the twelve currents into the head, so that man acquires the ability to perceive the world through his nervous system. So you see the human head as being connected to these six genii as in a kind of telephone or telegraphic connection. You have them to thank for the ability to perceive through your senses. Thus man stands as a microcosm, as a small world, in connection with the great world, the macrocosm.

And what do the subordinate spirits do, the twenty-eight Izards? You see, before man was ripe to receive the high powers of the Amshaspands within himself, he was already ripe to receive the powers of the Izards, which express themselves in his lower nerves. Just as the above-mentioned currents flow into the nerves of the head and build them up, so the currents of the twenty-eight izards flow into the human trunk, which was built earlier than the head. Before man was able to absorb the forces of the amshaspands and form the head from them, man's trunk was able to absorb the inflows of the twenty-eight izards. Does he also have the powers of the Izards within him now?

If we examine the human spinal cord, we find that it passes through the spine in a nerve cord that has a whitish matter on the outside and a gray matter on the inside, whereas in the brain the inside is white and the outside is gray, exactly the opposite. This has a special significance. It is interesting to note that nerve cords extend from the spinal cord along the entire length of the backbone, supplying the lower functions of the body. They extend downward from above and spread throughout the entire body. How many such nerve cords are there? If we want to understand how many there are, we must first answer the question: Where do they come from? — These are the cords that are formed by the influxes of the twenty-eight Izards; therefore, there are twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of such left and right nerve cords. You know that before man was formed on earth, he went through a moon formation. During the moon formation, only twenty-eight such nerve cords were initially formed as a disposition. Then, as the moon developed towards the earth, two to three new ones were added. Therefore, the number of the original twenty-eight Izards, which already served the higher genii on the moon, was increased by three. Because the higher education of man had to be prepared on earth, three more Izards had to be added. These latter three are Izards that only affect man; they have no function in nature outside of man. This is very interesting to survey.

Now it is even more interesting to follow all these processes in such a way that we observe them not only in man, but also outside in the great nature. For man has been formed little by little according to the constellations of the great nature outside. If our Earth were not in the vicinity of the Sun, around which it moves in one year, if the Moon were not in its vicinity, moving around it in one month and showing itself in four phases, then man would be different, because all these things are strictly connected. Light and air have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a certain point in the sky, and they have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a different point. Why is that so? Because the apparent progress of the sun is precisely connected with the fact that the Amshaspands take turns in governing. From month to month, through six months, the Amshaspands take turns in governing. This is connected with the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac. After every six months, it is the turn of another Amshaspand, so that we have one reign of the Amshaspands in the months of summer and the other in the months of winter. Each year, an Amshaspand has to rule for one month twice, and during this reign the Izards take turns, they take turns exactly with the change of the moon. Therefore, the moon needs twenty-eight days to return to its original form through its four phases. The orbit of the moon regulates the work of the Izards, and the orbit of the sun regulates the guidance of the Amshaspands.

And so the formation of the human brain with its twelve pairs of nerves is connected with the course of the sun over the year and with the twelve months. What the twelve months are outside in nature, that the twelve pairs of nerves in our head are inside, and what the twenty-eight lunar days are outside, that the twenty-eight nerves of the spinal cord are inside. And because it was necessary that a new order emerge from the old lunar form when our Earth was newly formed, three new izards were added, whereby the order was established in which the months with thirty or thirty-one days must necessarily vary. Today's astronomical division is not quite exact, because the three supernumerary izards have a special effect on humans and less on nature. If a month always had thirty-one days, then all thirty-one Izards would actually work on the human being. They regulate the functions of the organic body below the head, and so these functions of the organic body are actually connected with the different reigns of the Izards, even if they shift in the individual human being. Originally they are connected with the arrangement of the great nature.

Here you can see deeply into the connection between the inner human structure and the spiritual world of the astral plan. In the various popular theosophical works, one speaks of the “formers”. Here you can see them at work, how they work into you from the outside and build you up; here you can also see what a complicated being man is, what kind of beings are at work so that man, this complicated being, can be built up. Six categories of spirits must be present so that his cognitive head can be built; and twenty-eight to thirty-one lower spirits must be present so that his trunk and all the functions of his trunk can come about. That is a wonderful connection between man and the spiritual world. Now you will understand that it is not enough for the knowledge of the relation of man to the Infinite to just prattle about the fact that man is built out of the spiritual world, but that we must patiently study what it is like. Occultism knows the entities of every organ that is in man, which have built the organ together from the outside. This is an occult anatomy that leads you from the effects in the sensory world to the causes in the spiritual world. The effects can be seen by anyone who looks at the world with an open mind; but the only way to learn to recognize the causes is through occultism. From this you can see that we are not trying to provide abstract proof of the existence of a spiritual world with all kinds of logical conclusions. Because anything that can be proven can also be refuted. You can object to anything. That is not the point. But if you piece together the individual insights so that the things match the effects that are present in the sensory world, then you can come to recognize as true what is recognized by the occultist, how the human being is constructed from the spiritual world. It did not occur to the Persians to count the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord; they saw the twenty-eight Izards at work. You can find the whole human being in the mythologies and legends. That is what gives the real occult study of the world of legends its great appeal.

These phenomena that we have studied can be found everywhere in the secret schools from Persia to the Druids in Central Europe. Whether you call the supreme spirit presiding over the Amshaspands, Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd, or Huu - as he was called in the Druid schools - does not matter. The spiritual beings that were given to humans in the mythologies were known. The individual gods and spirit figures are not fantastic inventions of a popular imagination. Anyone who speaks of “popular imagination” has a certain right to do so, but the imagination does not lie with those who gave the figures to the peoples, but the imagination lies with our present-day scholars, who speak of a popular imagination that does not exist at all. And in many cases, scholarship is a much worse superstition than what scholarship designates as superstition. In myths and legends, a much, much deeper wisdom can often be found, because they go back to the origins of things that were in the invisible beyond the sensual. When one engages in such contemplation, it is as if one were to cease being confined to one's own skin and one's existence were to continue from the inside out. One becomes familiar with the beings that are in the spiritual world; they have put one together and one can come into relationship with these beings again. For it is a real coming into relationship with these entities, which we attain through the path of knowledge that leads to the higher worlds. We ascend from the effects visible to the senses to the supersensible, invisible causes. Through the path of knowledge, man becomes one with the universe again.

We could cite many, very many more examples along these lines, but today we will conclude this reflection - so as not to prolong it too long - with a fact from Germanic mythology that will show you how, on the one hand, things happen in the development of humanity, and how, on the other hand, these events are preserved in myth, how many things are preserved in simple popular belief.

What is physical today was entirely spiritual in the beginning. Before these twelve brain nerves took shape, there were only the astral currents that entered them. Before the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord were formed, the corresponding astral currents were there. How do these nerve deposits arise in the human being? In the following way: Imagine that originally there was a watery, muddy fluid. Think of the brain in this way. You can still see this today in the part of the brain that has remained fluid and watery; if it remains too strong, a so-called hydrocephalus develops. Our brain emerged from such a watery brain and then became gelatinous. At first astral currents coming from outside flowed through this watery mass in all directions, and along these astral currents the gelatinous mass became structured and hardened, and nerves developed. Where nerves run today, there were originally astral currents, then etheric currents, and finally they became physical nerves. Imagine man gradually hardening. The mass was hardly cartilaginous when the first rudiment of the backbone appeared. The bony covering was still soft. The astral currents flowed in on the right and left, which later became the spinal nerves. We are looking back to an ancient time when the twenty-eight Izards began to send their currents - first astral - into man.

The twenty-eight Izards also had a leader, a controller who had a dignity between the Izards and the Amshaspands in the middle; this leader of the Izards was a kind of foreman, a divine spiritual being. When we look back into the ancient times, we see him working in such a way that he commanded the twenty-eight Izards and directed them to channel the astral currents into human beings. The whole earth was surrounded by this astral sphere; and just as today the winds flow through the earthly atmosphere, so the astral currents flowed into the human bodies. The old clairvoyants really saw these currents flowing into the heads and spines of people in the Atlantic Age. That was a living astral image. When the physical nerves gradually formed, this image disappeared, and that meant: their origin was forgotten, it was forgotten how the currents had been directed into the body.

The leader of the twenty-eight Izards initially commanded the forces of nature as they worked day after day. In the great course of the year, all this worked rhythmically and harmoniously. In the course of the day, it worked somewhat irregularly. Terrible lightning, thunder, and storms flashed through that air in the earth's orbit, which still had the astral in it. Then the god, the leader of the Izards, who had been working out there, changed his scene and worked inside, in the twenty-eight nerve currents of the spinal cord. He went out of that spiritual earth orbit and finally unfolded his powers in man. Germanic myth calls this god Thor or Donar. He is the same according to the Germanic view, who is later called Jupiter according to the Roman view. He is correctly worshipped as the thunderstorm god who caused the storms. He is also seen as being married to Sif, the astral earth atmosphere; these two now have a daughter who is something very special. How does this daughter come about? Because Thor has withdrawn into the inner being of the person and works through the twenty-eight nerve cords. Through the twenty-eight nerve cords, people do not perceive the astral on the outside, but in certain states of emergency they do perceive it, for example in a dream-like state of sleep. Those who were particularly predisposed to perceive this then said according to popular belief: “I am being pressed by Thrud” – and this is none other than the daughter of Thor. There people still knew that Thrud was born where Thor lives with his wife. That is why they called it “Thrudheim”.

You see, that is how closely folk tales are related to the occult truths. In this way, little by little, we can gain a deep insight into that wonderful structure that has been built by so many beings, into the human being. How childish and small a materialistic science appears to us, which wants to understand this wonderful structure in such a trivial way. In older times, this was felt quite differently. They expressed what modern science knows through realization with feeling. And when the old poet looked around and sensed how man, as the wonderful final structure, stands among the beings he sees on the physical plane, as the work of so infinitely many entities, he was allowed to speak the beautiful grand word that emotionally expresses such a deep truth:

Many powerful things live,
but nothing is more powerful
(than what can be seen)
than man.

It has been requested that we also talk about what is usually called “white and black magic” and that this be linked to some other concepts that theosophists are familiar with.

Now, what needs to be touched upon here is a very wide-ranging and extensive field of occult and spiritual-scientific observation, and it will therefore only be possible to touch on a few elementary things in this area, so to speak. But even these presuppose that what we are now considering is taken up as if it were meant only for students of spiritual science and not for anyone else who is not equipped with a spiritual scientific attitude and way of thinking. Certain conditions must be met if one is to speak about such a subject.

The words “white and black magic” are often used in theosophical circles, and we are confronted with the term “black magician” as an accusation all too often, even from those who work in the theosophical tradition. Some of you will have heard it said with a light heart that this or that is “black magic”. Yes, it has even happened that after reading our “Mitteilungen” - as it seems to me it was the first issue - people in one place said: What happened at that general assembly and was reported in the “Mitteilungen” is black magic. At the time, some people had actually claimed that an evil spell must have been cast over the proceedings of that general assembly. This is just one example of something that occurs more often and that stems from a rather trivial conception not only of the term “black magic” but of the term “magic” in general.

We must first be clear about what is meant by “magic” in order to then understand what is meant by “black magic”. Many people believe the following: They say that occult powers can be acquired, and usually have in mind quite inferior, elementary occult powers. This is because those who talk about such things usually know nothing about higher occult powers; they generally have no idea at all of what occult powers actually are. Usually people then add that someone is practising black magic if they use such powers in the service of personal selfishness. Such a statement is one of those of which it cannot even be said that it is wrong. But it does not matter much that it is said to be right, because nothing special is said with it. It is the outgrowth of a completely abstract way of thinking. He who wishes to speak of such things must, above all, stand firmly on the ground of reality, whether it be physical or spiritual reality; he must know what is real, and then he will no longer prattle about all kinds of things that have no connection with reality.

Does such a statement, that occult powers should not be used for personal selfish ends, not in some respects represent an impossible demand for people in the present day? This question must be answered first. Of course, those who say this make “Thou shalt not be selfish” their first commandment! That is certainly a supreme commandment. But for the real thinker, the question is not whether such commandments should be established, but whether such commandments can be fulfilled at all. And anyone who believes that the commandment not to be selfish can be fulfilled by people of the present day without further ado is labouring under a very great illusion. He who recognizes it as his duty to dispel illusions must also dispel the illusion that such a commandment can easily be fulfilled.

Perhaps someone will say: I want to work in the world in an entirely selfless way! - At first he cannot know that among the forces with which he works, there are a great many occult forces. Occult forces emanate from every human being. If someone says they want to work in the world in a selfless way, that is a very, very beautiful ideal. But if you try to ask further: Why do you want to be selfless, why do you impose this commandment on yourself, to be selfless? - you will get strange answers, for example: Through selflessness I gradually ascend to higher levels of perfection; I cannot bear to be a worthless person; I want to be a person who is valuable in the world. If you were to analyze this feeling, you would discover that behind the reasons for selflessness there is often the most incredible selfishness, often much greater selfishness than is found in people who do not want to be selfless at all, but simply give in to their selfish instincts. Imagine the thought, and you will see how much selfishness there is in the urge for selflessness.

And how could it be otherwise? Selfishness is a force that was not planted in human nature by the gods for man to so readily deny or negate. Selfishness is one of the most essential things through which man works. When we inquire into the reasons for selfishness, when we ask ourselves why the gods, the kind gods, have implanted selfishness in man, Since this is something so abominable in the opinion of so many people, we are born out of real occultism the answer that selfishness is a very powerful protection against what would happen to man in the world if he did not have this selfishness. Do you know what best protects man from using certain rather evil powers, which we will talk about in a moment? It would be easy today for someone who wanted to practice black magic themselves to take on a student and teach them certain techniques and machinations of real black magic; they would be able to work in the most horrific ways in the world. But most people won't do that without further ado. And do you know why not? Not for the simple reason that they are afraid, because they fear for their personality. They perceive a little of the consequences in spirit and fear selfishly. And that is quite good, that they are afraid and therefore leave it at that. If, at the beginning of the development of the earth, people had received everything that exists in terms of forces to affect the astral, the etheric and the physical body, then these people would have done terrible things in the world. But selfishness was given to them, and that causes man to first take care only of himself, and to be completely absorbed in caring for himself. The gods have erected selfishness around people like a protective wall. It is selfishness that veils man's insight into the things that lie behind the world of appearances. It is extremely important to consider this. It is one of the wise brakes that the gods have set up so that man does not intrude too quickly into the spiritual realms. So that is egoism; it is a good protective device.

So we should not be throwing words around like that, because there is still a long way to go before man can become selfless, before he can become ripe for selflessness. There is no need to point out how all preaching of selflessness looks so strange in our age, in the age of the most potent egoism, where everyone wants to grab as much as they can of what is established in the social order. So this “selflessness” leads to surrounding oneself entirely with a whirlwind of illusions. You wouldn't believe, if you didn't think about it thoroughly, how people today wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions, how, in particular, “theories” allow our contemporaries to wrap themselves in a whirlwind of illusions. Social theories are being shaped and preached by professors and non-professors alike. But a large part of the theories about the social remedies of the social body are nothing more than an expression of “professorial psychopathy”. You can see it in practice, how people think and act wrongly. Wherever you go, in any society or community, you will find people pondering this or that remedy, for example against unemployment. When there is unemployment, there is hunger. But how do we go about remedying this? Then the decision is made: people have to be given work. And now we invent something to give people work, to keep them busy, so that they get money and can buy what they want. This seems to be a very effective way of averting social damage: giving people something to do. But giving people work at any price is a very dangerous strategy, as long as we don't distinguish between productive and unproductive work. As long as this distinction between productive and unproductive employment is not made, this is even a terrible means in its effect on society. Imagine the radical case: someone wanted to quickly provide work and bread to a number of people in a certain area because a new machine had been invented that had left a number of people without work. He invents an article in which he uses worthless waste products for toilet articles. The people can then earn something and buy bread. But this is only a means of transferring poverty from one side to the other, because nothing is produced in this way, nothing is created. Everyone can consider the following case for themselves: someone sits down in a restaurant in the countryside and says, “Waiter, give me ten postcards!” and sends them off without considering how many postmen have to go up four or five floors to deliver them, and without considering that this does not set any real power in motion in the world. No thought is given to the fact that nothing real is achieved that benefits the mind and body. If you tell the person concerned this, he will of course have an excuse. He could say, for example, that new postmen could be hired, thus giving more people work. But no thought is given to the fact that if new people are hired, nothing new is created by their work, but that poverty is only redistributed. This shows that people must first know something about the distribution of work on earth before they can begin with the smallest idea of reform. In the context of the world, ignorance that wants to reform is terrible. It is terrible that people often do not have the patience to wait until they have learned to have an overview of how to help, but instead engage in clubby activities to get this or that done. These are all illusions with which people shroud themselves. And it is also an illusion when people speak of selflessness in trivial theosophy. If we want to teach ourselves about white and black magic, we must first bring to mind some of the concepts of “magic”, of which those who have heard the last lectures already know something. I have also touched briefly on the nature of magic in public.

What is magic? In all the old occult schools, there were three ways of ascending to the highest realms of knowledge. The first way was that of the initiate, the second way was that of the clairvoyant, and the third way was that of the magician. These are three fundamentally different things: initiation, clairvoyance and magic. Let us first make clear to ourselves, by means of a simple comparison, what an initiate, what a clairvoyant and what a magician is. Imagine some region where no one has ever heard of railways, steamships and so on, where people live without railways and without steamships. In such a region, the fact that there are railways and steamships is pure occultism. Occult means something like secret, something that people know nothing about. Now when someone from the area where there are no railways and so on travels to another area where he sees railways and steamships, and then returns to his homeland, he tells his people that there are railways and steamships. He knows it from his own experience, because he has seen into a world that is still a secret for others.

Anyone who is introduced to the higher worlds through occult training is, in this respect, a clairvoyant. He knows from his own experience that there are spiritual worlds and beings, spiritual forces. The spiritual worlds have different levels. A person at one level can be clairvoyant, can see some phenomena but not others. Now you have to remember something that has been said here often: to find and independently explore occult truths, clairvoyance is needed. But clairvoyance is not needed to understand these truths. For that, ordinary human understanding is sufficient, if it is only applied correctly in a sufficiently comprehensive way. Anyone who says that they can only understand what is communicated in occult reports if they are a clairvoyant is simply not using their mind sufficiently. Man cannot find the occult truths with the mind, but he can see them. Everything that is told from spiritual research can be understood if one is willing to think about it thoroughly. However, one cannot find the occult truths without clairvoyance; clairvoyance is needed for that. So what is proclaimed by Theosophy can also be understood by those who think about it thoroughly.

You can receive the stories up to the highest realms of occult experiences, and then you can understand them. So there were always clairvoyants in the occult schools who learned to see into the spiritual worlds through the methods that were used. These were often very lengthy methods. But besides these clairvoyants, there were always initiates. These were those who, through their comprehensive and willing application of their powers of mind, had come to understand the facts and laws of the higher worlds. These were initiates. Today, this relationship between initiates and clairvoyants is hardly possible anymore because today every person is afflicted by the great selfishness of wanting to see for themselves. People today can hardly imagine the love and trust that prevailed in the occult schools of the past. There was the clairvoyant, who perhaps through incarnations, in a self-denying way, applied the methods and trained himself to look into the higher worlds, who could see much in these higher worlds, and who refrained from learning the laws of these higher worlds, in order not to be held back by laws, but to prove a greater service to humanity through a more rapid development of clairvoyant abilities. This renunciation is not to be taken lightly. It is a great and mighty step when anyone decides to become a seer without at the same time becoming acquainted with the whole system of laws in the higher worlds; and if he waits, perhaps for thousands of years, before he attains this, he can only do so on condition that he places himself under the strict care of a chosen guru or teacher. For if he approached the things of the spiritual world as a mere clairvoyant, without knowing its laws, he would soon go astray and into the most dreadful errors if he did not accept the guru's advice in all important matters.

There were others who renounced the development of higher clairvoyant gifts altogether because they wanted to be initiated into the laws of the higher worlds. They trusted in love and devotion what the seers told them, but they knew the laws. To explain this, one can cite an example from the ordinary world. Imagine a person who sees extremely well, who can see all kinds of phenomena with his eyes, but who understands nothing of the laws of light phenomena. And imagine another person who is very short-sighted and can hardly see a few centimetres in front of his eyes, but who is well acquainted with the physical laws of light phenomena. The two can work well together, one person knowing the laws and the other not knowing them at all, but instead seeing the phenomena. And this applies even more to the higher spheres. It is possible for one to become an initiate of higher degrees without laying claim to clairvoyant powers. In the old occult schools it was quite usual for these two classes to be side by side. Clairvoyants willingly accepted the advice of initiates who were not clairvoyant at all. This was especially necessary for cases where a high degree of clairvoyance and a high degree of initiation were required, for example, for everything related to the astrological field. It was the case that those who wanted to fully comprehend the complicated laws of astrology usually had to do without the high level of clairvoyance that the astral clairvoyants had to acquire. They complemented each other. Only in recent times, when man thinks and feels in a materialistic way, must it be realized that it is impossible to separate these two fields strictly, and therefore no distinction has been made between the two classes since the fourteenth century, so that the teacher gives no one an initiation without at the same time giving a certain degree of clairvoyance. This is necessary because it cannot be reconciled with the selfishness and lack of trust that prevail today. Therefore, no distinction is made between the two, because people today cannot be selfless.

Now, however, the magician differs from both the clairvoyant and the initiate. For someone who can see into the higher worlds, it does not follow that he can already control and apply the forces that are at work in the material world. Or do you think that a person who has brought knowledge of the locomotive, the steamship and the steam engine to a region could also build such a machine? He can tell them what such things look like, but he will not immediately understand how to build them. The fact that the clairvoyant can see into the higher worlds does not yet mean that he also knows how to control and apply the forces that work in the sensory world. Only he is a magician or adept who knows how to apply the higher forces, of which all physical events are an expression, in the world here, who is thus able not only to call upon the physical forces and powers when something is at stake in his actions, but who can set the higher forces in motion. In our time, it is no small thing to be a magician or adept. There has never been a time in the development of humanity when the path of the magician or adept was so completely opposed to our own as it is today. And today, under certain circumstances, one best serves humanity by limiting oneself to spreading the knowledge of the higher worlds, and even - perhaps with a bleeding heart - refraining from it in cases where the application of magical powers might be appropriate. For today's public life is so alien to the concept of magistery that under certain circumstances the influence of higher worlds on this world would mean a setback if magical powers were applied directly. He who has practised the use of these powers to a certain extent, and who has acquired the knowledge of the mechanism as well, must in certain cases refrain from using these powers, for the simple reason that it is impossible today to go against the current of the world. Not only clairvoyance and initiation belong to the magician, but also practice. That is what it is all about. The magician must practice certain tasks with great dedication over a long period of time. Just think about how much you can know - even in the physical world - without being able to actually do what you can talk about, what you know something about. You can be initiated into many things. You can know exactly how a locomotive is constructed, but without anyone giving you the order to build a locomotive, because he would risk throwing the money out the window. It is the same in the higher realms. Practice makes the magician, perception in the higher worlds makes the clairvoyant, knowledge and realization of the laws in the higher worlds makes the initiate.

In times gone by, it was absolutely forbidden to perform any magical operation without being in harmony with the leaders of the world, the “earthly government”, also known as the great masters of the so-called white lodge. All occult schools, all schools that exist at all and all teachings can only be the lowest step towards higher development; on this step, higher and higher steps must be built up, right up to the actual leaders of earthly development. Those who not only know wisdom but also “rule” the earth in its development, who let wisdom flow into earthly evolution, are on the highest level. They alone are able to indicate for each individual action, based on spiritual forces, whether it disturbs or does not disturb in the whole context. When you build a house and lay out the plan for the house, each individual workman on the house must work in harmony with the plan. And if someone comes along and decides to make a window different from what is provided for in the plan, no matter how beautiful and magnificent that window may be, the whole house is disturbed. If anyone in the world wants to accomplish something through spiritual powers, no matter how significant and grandiose it may be, if it does not fit into the original plan of earthly development, it disturbs earthly development and sometimes throws it back for a long time. A man who applies no spiritual forces can never disturb this plan of earthly development. And why not? Because in relation to spiritual forces, what people do without knowledge of the higher worlds is to natural phenomena as a house is to a house. Whatever is ruined by the weather, by heat and sunlight, must be ruined; that is self-evident in a certain sense. So it is with the intentions of those who have no connection with the higher world. But the actions of those who have some connection with the higher worlds behave, when they do something that is not in harmony with the spiritual world, like someone who hits something with a hammer. So what is necessary for the progress of the human race to take place? When occult forces are applied, it is absolutely necessary that the connection with the central spiritual powers of the world be maintained, and it is absolutely necessary that the spiritual forces not be delivered to anyone who does not want to seek this connection. It is connected with this that in all real occult schools a secret is held over the imparting of spiritual forces, and that no secrets are delivered to anyone who does not undertake to maintain the connection with the leading spiritual entities. Only the “central government” of the earth has the possibility of knowing what is at stake. And this must be known if one is to apply spiritual forces. If one imparts anything to another in an unauthorized manner, whereby this other person can oppose the great plan of earth development, then one commits the first kind of black magic act. Therefore, the following is a basic principle: The first black magic act is the betrayal of occult secrets. Gossip and divulging of occult secrets is the first case of black magic, because in doing so you surrender the occult secrets to those who oppose the central leadership of the earth's development because you do not know the context. Where does this occur, where does it become real? It becomes real wherever occult secrets are used in the service not of the entire earthly leadership but of some limited body that does not want to have any connection with the earthly leadership that serves humanity. If, for example, a person receives the things that he is only allowed to use when he has overcome all national and racial prejudices, earlier delivered, he uses them before he has overcome these prejudices and before he has an idea of what it means to be a “homeless person”, then exactly the same thing that is otherwise white magic goes into the service of black magic. Exactly the same. If that which is intended to serve humanity is used in the service of a separate race, for example to give that race supremacy over the earth, then on a large scale that is black magic, because it does not happen in accordance with the way the earth is run. It is the first requirement: to go beyond what connects us only to one part of humanity. For a modern white magician, this is the first principle. Man should not strive for unselfishness, but for love for all mankind. He can extend the field of his love. He can do that, and that is what it is all about.

Now it happens very often that people try to force through some machinations to get something that can never be communicated to them otherwise. Now we come to the actual methods, to the machinations that are necessary to carry out in order to gain possession of black magic powers. This is something that can be described in great detail. You have seen the first means, the first way to gain possession of black magic powers; it is to let the appointed powers and beings communicate the means to you. Yes, what are they then, these magical means? They are the means by which we can use the spiritual powers to work here in the world of the senses, to achieve results and success here. These are such means. But there are no other effects in the material world than those that emanate from the spiritual worlds. All effects, successes and deeds in the material world emanate from the spiritual worlds. Therefore, anyone who does not want to come to these things by the rightful way of slow study - through those who are initiates or clairvoyants or even adepts or magicians - can only choose another way, and that consists in , instead of turning to those who are the embodiments of higher spiritual entities, he turns to nature itself and tries to eavesdrop on nature and to discern how the spiritual forces have flowed into it. For everything in nature flows into it from the spiritual worlds, and we can again divine these spiritual forces through certain machinations and activities. But the moment we do not let nature act in regard to what we do not know, but instead carry out what we want ourselves, thus acting where we know nothing, in that moment we are also able to obtain forces from the realm of black magic. If we do not want to obtain the inner forces of nature indirectly through wisdom and insight, and if we avoid everything that happens through wisdom and insight on the path of developing inner forces, but choose other means, then we are always on the way to black magic through these other means.

You see, anyone who wanted to become a black magician today would have a large fund for black magic activities from the outset if they were a terrible coward and had a dreadful fear of everything that could happen to them. Such fear within a person is a very good starting point for a black magician, because this fear is only compressed selfishness. Suppose a person intends to practice black magic on a large scale. He would first look around in the world for individuals who are as cowardly as possible. For this stock of fear is a good material that can be so transformed and converted that the cowardly individuals in question acquire certain other powers and strength, without knowledge or insight, to a much greater extent than a person can otherwise have. What would such a magician have to do who wanted to have such arts? He would first have to set up a laboratory in which he trained these cowards to do so. I am speaking radically, but it will be most clear to you this way: to harden themselves completely by the means of constantly cutting into living flesh and seeing blood run. What the hare foot has to a high degree in terms of fear as a certain outward force can be converted into something opposite if one teaches people to harden themselves by cutting into living flesh. For a person who has no fear, this procedure would be of no use at all.

This is, so to speak, the ABC, the very first thing done in black magic. And when that was done, what had formerly been fear in man would change into powers by which he could indeed gain a certain influence over his surroundings; and he who would make use of such assistants would be able to perform the most incredible atrocities in the world. But he who, without assistants, wants to become a great black magician himself sometimes does something quite different. Such a black magician once wanted to become a man of the 15th century, Gilles de Rais, whom the profane world called “Knight Bluebeard”. This man sought to gain powerful occult powers, not by the rightful path of learning, but by transforming certain deeply-held selfish feelings. At the same time, he was an excellent observer of himself. Please excuse me if I use a word that will sound strange. This man was what one might call 'the most radical Christian egoist' or 'egoistic Christian'. There have been and still are people like that. They are the kind of people who see Christianity above all as a bridge to gain as much as possible for themselves, because it is clear to them that a good Christian can go far in bliss. Through self-knowledge he noticed this in his nature and when he had noticed it in himself, he already knew the best means by which one could transform this into incredible magical powers. He was indeed stopped early. He was put on trial and it was shown that the man had started to murder one child after another in 1432 in order to develop his special occult powers. He saw the destruction of life as a special means of extracting from nature the knowledge that he could not obtain himself. During the trial it came to light that the man had murdered 800 children in a short period of time. Now some of you who have read the novel by Mabel Collins, Flita: True Story of a Sorceress, will understand why there is a murder at the beginning. It is part of it. The novel “Flita” was written by someone who knows this. What the black magician wanted could only be developed under the influence of this murder, which is at the starting point of the story.

And now take a serious look at this story and ask yourself what could protect most people from these procedures that I have mentioned, and through which man could certainly be led to the mastery of black magic powers. Selfishness is a very good means of protection against it. Not everyone will be able to overcome themselves to cut into living flesh; most people would faint, and fainting is nothing more than an expression of selfishness. So, in its physical effect, it is a good means of being deterred from practising black magic. It is also difficult to become a Bluebeard; most people are protected from that by their perfectly healthy selfishness; it acts as a barrier to putting oneself in the shoes of the means of acquiring black magic powers.

Well, you see, I just wanted to mention that so as not to use empty phrases. That is not my style. I prefer to talk about real facts. I wanted to show you by example what the acquisition of machinations in the field of black magic consists of. The betrayal of occult secrets to the profane is the first and simplest kind. But the actions I have just characterized are among the teaching methods of black magic, they are, so to speak, the ABCs. And what comes after these ABCs, in which black magic students are taught to “read” – if I were to tell you about that, several of you here would probably faint. So we will stop at this first stage. These things are not at all something to be trifled with, not even in words; they are something most serious; and they are, unbeknownst to people, unfortunately all too widespread in the world. Most people do not even have the will to consider how these things are spread in the world.

Now the development of such things is intimately connected with the whole evolution of the earth, indeed with the evolution of a planet, and we understand such a thing in the right way only when we have an idea of the fact, a planet spiritually affects its successor, the next planet, how, for example, the moon affected the earth, and how, in turn, the earth affects its successor, Jupiter. You all know that the Earth is, in a sense, led by the so-called 'white lodge', in which certain highly developed human individuals are united with individuals of an even higher kind. What are they doing? They are working, they are guiding the evolution of the Earth. While guiding the evolution of the Earth, they are working out a very specific plan. It is actually the case that a specific plan is worked out by the guiding powers during the evolution of each planet. While the Earth is evolving, the plan for the details of how Jupiter, which is replacing the Earth, must be, is being drawn up in the so-called “white lodge” of the Earth. The entire plan is developed in every detail. And herein lies the blessing and the good fortune of progressive development: that we act in accordance with this plan. When a planetary development comes to an end, when our Earth has reached the end of its planetary development, then the Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations will also have completed the plan they have worked out for Jupiter.

And now, at the end of such a planetary development, something highly peculiar happens. This plan is simultaneously infinitely reduced and infinitely multiplied by a procedure, so that an infinite number of copies of the entire Jupiter plan are available, but in miniature. It was the same on the moon. The plan of the evolution of the Earth was there, infinitely multiplied and infinitely reduced. And do you know what it is that was worked out by the Masters of Wisdom on the Moon at that time? These are the atoms, the atoms of the Earth. And it is the atoms of the Jupiter evolution whose plan is being worked out by the leading “white lodge” on our planet. That is the real atom, and all other talk about an atom is nothing. Only he recognizes the atom of a planet who recognizes in it the reduced plan of the evolution of the planet. If you want to gradually recognize this atom, which underlies the earth, then the very measures that emanate from the great magicians of the world will confront you with the knowledge of this atom. Now, of course, we can only hint at these things, but we can at least get to know something that gives us an idea of what this is about. In a certain sense, the Earth is composed of these atoms of hers, and every being, all of you yourselves, are in a sense composed of such atoms; and you are in harmony with the whole evolution of the Earth in that you carry within you, in infinite numbers, the reduced-scale plan of the Earth planet, which was worked out earlier. This plan for the earth could only be worked out on the preceding planetary state of our earth, on the moon, and thus on the planet that preceded our development on earth, through the activity of leading beings in harmony with the entire planetary development of Saturn, the sun, the moon, and so on. Now, however, the point is to give the infinite number of atoms that which brings them into the right relationships, arranging them in the right way. The leading spirits of the moon were only able to give them this if they steered the development of the earth in very specific directions. I have already described the paths into which they steered the development of the earth. When the earth emerged again after the development of the moon, it was actually not yet our present earth. It was the earth plus the sun plus the moon. These were one body. If you were to mix today's Earth with the Moon and the Sun and make a single body out of it, you would have what the Earth was at the beginning of its development. First the Sun separated from the Earth, and with it all those forces that were too thin, too spiritual, for man, under whose influence he would have spiritualized too quickly. If man had only been under the influence of the forces contained in this sun-moon-earth body, he would have spiritualized very quickly, he would not have developed down into physical materiality, and he would not have been able to attain a self-awareness, an I-consciousness, which he had to attain.

You all know that there is imaginative knowledge and occult characters [in which imaginative knowledge is expressed]. I can only give you two occult characters now. To discuss further would take us too far. The occult symbol for those forces that would have worked and given direction to the whole evolution of the earth if the sun had remained united with the earth, the occult symbol for those forces that would have spiritualized the earth too soon, is this: in this symbol, the one who is a student of occultism can recognize the forces that quickly lead humanity to spirituality. On the other hand, if humanity had separated from the sun with the whole earth but remained united with the moon, it would very quickly have become ossified and hardened. If the earth had kept the moon within itself, people would very soon have become a kind of puppet, a marionette. They would have descended too deeply into matter, as on the other hand they would have spiritualized too quickly, if the Sun had remained connected with the Earth. Therefore the Moon had to come out of the Earth. And all those forces that have been transported out and that today rule from the Moon and work in from the outside on the Earth, all these forces are represented together in this sign, which looks like a double hook. This is the sign of the beast or the lamb with two horns from the Apocalypse.

The one symbol is called Nachiel, the other Sorat. This second symbol is also called the symbol of the demonic element on earth. All the forces that the black magician develops by using such hideous methods lead to an occult increase on earth of the forces that belong to the demonic nature of the earth and that lead to the hardening of the earth. If many people became black magicians, the result would be that the earth would become more and more like the moon, while through the forces of white magic the earth would become more and more like the sun, like the forces that are in the sun's rays.

So what would an increase of black magic on our earth lead to? It would lead to the hardening of the globe, to the globe becoming a moon. The same forces that were eliminated with the moon, that had developed out of the substance of the earth, are still present in the layers of the earth as an inclination. In addition to all the forces that have the good inclination to become solar forces, the forces that have the inclination to become lunar forces are also still present. Through white magic the earth is more and more approximated to the nature of the sun; through the forces of black magic it is approximated to the nature of the moon. Through white magic everything must be conquered that does not lead to the control of spiritual forces on the path of enlightenment, of wisdom. For all such procedures, such activities, as they have been called, do not lead to the mastery of spiritual forces on the path of wisdom, of insight, not by really looking into them, but they are the nature of the trickery and procedures by which forces are to be gained without enlightenment. Thus the apocalyptic seal is at the same time the sign for the conquest of black magic by white magic. Through the human powers that are transformed, solar powers are born of man himself, so that the lunar powers lie at man's feet.

That is the path the magician must take on our Earth. Then, through the nine steps, which you will get an idea of if you read my 'Theosophy', the forces become the nine stars. So what must the true black magician say to his disciple? Very simple:

Despise reason and science alone,
Let the lying spirit only encourage you
In works of deception and magic,
Then I have you absolutely already!—
To him fate has given a spirit
That always presses forward, unrestrained
And whose hasty striving
skips over the joys of the earth.
I drag him through the wild life,
through shallow insignificance,
he shall fidget, stare, stick,
and his insatiability
shall make food and drink float before greedy lips:
He will beg for refreshment in vain,
And even if he had not given himself over to the devil,
He would still have to perish!

And even if he had not given himself over to the devil, It would be easy, tremendously easy, and here we come to a very subtle chapter on the one hand of human development and on the other of magic - it would be easy to simply wait until all people would be able to see things correctly, which they must first see before they can progress on the path of magical development. That would be quite easy under certain circumstances. But then one would delay the course of human development. It must be possible in some way to put people in charge of the dissemination of occult truths — and in a sense this is always something of the dissemination of occult powers — and to use these so that they have the right effect in the world. People must be given more occult truths and teachings so that they can, in a sense, become occult teachers. |

Now one might ask: But is not everyone who spreads occult teachings in some way a black magician? It is absolutely true that someone who spreads occult teachings today can easily become a black magician. This is the case when he is unable to grasp the full scope of the effects of his occult teachings. Therefore, the occult schools must ensure that no one spreads real occult teachings who is not able, through his own development, to grasp the scope and effect of occult truths. Today, occult teachings can be spread by one disciple repeating them to another or copying them from him. If the person wants to be a disciple or a disciple, that is all right, because in that way he spreads the original from which he has heard. But let us talk about the case when someone would spread occult teachings independently and even add his own judgment. If someone wants to spread occult truths in an independent way, then, above all, precautions must be taken to ensure that this person has the maturity to spread occult truths independently, and that does not depend on intellectual training, but the occult schools make it dependent on something quite different, namely on how the individual members of human nature develop gradually.

You know from the essay on “The Education of the Child” that at birth the physical body is born, that by the age of seven the etheric body comes out, by the age of fourteen the astral body, and by the age of twenty-one the I comes out. We can follow this up and see that by the age of thirty-five, or rather between the ages of thirty-five and forty, the etheric and astral bodies of the human being are so free that only then can the human being have the necessary sense of responsibility for the dissemination of occult truths. Therefore, all occult schools have the strict law that no one may act as a teacher of occult truths before reaching this age. And it is this law that the great poet Dante set forth when he says right at the beginning of his Divine Comedy: “It was in the middle of life that I lost my way in the forest...” and so on. If you do the math: In 1300, Dante was thirty-five years old. All these great things happened to his soul.

This is a strict law. If you look at this strict law and consider some of what is happening in the present, then you will simply know from this point of view that much of what is being spread does not come from occult sources. No occult school allows people to independently spread occult truths that have not reached that age. Of course, this does not mean that one cannot start learning something early enough. But to act as a teacher of occultism, one cannot start late enough. Much, much evil would be avoided if people really knew the occult and the strict laws that prevail.

These are things that must be considered in connection with the subject of “white and black magic,” which is not so easy to treat, and of which I have really only said a few words. If you take up some of the things that could only be hinted at here and develop them further in your meditation and serious study, you will see that even these imperfect suggestions provide the initial steps for many paths to further knowledge. Above all, you will have convinced yourself that one cannot talk about such things as white and black magic at all with ordinary, trivial terms, that one must even first formulate new terms if one wants to talk about such lofty or such hideous things. It is important today to know such things, because there is much in the world of which the ordinary person knows nothing, but which he should know in order to save himself from the influences of magical arts. People are also aware of some of it, but see it as something harmless. But it is not harmless at all.

We can only make a start when we discuss such a topic, and then we will make progress in this area. The beginning is best made when a sense of the seriousness and importance of such a matter could be awakened. Even though the presentations could only be incomplete in the short time available, I still hope that the fact that they were spoken in real terms has passed some of it on to you, in order to encourage you to consider the matter with the utmost seriousness.