The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On Easter Monday I want to talk to you about the Mystery of Golgotha. Today we may perhaps prepare a little for this. What I have to say today will relate mainly to a New Testament passage which many people find it impossible or at least difficult to understand. At the least it is easily seen that people do not perceive these words to have the deep meaning which they certainly should be given if one considers esoteric Christianity. From another point of view, these words will take us even more deeply into the spirit and the meaning of Christianity. They are words you know well: ‘All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven him.’⁹⁸

Such words do indeed tell us the meaning of the mission given to Christianity, and essentially the only proper instrument to help us reveal their deep meaning is the view of the world gained through the science of the spirit. Those who come to this world view will have to get used to coming to know the great world mission of the spiritual scientific movement from many different points of view. The world will have to realize more and more that this movement clearly does not exist in order to found some kind of new faith, let alone a new sect or the like. The times when new faiths and new special religions could be founded in the course of human evolution have passed. The future of religious development lies in making the existing religions into one great religion for the whole human race. The movement for spiritual insight does not aim to preach a new religion. It merely wants to be an instrument for gaining insight into the profound religious truths contained in the original religious writings.

I have said on several occasions before that today the tendency in theological and other religious circles is to reduce religious truths to the commonplace, and not take them deeply enough. Just think how it satisfied people to have Christ Jesus considered ‘the simple man of Nazareth’,⁹⁹ a figure people are certainly pleased to consider one of the great ideals of humanity, like Socrates or Plato or Goethe or Schiller, but they do not want to put him too far beyond the level of common humanity. People never think of asking today if it is not true that something that went beyond all common humanity dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. modern humanity seems to have gone far beyond that ancient Gnostic question. The intention had been to call on the whole of human wisdom to understand what really happened in the year 1 of our time. And so people are also satisfied to cover a truth as great as the sin against the holy spirit in a few moralistic phrases, a few, rather commonplace words.

But the original religious writings do not exist to be explained in commonplace terms. No depth is deep enough and no wisdom wise enough to remove the veil that covers them. It is also important not to add anything when we seek to understand the deep meaning. This is none too difficult for a non-academic, non-scientific person; but it is also true that the religious document is so profound that no wisdom suffices to decipher its meaning completely. No mind is so simple that it cannot gain great and sublime impressions from the true original religious writings. Nor should wisdom ever be considered to be so elevated that it goes beyond the limits of a true religious document. This is the point of view and these are the convictions from which we are going to consider those words.

Let us first of all be clear in our minds as to what is meant by the Holy Spirit in true esoteric Christianity and what is meant by the other two aspects of the godhead—the Son, the Word, or Logos, and the Father. It would be wrong to try and penetrate such things by means of speculation or by thinking about them. They do not exist so that anyone may put in whatever meaning suits them. The meaning was given by individuals who are called Christian initiates, and we must go by the things taught in their schools. It is therefore wrong to take the Bible in a superficial way, speculating about the meaning of one passage or another. A true occultist would never do this. He sets about things in a different way, for he knows that there have been esoteric Christian initiation schools where the deep meaning of the original Christian writings was taught. It has never been taught in any other way, and so there are no different points of view with regard to it.

If there is one thing we want to go by, something which in this respect has perhaps come most to the surface of external history, it is the great esoteric Christian school which Paul the apostle himself founded in Athens, the School of Dionysius the Areopagite.¹⁰⁰ Academics have come to speak of a pseudo-Dionysius because writings that bear his name can only be traced back to the 6th century. Academics cannot know the truth in this respect unless they realize that customs have changed enormously through the ages. Today, someone who has a bright idea cannot wait to get it down on paper and into print so that it may flutter out into the world. In earlier times it was the custom to preserve the most sacred truths carefully from the public at large, not to bombard people with them. The only people permitted to receive those truths were people one knew and who had given evidence that they would receive such truths in a worthy manner, having a sense of truthfulness. Initially they were only passed on by mouth, for the intention was that anyone passing on such truths, or indeed revealing the facts relating to them before the eyes of their pupils, would let the words enter only into genuine feelings, into warm hearts that were truly alive. The disciples at those schools had to develop a certain mood, a certain attitude to the most sublime truths.

Today people think a truth may be received whatever one’s mood. This is not a criticism—it is part of evolution. In those days, people took a different view. It did matter then if one received a mathematical or physical truth in one mood or another. People understood that this mood mattered, and even the simplest truths, which ultimately also reveal truths, were received in an exalted mood. They would be received as a revelation of the divine cosmic spirit. Even the mathematical truths representing the divine revelations relating to space would be received in this mood. The school was very much concerned with creating the right attitude, the right sphere of feeling.

In Paul’s school, too, the most sublime truths would only be revealed after intimate preparation. Whilst Paul was preaching to the world at large, his disciples went through their esoteric experiences in Athens. The spirit of that school continued through long periods of time, and because of this the individual who bore the esoteric truth would always be given the same name. The School of Athens continued for centuries and the highest of the teachers was always called Dionysius. This is why the one who wrote the things down in the 6th century, when writing had become more of a custom, also bore that name. You have to know this to understand what this means for the Dionysius school.

Let us now consider the three words ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ in the truly Christian sense. We went into what lies behind these words from another point of view when speaking of the Lord’s Prayer.¹⁰¹ We then came to see what speaks of the divine in the three higher principles of human nature—atman, buddhi, manas. We heard that these three higher principles of human nature are connected with the words ‘name’, ‘realm’ and ‘will’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Today we’ll consider these three human principles from another point of view, as was done in esoteric Christian teaching. Let us briefly recall the relationship between the lower and higher nature of man. In that Christian initiation training it was always taught that man consists of physical body, ether or life body and astral body, and that the I lives within these three human bodies as the inmost part of essential human nature. That was the ‘sacred tetrad’ of which people would speak in the past—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I.

We have also come to know that the three bodies are transformed by the I in the course of human evolution. We have seen that the I must first of all transform the astral body, the bearer of affects, drives, passions and inner responses. We might also call this astral body the awareness body. Esoteric Christian teaching was that the I has the task of progressively improving and purifying the astral body. And as much of the astral body in a person as has been thus cleansed, purified and improved is called the ‘holy spirit’ in that person in esoteric Christian terms. To use theosophical terms we might also say that the part of the astral body which has been purified through the I is in esoteric Christian terms called ‘the part of the astral body which has been taken hold of by the holy spirit’.

We also know that the I influences the ether or life body to transform, improve and purify it. Whilst in everyday material and non-material life our moral cultural life ennobles the astral body, only the things people take in through religion and art—sensing the eternal in the time form—will change and improve the ether body. The impulses that come from the arts are more powerful than moral teaching, more powerful than the life of rights and government among human beings, for the eternal, immortal shines through in a true work of art. Religious impulses have the most powerful influence on the ether body. Under this influence part of the ether body differentiates out and is transformed into buddhi, the logos, the word. This is known as 'the Christos' in esoteric Christian teaching.

One thing we must always keep in mind when looking at these things is that with the science of the spirit we are not pursuing some kind of grey theory, nor anything removed from the world and alien to life. We are seeking the element in the spirit through which we can have a direct ennobling and purifying influence on these bodies. We must be able to grasp the spiritual principle, live it, and bring it down into life. Only then can we let the insights gained in the realm of the spirit flow through all life, from moment to moment, and make it spiritual. This is practical perception of the spirit. It is not a matter of thinking things out but of letting the spirit flow into our civilization. And so it is also meet and right, at a point where we are speaking of the transformation of the bodies, to draw attention to a practical aspect, namely, what the contemplation of such passages is really meant to convey to us.

When you are in ordinary life with your conscious mind, walking along the streets and crossing the market square, letting life’s influences and impressions come to you, the things you find there will be only part of the whole of your experience. If we do not consider this, we will never come to understand life and perhaps also fail to perceive certain important secrets of our most everyday life. Someone seeking insight in the spirit has to look deeper than someone else would be able to see with the ordinary means our civilization provides today. Our different bodies, the ether and the astral body, also differ in that the outside world influences them in different ways. Everything you take in consciously, giving it your attention, knowing it as you go past it in life, so that it comes to awareness, everything you see outside or in your room that makes an impression on the astral body, creates surges and movements in the astral body. An occultist is able to perceive everything which you experience in full awareness in looking at the movements and currents and everything that shows itself in the astral body.

You can see the infinite importance here of something which people do not really take into account at all in their conscious minds. Beneath the surface of our civilization, things are continually influencing present-day human senses, acting directly on the ether body that is bypassing the astral body and calling up images that are of lasting significance. Beneath the surface of our civilization, such things are all the time having an influence on us. And this is where the science of the spirit needs to draw attention to the more subtle elements that lie beneath our civilization, and has to show how insight can be gained into everyday life by gaining insight into the world of the spirit.

It is simply like this. The people of one age think and do things very differently from those of another. If the former produce horribly bad posters and joke magazines that focus merely on low things, pure sensuality and calculated sensationalism, and the latter do not have such magazines, this reflects for the occultist the things that live in their inclinations and generally also temperaments and character traits. Even conscience mirrors the hidden influences on human beings. If we wanted to study the consciences and also the temperament, mood and inclinations of central Europeans, or Europeans altogether, in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, proceeding by occult methods, we would have to go back to the building styles, the kind of paintings and other cultural elements that were around people in those times. A person would have been in a very different mood walking down streets where everything seen to the left and the right had a relationship to the inner life from the mood you have today when you cross the market square and see quite different things around you. We certainly must not ignore the things that live deeper than conscious awareness, for the very impulses which are connected with the major periods of human civilization have a profound influence. And so we must not underestimate all kinds of things present beneath our present-day civilization that are like the ones I mentioned just now, for there lie the true and real foundations of materialistic feelings and inner responses. That is where we must look for them. And so people should not simply consider one a reactionary when one wants, from a deeper point of view, that nobility and significance should come to expression exactly in these things which have such a profound influence on the human soul, and indeed right down to the form-giving powers of the ether body.

As you can see, therefore, there is a way of looking at things where one is guided not by the prejudices of the age but by spiritual truths. And if we also extend this way of looking at things to the harmful elements in our daily environment which give rise to materialistic views without people having paid them real attention, do you think we shall get far with theories and teachings unless these theories and teachings go right down as far as this? If you know how the more sublime teaching in Christian thinking came to be reflected in paintings, you will not be surprised that they were also reflected in the things that were around people all the time, even if they did not focus their attention on them.

Let us now consider the principle which in Christian esoterics was called ‘the Father’. We know that not only the astral body, but also the ether body and the physical body are transformed through the I. They are transformed unconsciously by people, but consciously so by an esotericist or occultist or someone undergoing esoteric training. Everything that influences only the astral body is mere preparation for the actual esoteric or occult training. Occult training begins when we learn to work into the ether or life body, when the human being is enabled, through the instruction given by the occult teacher, to transform temperaments, inclinations and habits, thus becoming a different person. This alone will give insight into the true higher world—that the person changes. You can study the theory of physics and this will only affect your astral body. You can learn all kinds of things, and they will only affect the astral body. It is only when teachings have such power that they are able to transform the human being that organs develop from inside that allow us to look into the higher world. Then the ether body is transformed and also the physical body. And because the transformation of the physical body comes from the breathing process, bringing rhythm into breathing, a physical body illumined by conscious awareness is called atman. The Christian esoteric term is ‘the Father’.

Within Christian esotericism we have to distinguish between the Holy Spirit—the Christ has as much of the Holy Spirit in him as he has ennobled his astral body; the Son, Logos, Word—the Christ has as much of the son, the Logos, the word in him as he has transformed of the ether body; and thirdly the Father—the Christ has as much of the Father in him (only an initiate can consciously have the Father in him) as he has transformed the physical body, making it eternal. To understand sin or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the Son or the Father, and learn the Christian way of saying these things, we have to recall the mission of Christianity as the esoteric Christian teachers saw it. I have on some occasions said that the deeper mission of Christianity is given in the words: ‘If anyone comes to me who does not disregard his father and mother, his wife and children and his brothers and sisters as well as his own soul-bearing life, he cannot be my disciple.’¹⁰² Mark also put it in other words: ‘His mother and his brothers came and stood outside and sent to call him. But a crowd was sitting round him. So when they said to him: See how your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside looking for you, he answered them: Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Looking round at those sitting in the circle he said: See here my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother.’ In Luke’s gospel we also find: ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’

Such words speak of Christianity’s real mission. We can understand them if we consider the evolution of the human race, and this will also be the best possible preparation for our discussion of the Mystery of Golgotha next Monday.

Going a long way back in human history we come to a time we call the Lemurian age. As you know we go back through Atlantean times to the Lemurian age. There we find the fourfold human being who we may say was half animal, a human being who did have four bodies—physical body, ether body, astral body and the potential for an I—but was not yet in a position to do any work on the three outer bodies. For the power human beings need to work on their outer bodies in the above-mentioned way first had to enter into those vessels for man’s true essential nature. The I as you know it today, veiling your soul, your deepest nature which already contains as much of the three outer bodies as has been transformed—this did not yet exist then, it was still waiting to enter into the process of evolution. The I was still a hollow space that would receive what today is our deepest, inmost part, our immortal part, as we call it, that goes through all incarnations and can go with the earth when it enters into a different planetary existence. This came down into the human vessel at that time. Before, it had been in the keeping of the godhead, part of divine nature.

On a previous occasion I gave you a picture for the way man was ensouled at that time, with the divine droplet poured into each individual human vessel. I then said that one might take a glass of water—many drops are in it, a mass of fluid. We might then take a thousand tiny little sponges and let each absorb one drop of water. We have then taken many drops from the glass, and something which had been united in the glass has then been distributed among all the small sponges. Something which is now in us and had previously been in the keeping of the godhead as in an element where everything flowed into one, distributed itself at that time among the individual human bodies, so that today each has a drop of this one divine substance in it. This element, which until then had been part of general divine nature, thus became individualized. Just as my ten fingers are part of my organism, so are the souls which are in human bodies today part of the godhead. And just as every finger would become individualized, every finger would receive a life of its own if it were to surround itself with other outer elements, so did the drops resting in the keeping of the godhead become human inner natures.

These human inner natures lived in the human bodies which had been prepared for them at that time. Human bodies looked very different at that time compared to today. Perhaps no one would believe it if I were to describe those bodies which walked about, waiting to be ensouled by the godhead. People who listen to these lectures may be used to some things, but some would be quite surprised, really, if I were to tell them what those bodies were like and how those shapes, grotesque as they would be in our eyes today, gradually changed into the bodies we have today. Who made them look the way they do today? The inner soul itself has done this. The figure, the form of this human soul influenced the body from inside. You get an idea of how this soul was working if you consider the last bits of configuration the soul still does on the human body today.

Consider feelings of shame, anxiety, fear, fright. A feeling of shame makes the blood rush up to make us go red. The colour of the face also changes with anxiety, fear or fright. In the one case it turns red, in the other it grows pale. In my lecture on the blood as a very special fluid,¹⁰³ I showed that the blood is an outer reflection of the inner work of the individual person. Our most intimate nature shoots into the blood—someone who has blood has an I, and someone who has an I has blood. It is therefore a very special fluid. This only applies to warm blood, however, and not to creatures whose blood is sometimes warm and sometimes cold. Today the I influences the blood when we feel shame, fear and fright, changing the body in this definite, subtle way when we feel shame or grow pale from fear, and it also acted like this in those times. The influence which the blood had in the earliest time of human evolution was great and powerful. It reflected, subtly and exactly, the inner power that had entered into the I as its divine content. And because of this the I came to be reflected through the races. Just as people may grow pale or turn red today, so did the inner feeling shape the human body from the inside. When the human being was still soft—he did not yet have fingers—the I created the form from inside, through the blood. Blood is still brought to expression today. The sculpting power comes from the I, via the blood, and develops the human body. In the many different shapes and forms we thus get to know the blood as the vehicle for the I.

In other lectures I spoke of a secret that lies in the earliest Bible stories. I spoke of the image given by saying that Adam grew to be hundreds of years old.¹⁰⁴ This was due to something we call intermarriage, marriage between blood relations. We find it in the early times of every nation, though ve have to go back a long, long way. Then we find small groups everywhere within the earth’s population who are blood-relatives, marrying only within the group. This has an important result. To make it easier for you to understand what needs to be said I once referred to a conversation between Anzengruber and Peter Rosegger.¹⁰⁵ You’ll remember that Rosegger, a good and popular writer, describes the country people in his books the way he sees them; that’s how he presents them to us. Anzengruber describes them in a more living way, his countrymen stand firmly and securely on their feet, as though hewn from wood, absolutely true and sure. The two writers once went out together. Rosegger then said to Anzengruber: ‘You’d be able to give a much better description of the country people if you went into the country and took a look at them there.’ Anzengruber’s reply was: ‘I have never seen such a countryman. But I describe them the way I do because it is in my blood. My father, grandfather, great grandfather and my uncles, too, were country people. And that’s in my blood.’ There was no need for Anzengruber to have seen the country people. The blood had an influence through generations, and this showed itself in the way he wrote about country people.

So you see how the spirit works through the blood, and an I limited to an individual does not stop there but grows strong and spreads through father, grandfather and so on. That’s how it was with Anzengruber, because those country people had only married among themselves. Some level of awareness of this remained. This level of awareness was much higher at the times written about in the first parts of the Bible. People then still had a real memory of things that had happened to their ancestors. There was a time when people remembered not only the things that had happened to themselves in childhood and youth but also had memories of what their father and grandfather had done. This may seem unbelievable to people today, but it is true that in those early times when blood relationship was strictly maintained within a small group and one could not marry outside the community without committing a sin, the I not only had awareness of the character of country people but the son would say of things that had happened to his father, grandfather and so on that they had happened to him. People who after nine hundred years had descended from Adam would say: ‘That has happened to me’, when speaking of things that had happened to Adam. It was a kind of group self that went through generations. And the term Adam, or Abraham, was used to refer to the way the I had thus continued through generations.

This is also what lies behind the stories in the first chapters of the Old Testament You realize that the blood may be seen as an outer reflection of the inner creative soul. How did humanity lose this way of looking upwards into the generations? What caused conscious awareness and memory to be limited to the life of the individual? They were limited because the bond of blood relationship was broken. The old form of blood relationship loosened, small groups became larger ones. A family group became a tribe, the tribe a nation. Humanity could not have developed in any other way but by families coming to be part of tribes, and tribes of nations, breaking the close blood bonds. Memory used to go back up through the generations.

If you recall the many times I’ve said that memory is sustained by the ether body, which reproduces the things that make up memories, you’ll know the connection between blood and ether body. The I impresses itself into the ether body by coming to outward expression in the surges of the blood, in the element that enters into the blood. You’ll recall, however, that someone wanting to be an initiate has to work into the ether body, and here we come close to something that is deeply connected with the mysteries of pre-Christian times. Those mysteries also had to do with the blood. Today we want to see what all this has to do with the blood.

We know that someone who was to be given the pre-Christian initiation had first to be prepared. We know how such an initiation went. The candidate was instructed to transform his qualities and habits and this would make him the kind of human being he needed to be for initiation. I also said that the initiates went back to the adepts of ancient Atlantean times and that the candidate, once suitably prepared, was put into a sleep state for the whole of three and a half days. This was the kind of sleep in which it was possible to lift not only the astral body but also the ether body out of the physical body. The wise individual who initiated the disciple would guide the whole process. The ether body would be lifted out and this made it possible for the initiator to give the disciple the power to experience things in the spirit and have a real perception and experience of the higher world. The ether body would have been set in motion through the preparations that were made, and the disciple would then be able to see into the higher worlds. When he had been brought back, he would be able to bear witness to the truth and reality of the spiritual world. The essential point was that the individual’s conscious mind had to be dimmed, tuned down, and this was connected with lifting out the ether body. He would be wholly under the influence of the initiator.

Let us consider the situation. All existing laws, institutions and social structures ultimately went back to initiation. At the pinnacle of the social structure would be the great initiator. All goals and trends would depend on this. The disciples would take the wisdom that had been revealed out into the world, and those who heard them out there would take their guidance from them and also arrange their social life accordingly. Everything was under the authority of initiation, of the initiator. Everything depended on these. The principle was one of authority based on truth and wisdom, lived out to the highest degree and in the best possible sense. Only the great, wise leaders of humanity were allowed to have such authority. And it was like this without causing any kind of harm to humanity.

What mattered then was to lift the ether body out of the physical body in the right way. This could not be done with just anybody. Anyone who says that this could be done with anybody, is talking in an abstract way and not out of the truth. It needed long preparation to achieve these things. Essentially the blood had to be the right mixture. This is also why great care was taken to see that the generation of priests did not mingle with others. Preparations would continue for centuries to ensure that one of the right descendants would always be available, who might one day be made a true initiate. It was a way of treating the human body in a grand style, in a tremendously mysterious way, a way that was mysterious in the best possible sense of the word. The greatest initiates had been prepared for through centuries to get the right physical principle, the right blood mixture. This whole process of preparing for initiation is the key characteristic of pre-Christian initiation. Yet it could continue for ever in the course of human evolution. For what was this initiation principle about? It had to do with having a clear view of the blood community. The closer we come to understanding community, the more do we come across principles of this kind.

In those very early times, therefore, initiation was based on the blood principle. This came to be broken more and more, from family to family, tribe to tribe, nation to nation. And now the future was making itself felt, with all such blood bonds broken. For where did the community principle reside for human beings when they had come down from the keeping of the godhead? We might say that it flowed through the blood, and the blood therefore had to be taken into account when one wanted to initiate someone.

When the possibility was given, with the warm blood, for the I to make the divine soul quality its own, that divine soul quality flowed through the blood: ‘I’ am he who was, who is and who shall be.’¹⁰⁶ This was indeed the one who spoke as the god Jehovah, saying: ‘I am he who was, who is and who shall be.’ And where did he show himself to be most powerful? In the blood. And how did they guide a human being to initiate him? They would guide him by treating his blood.

These are profound, far-reaching mysteries of ancient times. Someone who only considers Christianity on the surface does not understand it properly. Much thought went into the title of my book, calling it not ‘The mysticism of Christianity’ but Christianity as Mystical Fact. It means that Christianity itself is a mystical fact and can only be understood if one knows that the whole spiritual configuration of the planet earth changed with the coming of Christ Jesus.

Put yourself on a distant planet and imagine you are a seer looking down on to the earth, the earth atmosphere, the earth’s astral body, the bubbling, boiling, billowing mass of animal and human astral bodies. And then imagine you were able to look down on it some centuries before the Christ was born and follow events on into a far distant future. If you were able to follow this you’d see something strange. You would see the astral atmosphere changing profoundly with the coming of Christ Jesus, a tremendous sudden change, so that its shade, its colour, would be different for all future times. Something new entered into the earth’s spiritual atmosphere. Anyone who does not admit that something now exists in the spirit on earth which was not there millennia ago, does not understand Christianity and the preparations that preceded it. You have to consider that something absolutely real came in, something new, and then you know what happened at the beginning of the Christian era.

Looking at it this way you’ll also find the right words for the transformation of the planet earth in the realm of the spirit and have to say to yourself: ‘All close blood bonds broke, everything that kept people together in small blood-based communities gradually disappeared. The small brotherhoods were gradually extended, ultimately to become the large brotherhood that is to include all human beings on earth, with everyone calling everyone else “brother”, and human beings “leaving their mother and father and brother and sister.’” Everything the blood has prepared within a kind of group I, an I that goes beyond the ordinary I, has to vanish from this earth. And when the earth will be ready to be a new astral sphere, the fruit will have germinated, all bonds will have been broken and a single large bond will bring the whole of humanity together. Christ Jesus made it his mission to give the impulse, the power to create this brotherhood. His mission and the ideal of Christianity are thus given in the words: ‘If anyone comes to me who does not disregard his father and mother, his wife and children and his brothers and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple.’ And the rejection: This is not my mother; my mother and my brothers are those who do my father’s will. That is the new spirit that is to come, different from the blood bond.

Please take what I am going to say now not as an image or a symbol, but as something that is real. It is difficult for the materialistic thinking of today to see the reality of such things, but they are real. Let us look on the cross raised up high, and above all the blood flowing from the wounds. Of this blood that flows from the wounds—be clear in your minds of its significance in world history! Why is it flowing? Why do we actually speak of the flowing blood of Christ Jesus? What was the foundation of all close communities? What brought the small tribes together? What must lose its significance within these narrow limits if the whole of humanity is to grow into a brotherhood? The blood. The element that influences the I, pulses in the I, can no longer depend on the blood when the whole of humanity has matured to make brotherhood possible. And so the excess I blood, the blood that causes human beings not to extend their I and let it be universal, must flow out, for it is self-seeking blood, egoistical blood. Consider this not as an image but a reality. Consider the amount of blood that flowed from Christ’s wounds to have been the amount that had to flow so that the blood would lose the tendency to create close communities and thus gain the ability to spread brotherhood over all the earth.

No one perhaps ever came as close to the mystery as Richard Wagner did exoterically in his essay on his conception of Parsifal.¹⁰⁷ Here an exoteric thinker touches on the most profound esoteric mystery truths. If you see things in this light you’ll find that the purpose of Christianity is on the one hand to dissolve the bonds of tribe, family and closely limited communities and on the other to split humanity apart into individuals, so that each feels himself to be an individual and yet also a member of the human race. These are polar opposites that run side by side. In the early times, when groups were small and based on blood relationship, the individual felt himself to be a member of the family, a member of the tribe. And as blood relationship dies out individual independence will grow and increase to the same degree.

This happens because of the event on Golgotha. You can see this from the fact that from that time onwards, when the event happened that was to embrace the whole earth, the religious impulse came to be of the greatest significance. Everything that happened there had been prepared for, and was preparation. The effect of it began when the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. Speaking in such a way that we speak out of the soul of the other person, that is, no longer egoistically—this was shown in the best possible way in the place where the apostles spoke to all people in all tongues. The Holy Spirit thus prepared the way for the new impulse that was to come through the blood of the Son, the logos, the Christ.

Let us now go back to the ancient initiation principle. This was based on authority. Everyone would look up to the initiates and receive impulses from them. This authority principle is gradually coming to an end. Here we have an apparent contradiction. Humanity is being split up into individuals, with the ancient authority principle no longer valid, and yet brotherhood is to be established in its fullness. By what means is it to be established? By people getting a grasp of what has come as Spirit. What is the nature of this? For the initiate of old it was enough to have the whole wisdom, the truth, and let it flow into the whole of humanity. Now the individual person, with individuality taken to its highest level, must have the truth. Every individual must have truth and wisdom. In those early times, truth came to the individual from the highest pinnacle, and he had to make it his own. The spread of wisdom must go hand in hand with development, and human individualization with the creation of the great human brotherhood. These two things cannot go in parallel; they must go together.

Considering this, we are following the stages by which the Holy Spirit was brought to bear. For as long as human beings obeyed that one and only authority they could, as individuals, give themselves up to life. They were able to live in close communities. The supreme authority took care of the whole. This is no longer possible when the principle of authority is destroyed. Then every individual must take care that brotherhood is maintained. Each individual must be able to take care of the social life within the brotherhood. They must perceive what exists in general, what every individual is preparing. What may this be? We only have to remember how the ancient religions arose. All initiates had the same original wisdom of humanity. But as this wisdom was given to individuals, the state, the clergy and so on gave it specific characteristics, different forms. Buddhism and Zoroastrianism arose in this way. The smaller the communities, the more specialized did things have to be. Now that the great brotherhood has to be created, the wisdom of the initiate must be able to reach the whole of humanity so that every individual can now take care of the things that used to be the responsibility of the initiates.

Wisdom thus comes to the whole of humanity. It is the same for all. And we can see, therefore, that this wisdom, this insight, is the element that was distributed among the separate individuals who ‘leave their father, mother, brother, sister and child’. They shall have this wisdom again, exactly because it is the same for all. To understand what is said of the Holy Spirit we must understand that wisdom is the same for all.

People have not yet got that far, however, for they’ll still say: ‘That’s the way I see it; someone else may have his own point of view.’ This point-of-view idea must be overcome. Humanity had to be split ip so that there could be I-nature, egoism. They have not yet found the way of coming together in one and the same wisdom. They will be able to do so if they truly apply themselves to this wisdom and grow as individual as possible. If they find the spirit of the wisdom that is the same for all they will get out of the habit of saying: ‘That’s the way I see it; that’s my point of view.’ We have to understand that there is no particular point of view when it comes to the wisdom that is the same for all, that having a point of view means that one has not yet progressed far enough. Only then can we grasp the idea of the Holy Spirit. Only imperfect human beings have a point of view. Individuals who are approaching the spirit of wisdom do not have a point of view. They know that they must give themselves up selflessly to the wisdom that is always and forever the same for all. Just as all plants turn to the same sun, so human beings will unite in turning to the One, for one spirit of wisdom will live in them. The principle which originally held people together in the blood has flowed out of the Christ, and now wisdom brings us together again in brotherhood.

This has been reflected most marvellously in the miracle of Pentecost, when the apostles extended their brotherhood into one that embraced the whole of humanity, speaking in words that all could understand. This must show itself more and more, as individual nature reaches its highest development. We are all united in the spirit of truth. All other aspects of human nature will develop further at a much later time, when our planet goes through different stages of embodiment. The one thing, however, which will be alive and active until the earth comes to its fulfilment, is the wisdom that unites, wisdom revealed to us in the way in which it was only revealed to initiates in the past. Anyone who sins against this wisdom, the wisdom that creates brotherhood, cannot be forgiven, for this delays the earth’s evolution, for the earth will only be able to enter into its astral stage once humanity has come together in brotherhood. The spirit which brings the human race together is the one that has been poured out into the future. If we let our astral body be filled with this spirit of wisdom which exists for all, we can take it up into the astral body of the earth.

So now we are able to see that something exists in which the earth may be united. The content of the wisdom is therefore positive theosophy, something that must be reflected in the view of the world that is taken in the science of the spirit. This will not happen if you just say to people: ‘We must unite.’ It is not enough merely to preach brotherhood; moral sermons are empty words. Just as we have to supply a stove with fuel if we want it to get hot, so we must supply wisdom for humanity; this will unite human beings in brotherhood. To talk to people about brotherhood is like talking to the stove, telling it to get hot. No, what will take us forward is to teach in a very real way, concept by concept, idea by idea, conveying the wisdom of the evolution of the world and the nature of the human being. Preaching compassion, and indeed feeling any kind of compassion, means nothing unless we have wisdom. What good is it to someone who has fallen and broken his leg if fourteen people gather round him in the street, overflowing with compassion and love and not one of them can fix the leg! All fourteen of them are useless. But the one who is able to do it can help when he comes, and he will do so if he lives in the spirit.

Ethical principles will come of their own accord. They do not have to be taught. But the one wisdom which is beyond dispute, beyond points of view, the wisdom of which it is said in Christianity that it transfigures the astral body, cleansing it completely—this must come to humanity through the spiritual scientific movement. This is what the mission of Christianity means, it gives us the mission of Christianity.

People should grow more and more independent of all authority and move towards the truth that is the same for all. The brotherhood of humanity will develop of its own accord if people perceive the truth of the most Christian words, the words that are most free and most sublime: ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’¹⁰⁸

If you have two occultists with different views, they do not see the truth. Among true initiates it is not possible to say two different things about one and the same matter. Nor will there be two ways of thinking about it when humanity has reached the path that leads to the unification of the human race, of a brotherliness that is not just a word but an inner power.

• 98. Matthew 12: 31; Mark 3: 28.
• 99. A term used by the Protestant theologian Heinrich Weinel (1874–1936), which Rudolf Steiner would often quote.
• 100. Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century). Greek or Syrian churchman. Mentioned in Acts 17: 34 as a disciple of Paul. At the end of the 5th century On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies appeared under his name in Syria, translated from Greek into Latin by John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.
• 101. Lecture of 28 January (in this volume).
• 102. Matthew 19: 29; Mark 10: 29; Luke 14: 26. Second quote from Mark 3: 31-33, third from Luke 8:21.
• 103. Lecture given in Berlin on 25 October 1906. In Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55). See note 95.
• 104. Genesis 5: 3-5.
• 105. 'Another time, going for a walk with Anzengruber... We chatted about creative writing and subjects to write about. I said that he must surely have lived in Upper Bavaria or have had a lot of dealings with the country people of that area. His country figures were very much of that stamp. He put his pince-nez on his strongly hooked nose and said: "Upper Bavaria? No. Actually I never had any dealings with country people. At least not at close hand." Noting my surprise he added: "I don't need that. Just need to see such a one from a distance, hear some ordinary words, observe some gesture of other—and I know the whole chap inside out." "Most peculiar!" "My friend," he said, "you know yourself that all external occasions and opportunities are but midwives. The writer must give birth out of his own resources. Country people? - I'm a city man! But if, as you say, I’m better at writing about country people than city people, it may well be because it is in my blood. Or somewhere in one of my bones, like an inherited kind of gout. My father's family were Upper Austrian farmers. Well, and such things will linger on.'" Gesammelte Werke von Peter Rosegger, Leipzig 1914-16, 36. Band, Gute Kameraden—Personliche Erinnerungen an beruhmte und eigenartige Zeitgenossen, S. 145 f.
• 106. Genesis 3: 14; Rev. 1:8.
• 107. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen hg. von Wolfgang Goiter, Leipzig o. J., 10. Band, 'Ausführungen zu Religion und Kunst', S. 275 ff.; 'Heldentum und Christentum', insbes. S. 281. See Rudolf Steiner's lectures of 29 July 1906 and 16 January 1907 in The Christian Mystery (GA 97). Tr. A. R. Meuss. Gympie, Australia: Completion Press 2000.
• 108. John 8: 32.

Today we are going to talk about the Mystery of Golgotha. At the same time we'll be looking at Easter in the light of spiritual science. A week ago, I said that the Mystery of Golgotha had not only been significant in the evolution of human history but that it is of the most profound significance for the whole of earth evolution, and we do, of course, include the human being in this earth evolution. At the time I drew your attention to the way an observer of our globe, someone who had been able to look at our planet from a distant planet for millennia before our present calendar started, would have perceived the way the planet changed. Such an observer looking down from a distant planet would indeed have seen the appearance of the earth change through those millennia. And if the eye had been clairvoyant, able to observe not only the physical events on our planet but also the non-physical changes, it would have seen that the whole spiritual atmosphere of the earth changed, became different, when Christ Jesus came to the earth.

Just as the human being has a physical body, ether body and astral body, so does the earth, too, have a physical body, ether body and astral body. We are all of us surrounded not merely by air, but also by the ether body and the astral body of the earth. Such a clairvoyant observer would see this ether and astral body of the earth. It would have had a specific colour and a specific way of moving up to the time of the coming of Christ Jesus. Then, however, it changed, assuming new colours and new movement. This event has such a profound effect on our earth and on human evolution that the whole spiritual content of the earth then changed.

You should not think that this happened suddenly as the Christ was born, suffered and died. It had been in preparation for centuries in the spiritual content of our planet and has not reached completion to this day. With clairvoyant vision one would be able to see how the new spiritual element that came to the earth at that time is still in the process of condensing and consolidating. It will be a long time yet before all the fruits that were produced at the coming of Christ Jesus have been received into the earth.

To understand what this is about we must once more let the whole of earth evolution go through our minds. We have to go back to the time in earth evolution when man's present form was only evolving, developing. We call this the Lemurian age. We reach it by going back through the different historical periods of our present age.

Today we live in the fifth sub-period of the fifth main era of the earth. Going back to the time of the Graeco-Latin peoples, to a time when that wonderful art developed which really only came into existence in the Greek period, a time when the Romans developed their legal way of thinking, we would be in the fourth sub-age of our era. Going even further back we would come to a time when the Egyptian, Babylonian and Chaldean civilization was at its height. Beyond this we should find the time when there came the first beginnings of a life in the spirit, with Zarathustra bringing the first culture of the mind. That would have been the second sub-age. Even further back we'd come to the most ancient Indian peoples, not the culture of which the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita speak, but the preVedic peoples who were taught by the holy Rishis themselves. That was a marvellous ancient civilization, and clairvoyants are still able to see the whole of it. It was the first period of development, immediately preceded by the flooding of the earth in which the Atlantean continent that used to be between Europe and America was washed away.

Our ancestors lived in Atlantis, the people of the fourth main era. They did not yet have a social order, for there were no rules, no laws. Nor did they have logical thinking or the ability to do sums. Elements of counting only come up towards the end of the Atlantean age. Memory gradually came to be the highest inner power. Man then lived in marvellous interaction with nature. We only have the right idea of Atlantean culture, however, if we realize that physical conditions on earth were very different from those that developed later. Central European legends still hold memories of those early Atlantean times in Niflheim (land of mists), which was full of dense, heavy mists. All life forms then lived in such dense, heavy mists, and because of this conditions were also very different in the life of soul and spirit. It would take too long to go into more detail about the Atlantean age. I just wanted to, and had to, mention it briefly, so that we may move on to the time when human beings assumed their present form. For this we would have to go back not only to a flood but to tremendous upheavals caused by powers of fire. These fiery upheavals destroyed the land which in theosophical literature is known as Lemuria. It lay far down to the south, extending from the north of Africa to southern Australia. This was the region where man first appeared in his present form.

Going far back into Lemurian times we would see people walk about on the earth who were very different from people today, figures we should not yet call human, for they did not yet have the seed of the human soul in them which alone would enable them to rise to higher levels of development. We would find people there who only had the bodies that envelop the soul, people who had only a physical body, ether body and astral body. And their astral bodies had a depression, a kind of bay, in them—figuratively speaking—for the reception of self awareness. Essentially the four parts of the enveloping human form were already there, but the principle you call 'I' today, a principle that lives in you, was still in the keeping of the godhead then.

Figures were thus walking about on this earth. To describe those human figures that were ready to receive the core of essential human nature, we have to say they were completely different from today's human beings. You would think them to be utterly grotesque, going to the very limits of ugliness. Where today's human beings have air all around them, those human 'casings' were surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere. They were surrounded by a spiritual sphere of air in which they were alive and active.

To give you a diagram of the human beings of that time, I'd have to draw them like vessels, as it were, vessels ready to receive the higher soul quality into themselves (Fig. 20). The inner space is meant to be a hollow made in the astral body and this is ready to receive a higher soul quality into itself. That higher soul element was still in the surrounding atmosphere, the layer of spiritual air. Something which today is inside you was not yet inside human beings at that time, but moved around them. You have to understand, of course, that the spirit can assume different forms and that the element which was then your spirit did not need a physical body. Further development actually consisted in the human spirit coming to dwell in a physical body where it developed further inwardly as soul. Something which today lives in you was then living outside you, in the spiritual atmosphere that was around you. At that time, the individual souls which today live in separate bodies were not yet separate and individual.

Let us think of this glass of water containing thousands of droplets, all connected with each other. All the souls which were later to be distributed among human beings were like this, soul drops in this spiritual atmosphere, but as though dissolved to make a uniform, fluid element. And you may go on and image this: if I were to take a thousand tiny sponges and let them absorb a thousand drops, those thousand drops would then be distributed among the thousand tiny sponges. That is how you should think of the way the spiritual principle was distributed in Lemurian times. Having been all around on the outside before, this principle then came down into the bodies and separate entities were created. Just as the thousand droplets of water would be individualized in the thousand tiny sponges, so was the communal spiritual substance individualized in the separate human forms in Lemuria. At the beginning of the Lemurian age, every human form did not immediately receive the soul fully into itself. To show the way the soul content was received in my diagram, I'd have to do it like this (Fig. 20). I'd also have to show, however, that much of it remained outside the body, in the surrounding area. The body was thus surrounded by a spiritual content that was of the same kind as the part that was already inside the human form.

Evolution for the Lemurian and Atlantean periods and into our time meant that the element that was outside the physical body was gradually drawn into the body. This happened throughout the Lemurian and the whole of the Atlantean age. You have to imagine that human beings were in a permanent state of being half asleep and half awake, though they also had a kind of clairvoyance. If someone whose inner eye had been opened could have looked at the human beings of Atlantean times, these would have looked the way someone who is asleep does today. When a human being lies asleep, the physical and etheric body lies in bed, and the higher spiritual content is spread around it. It is exactly because it is outside that the individual falls asleep. You would see an Atlantean in such a permanent state of sleep; yet this would be full of lively dreams.

One individual approaching another in those times would not have seen the other the way we do today, sharply defined; instead, a colour form would arise in the first individual's soul. This colour form was such that if the other individual was congenial, it would indicate sympathy; with someone uncongenial it would show unsympathetic colour nuances. In those times human beings would perceive the world around them in a more clairvoyant way. The more the spiritual substance entered into them, the more did their state of consciousness become like the one we know in full daytime awareness today.

The process in which the soul came down into the physical body also had its physical aspect, a secondary physical fact. In the Old Testament this is significantly referred to in the words: 'And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.'¹⁰⁹ Truth is, it was not only air that was breathed into man at the time but the spiritual human being that filled him with life. You have to understand that the matter which lives all around us is not simply physical matter or substance. With every breath you inhale not only physical air but also spirit. It is perfectly true that when the physical air was inhaled at that time, in the way in which it is done by people in their present-day form, everything I have drawn here came down into the physical form. This is what the passage in the Old Testament refers to. And if you were to ask: ‘What was the human body at that time, when the soul came down from being in the keeping of the godhead?’ The body was the air, and today you still breathe the element which at that time came down into the body of human beings. For the principle we call the spirit is in the air. The air is merely the body, the substance, of the spirit.

You also have to understand that something else was connected with this way of breathing air, with the spirit coming down into the human form. It was closely bound up with what we call the warm blood of man, or rather blood that was warmer than the surroundings. Before this moment in time had come in earth evolution, there were no warm-blooded life forms. Warm-blooded animals only came into existence at a later stage. This breathing was therefore connected with warm-bloodedness, and this meant that something else also happened then. A certain quantity, a certain amount of warmth entered into the human being, the blood warmth you still have today. This is a higher kind of warmth than the warmth in the world around you. In those days, at the time that preceded this actual time when man came into being, something was present in the environment of our ancestors that was very different from the spirit embodied in the air.

You can get an idea of what was also present in the earth's atmosphere if you consider the following—not literally, a bit figuratively, yet also real—if you consider the warmth present in the different human beings who lived on earth, [if you consider] the warmth that lives in your blood, and then the warmth that has flowed out into your surroundings, and all this warmth enveloping the earth, all the blood warmth, therefore, all warmth that comes from the blood and flows within us—is the warmth that used to be around us on the outside in the past. Just as it is true that the spirit which used to be outside you is now inside you, so it is true that the warmth which was outside you is now inside you.

We would thus reach the time when the whole earth was enveloped in an atmosphere of heat. Another spirit was embodied in this warmth atmosphere, a spirit that was like the spirits who had been on the Sun—meaning one of the three planets that had preceded the earth. These had reached perfection at the time when the Sun was still a planet. The spirit embodied in this heat had reached a level of completion, perfection, which otherwise has been reached only by the spirits who achieved completion on the Sun planet at that time and dwell in the sun today. It is a fact that at the time when this warmth enveloped the earth there was in it the bearer of a unique spirit for the whole of humanity. And for a long time after this, the warmth that surrounded the earth was the bearer of one particular spirituality for all humanity, a spirituality which is no other but that of the spirit of the earth itself.

Just as every human being has his own spirit, is filled with his own spirituality, so for someone who is able to perceive these things, every plant and every material thing is at the same time also an expression of a spiritual entity. And our earth is the body or spiritual expression of the earth spirit. The blood warmth enables the earth spirit to enter into the human being. In the blood warmth which lives in the human being, and in pre-Lemurian times lived outside the human being, we have the medium by which the spirit of the earth enters into the human being himself.

You have to imagine, therefore, that at the time when actual human development began in Lemurian times, the spirit which belonged to the air came down upon human beings, and then the higher spirit began to come down which is in the warmth of the blood, the actual earth spirit. The relationship between these two spirits is such that we may say: ‘The spirit which has the air for its body is the one that has made it possible for human beings to gain speech.’ For the configuration of the human organism which makes the present-day breathing process possible, also makes speech possible. Speech developed in Atlantean times, and came to its highest expression in the ability to utter the word ‘I’ towards the end of the Atlantean period.

The process began in Lemurian times and gradually reached perfection towards the end of Atlantean times. The Bible says: 'And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.' This was gradually perfected until it became the word ‘I’, until the spirit began to speak out of the inner human being and began to call itself, out of the inner human being: ‘Y-a-h-w-e-h’. That is at the same time the eternal core and essence of every individual human being: ‘I am the one I am, the one I was and the one who shall be. ‘I am’ is the deepest inmost core. It came into man at that time and will remain for all eternity as the human being’s individual spirit.

This was the first outpouring of the godhead. It is called the outpouring of the spirit, or of Yahweh. In the mythologies of religious peoples, which are always more intelligent than scientific treatises, this outpouring of the spirit or of Yahweh is described as a breath in the air, something that moves over the earth in the air. Ancient German legend, and also Jewish, Hebrew legend, where Yahweh is the god of the tempest or the wind, shows that this is a divinity which has its outer body in the flow of the air and has poured into the human being.

Because of its essential nature this divinity did indeed play a role in human beings becoming individual when it entered into them. The uniform, fluid element which prior to the Flood had been all around humanity on a magnificent scale, was divided up among individual human beings, like the water being absorbed into tiny sponges. But this could not make the human being wholly individual. Human beings had to find the transition to complete individualization. They were not ordained to be complete individuals right away. Initially they formed groups. We have mentioned before that people lived in small tribal groups. They did not as yet feel themselves to be separate individuals. The human individual felt himself to be entirely part of such a tribal group or family, just as a hand is part of the body. Modern people with their very different way of thinking cannot really imagine what it is like to belong to a tribe, feeling oneself part of the tribal body. But that is how it was, and the more the small tribes spread, and the family came to be the tribe, the more individual did people become.

You have to think of this as a process of singling out, of progressively becoming more individual, as bound to the human being's blood. You can understand it if I tell you one thing, and I would ask you to remember it. The pouring out of the spirit in Lemurian times was not uniform. You would have been able to see many spirits coming down on to the earth from the spiritual surroundings of the earth. Many individual spirits were coming down. Speaking of Yahweh, we are not speaking of a single divinity but the spirits of many nations. The Jews know that it was one of many divinities. Nations were split up into tribes because many such souls of nations—please note that these were something real—were coming down. And the more they developed, the more did they live in families, in tribes, which then came together in large tribal nations. One thing that was not possible at that time was for all to come together in a great universal brotherhood. It will only gradually be possible for all of humanity on earth to come together, because apart from this sending out of the spirit and ensouling human beings with this spirit, which has come down into many souls of nations, there is also something that lived in the warmth of the earth, not in the air, and this more universal principle has also entered into human beings. In Christian esoteric terms, the element which came first is also called the Holy Spirit. Speaking of the old spirits that have come down, we should really refer to many holy spirits, many Yahwehs. When we speak of the spirit that has all warmth in it, we can only refer to a single one. In Christian esoteric terms this is called the Logos, the Christ, the universal spirit of the human race on earth.

Just consider that everything which lives in the spirit self, everything we call manas, came down in a multiplicity, and that everything we call budhi poured itself out over humanity as a spiritual oneness, and you have the difference. You'll then understand that humanity needed to be prepared first by the outpouring of the spirit before the outpouring of the Christos, of the budhi, the life spirit. Up to the time when Christ Jesus appeared on earth, everything there was of the Christ spirit was a oneness. It was a uniform sphere surrounding the whole earth, the solid earth being its skeletal system, as it were. If you take the solid earth with everything that is in it, and add to this the warmth that surrounds the earth, you more or less have the body of the Christ spirit, as it is called. Hence the beautiful words in the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus refers to himself as the spirit of the earth: 'He who eats my bread has lifted his heel against me.'¹¹⁰ What do we eat when we eat? Bread. We eat the bread which is the body of the Christ. And in walking on the earth we do the other thing—we lift our heel against the Christ. This must be taken quite literally.

Just as in Lemurian times the Yahweh spirit poured something of the element of the spirit into separate individuals, so during the ages that preceded Christ Jesus and in those that followed, the Christ spirit gradually poured in, the Christ spirit which has its body in the blood warmth. When the whole of the Christ spirit has been poured out into individual human beings, the Christian spirit, the great brotherhood of humanity, will have conquered the earth. Then there simply will no longer be any thought of cliques and small groupings, but only awareness of humanity as a brotherhood. There will be the greatest degree of individualization, yet each will be drawn to the other. The small tribal and national communities will have given way to the community of the life spirit, the budhi, the community of the Christ.

The eye of a soul looking down clairvoyantly on our planet would then see this. It would be able to follow the way in which the Christ spirit had been wholly in the sphere surrounding the earth and had then poured into individual human beings. It would see the earth changing more and more. Other colours and moods would appear. An element that had been in the sphere surrounding the earth would then have to be looked for in the inmost being of individual human beings. This is what the coming of Christ Jesus means; it is the cosmic significance of this event.

Anything else you may find in the spiritual development of our earth has been preparation. The coming of the Christ was in preparation for centuries. The preparation for this event which was so important for the whole of cosmic earth evolution was such that the Christ showed human beings how to overcome the narrow limits of tribal relationships. You know Mercury, Hermes Trismegistos, the Persian Zarathustra, the Indians Krishna and Buddha and the Greek Pythagoras. The Christos spirit, which until then had been in the earth's surroundings, began to enter into human beings. Then came a band of time when religions were founded; there we can see the process of transformation advancing more and more, and we can get to know the nature of the Christian spirit.

The outpouring of the spirit—what effect was it able to have? It was able to bring it about that love was tied to the blood. In those early times when tribal communities had not yet developed, people loved one another no less than they do today. In fact, they loved one another more, but it was in the way a mother loves her child and the child his mother. Love was therefore more due to nature. Blood felt drawn to blood, and people felt they belonged together because of this. But the people drawn to such blood-based communities progressed further in their development and this meant that their sympathies became more individual. This led to smaller groupings, families and communities, which then became part of larger communities. Individual people were, however, getting more egoistical and self-seeking. The situation thus was the following. On the one hand humanity was getting more selfish, and on the other hand the influence of the Christ made people one. On the one hand we have individualization, with the individual progressively more independent, and on the other the unifying nature of the Christian spirit. These two streams must come fully into their own before it will be possible to have a condition on earth where everyone is independent and on the other hand also connected with everyone else, for each will be filled with the 'Christ spirit', as it is called.

We must clearly understand that all this is connected with the blood, and that originally something came to expression in human blood that brought to light feeling and inner responsiveness. These would come into play within the blood relationship, but they brought about blood-based love. We must also understand that feelings then became more egoistical. Self-seeking came to be increasingly more present in the blood. That is the secret of human evolution, that the blood gained more and more of the quality of self-seeking. This blood which had grown egoistical had to be overcome.

The principle which was excessive egoism in the human blood ran from the wounds of Christ Jesus on the cross in real mysticism; it became an offering. If this blood had not flowed, self-seeking would have grown more and more in human blood as evolution progressed. The cleansing of the blood from self-seeking—this is what the Mystery of Golgotha achieved. By this deed of love, human blood was saved from its self-seeking.

It is impossible to perceive the cosmic significance of the event on Golgotha if one only sees a human being hanging on a cross, bleeding from a wound made by a lance. The profound mystical significance of this event is that vicariously this is the blood which humanity had to lose in order to be redeemed. We shall never understand the Christian spirit if we take these things in a materialistic sense only, knowing only the material event and not also the spiritual principle which lies behind it This spiritual principle is the regenerative power of the redeemer's blood that flowed on the cross. We shall only understand the further evolution of the human race if we perceive how crucial this fact is, realizing that the most tremendous and complete change in humanity's spiritual evolution on earth is connected with this fact.

If we consider this evolution on earth, we find that in early times, before the Christos principle entered into human souls, the mysteries of the spirit were profound centres of teaching and ritual The more the Christ came into the world, the more did the Mysteries of the Son unfold; and in future the Mysteries of the Father will be important. We are told of them in the Book of Revelation.

Let us go back to the Mysteries of the Spirit. They were initially established in a place that would have been between Europe and America and has long since vanished. The nursery of the great adepts was founded there, inaugurating the Mysteries of the Spirit that have continued into our age. People who had given evidence of having achieved maturity could be initiated in the Mysteries of the Spirit. The mystery centres would accept people who had been adequately instructed and purified. There they would receive the teachings, the theosophy, that is the basis of all religions, teachings we receive today through the science of the spirit. They would have purified their instinctive drives, trained to bring order into their thinking, and then have learned not only to love people who were blood-related but to embrace the whole of humanity in love. They had become 'homeless people'. The process which occurs at the highest levels of human development is one that points to the future.

Initiation at the ancient mystery temples continued on into the last pre-Christian centuries. We see evidence of this in the Egyptian pyramids. There the disciple who had come so far that he was able to love the whole of humanity would be put to sleep for three days. His physical body would be as if dead, in total lethargy. The initiator would be able to draw his spirit forth from him the way your spirit is drawn from your body every night when you're asleep. Just as it is true that this spirit is unconscious in ordinary sleep, so it is true that it would be conscious in disciples who had been frilly prepared. The interference that comes from the physical body would no longer be there. But in those three days the disciples would be able to remember everything they had learned before; they were able to take this into their body.

Because the candidate had been learning, taking in the necessary concepts and feelings, the initiator was now able to let him experience as a spiritual reality everything he had previously worked for and taken in by way of inner feelings. The soul would wander through the astral and devachanic world during the three days when it was out of the body. It would encounter the reality of what it had previously learned, and the individual thus came to know, to be initiated. The theosophical teachings ceased to be mere theory; now they were something in which he himself had been, as though in a living element. When he woke again in his body and looked at his physical surroundings, a sound would come to his lips that must wrest itself from the soul of its own accord when after wandering through the world of the spirit for three and a half days the soul found itself back in the physical world again. The soul was then aware that the I had become a citizen of higher worlds, that it had been in those worlds and could now speak to people about its experience in those worlds. Speaking of the world of the spirit from experience, he had become a herald of the spirit in the physical world, a missionary of the spirit. And this comes to expression in the words: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!'¹¹¹ which means: 'Oh God, my God, you have indeed glorified me!' These were the words one would have been able to hear from every individual who had been initiated in this way.

If you had examined such an individual with regard to his whole essential nature, you would have found that someone who was initiated in the mysteries of the spirit became a herald of something which in Christ Jesus was given for the whole of humanity. The budhi had, however, only awoken inwardly, in the 'ether body', as it is called, of such an initiate. Initiates in the spirit, in whom the Son, the Christos, had inwardly awakened, existed throughout antiquity in pre-Christian times. This Christos had not penetrated as far as the physical body, but he had been awakened in the ether body. Those initiates had become immortal as ether human beings.

The great step forward for humanity came because what applied to the great initiates in the spirit also applied to Christ Jesus coming to the earth. But in the case of the individual who died on the cross, this applied right down to the physical body. Everything which in the ancient mysteries could be experienced when out of the body could be seen on the physical plane in this one case, because of the event on Golgotha. It became visible even for those who had only physical eyes. In earlier times, initiates who were able to progress that far would be able to see it. They would feel at one with God because, being the chosen, they experienced inwardly how life must conquer death. Now, however, this was no longer necessary. With the event on Golgotha it had taken place in front of human eyes. There it happened that life overcame death. And through the connection with this unique event, through the bond that connects every individual with it, like a family bond, something was given that replaced the things which had been given to individuals in the Mysteries of the Spirit.

There is one great, significant image from the Mysteries of the Spirit which I must describe to you if you are to understand the Mysteries of the Son. I had to describe how the individual who lay in his sleep for three and a half days was surrounded by twelve human forms, as though he were sitting around a table with them. And how should they appear to someone who had had experiences of the higher worlds as an initiate? Twelve of his incarnations would appear to him, twelve of the bodies he had gone through before. Those twelve bodies were nothing more or less than what he bore within himself as the elements of his body. In occult terms, the human body is divided into twelve parts, and these are a recapitulation of twelve incarnations in which the individual human being is gradually purified and taken to a higher level of perfection. The individual would thus feel himself to be surrounded by the forms or figures which he himself had gone through in earlier times, and he would say to himself: The one form you had before lives in one part of you; the second form lives in another, the third in again another, the fourth, and so on.’ They are thus around you like the guests sitting at a meal with their host.

This image would appear before the soul of every individual entering into the Mysteries of the Spirit. It was the Son of Man who brought this to an end, no longer the son of a family, a tribe, a nation, but the son of the whole of humanity. It was really the thirteenth who had the greatest perfection among the twelve. Being outside his earthly self, he saw himself as the thirteenth.

Let us now consider how the experiences every candidate would have in the higher world came to be repeated in Christ Jesus. It is covered with a kind of veil, the way everything given outwardly, exoterically, is veiled. The Easter feast celebrated by the Christ and the twelve was not to be an ordinary feast. It was to be something else—a recapitulation on the physical plane of the experience which the initiates in the spirit had had a number of times on the higher plane.

In Luke's gospel, chapter 22, verses 7-12, we read: ‘When the day of unleavened bread came, ... they said to him, “Where do you wish us to prepare it?” And he told them, “Now when you enter the city, a man will meet you who is carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house where he is going. Then speak to the master of the house, saying, The teacher says to you, Where is the guest room so that I may eat the Passover there with my disciples? And he will show you a large upper room which has been set out ready; prepare for us there.”’

During the feast he explained once again that the bread was his body, that the blood flowing in his body was like the sap in the body of a plant. It was right for him to say, with reference to the plant sap, the wine: ‘This is my blood,’ and it was right for him to say this because he is the spirit of the earth. It is right for him to say of all substance: ‘This is my body,’ and of all juices: ‘This is my blood.’

Then comes the scene where Christ Jesus developed the Mysteries of the Spirit further into the Mysteries of the Son, and ultimately into the Mysteries of the Father. Again you must consider the twelve apostles sitting around him to be an embodiment of the twelve parts of his own body. If you really contemplate this, using inner delicacy and discretion as you approach a passage which unveils—or rather veils—the deepest truth of the Christian spirit, you will be able to encompass in your mind the transition from the Mysteries of the Spirit to those of the Son.

Consider once again what had to happen as the Mysteries of the Son were approaching. People had to become aware that the blood had to give up its connection with blood bonds. One day blood bonds would mean less to people than their egoism. Looking to the future mission of the Christian spirit, Christ Jesus realized that this could only be achieved by his sacrifice. It had to be thus. For times would come when people grew more and more egoistical in order to gain their freedom. The excess of egoistical blood therefore had to be sacrificed in a cosmic deed, so that human beings, however independent, might one day be able to unite in one great brotherhood. The egoistical element exists particularly because of the human race; it has grown more and more, and it needs to be made spiritual, to be ennobled, by the Christian spirit. Human beings are thus getting more and irore independent. Let us take a look, however, at something which has since come to girdle the earth—our forms of transport. What are they but arrangements to satisfy our egoism? Everything thought up by using the rational mind and common sense has only been thought up to satisfy our egoism, even if only in a roundabout way. Humanity was less egoistical when grain was still ground by using two stones. Humanity had to grow independent, however, and therefore also had to go through egoism, with the whole of our civilization providing the material basis for this.

Someone initiated in the Mysteries of the Spirit thus sees his own incarnations, with himself at the head, as the part which is now the most perfect, just as the Son of Man saw the group of disciples around him as versions of himself. Someone who looks into the future will see the configurations humanity will need to go through. Anyone who lives through the Mysteries of the Son sees into the future, to the end of earth evolution, when the earth state changes into a new star state. Christ Jesus was therefore able to say of the former state: 'You who are sitting around me represent different degrees of perfection, and when I look into the future, you, as you are sitting around me here, represent the twelve stations. These must be overcome, however. I must guide them through myself to the Father. I must guide you to the Father as though through myself, so that the earth may achieve a higher degree of perfection.' All sensuality, all drives, passions and affects attaching to human beings must be overcome. This can be seen in symbolic form in what happened with the twelve.

The age that followed is represented in Judas Iscariot. The representative of low sensuality is closely connected with the representative of the greatest moral and ethical qualities. It is Judas Iscariot who really betrayed the Christian spirit immediately afterwards. Oh, a time will come when it will look as though what happened on Golgotha is also happening all over the earth! It will look as if egoism was to bring death for the Christ, the budhi. It will be the time of the Antichrist. It is law that everything that happened around the cross will also have to happen on the physical plane. What happened on Golgotha does at the same time also have profoundly symbolic significance. Judas' betrayal signifies the lower drives gaining the upper hand. All things sensual must, however, become spiritual.

We thus have reference made here to the future evolution of humanity within the earth. I have spoken of this on several occasions. Everything of a lower nature will drop away from human beings. The future human being is already preparing in the human race. They will not be creative then the way they are today. They will not be working out of their lower passions. Today they produce the word, which can embody the most sublime, and they will become more and more creative through the word. They have grown more egoistical because of their sexuality, and they will be selfless again once that sexuality drops away.

Today the word is produced on a stream of air coming from the larynx; in humanity's future the word will be productive again. Boys' voices break at puberty. It will be the voice which will be productive. And in becoming productive, this word will at the same time—in the future, for the whole situation will be turned around—give expression to human control over the air. It means that the principle which originally breathed through man will cause a transformation in something which is even more deeply connected with essential human nature. The word will be creative with regard to the preparation of the blood. Even the blood of man will be transformed. It will only be able to produce pure, selfless feelings. A human race will arise that is creative through the word. Selflessness will be transformed into a quality of the blood, and the thinking organ will be transformed to be in the heart. This is one of the two evolutions that will follow Christianity. The age when egoism rules is represented by Judas Iscariot. Anyone taking an unbiased look at world events can see how sexuality is capable of betraying man as spirit, to kill him. But human beings who today can produce the word as something higher in themselves will one day be creative through the word. This will be when the heart is the organ of their mind and spirit.

I would now ask you to apply this to the gospel and note a passage which puts what I have just been saying in a truly wonderful way, with magnificent symbolism. Consider what will follow when Christianity has grown selfless and brotherly; how Judas Iscariot embodies everything that makes people egoistical; and consider also the direction in which humanity will develop through the twelve stations—to the form which Christ Jesus himself assumed. Everything rises upwards towards the heart.

The way the transformation occurs is such that creative power pushes upwards from the lap to the heart. This has to come to expression in the one who represents the highest form and is closest to Jesus. Now read this: ‘One of the disciples, the one whom Jesus loved, lay in Jesus' lap at the table. Simon Peter beckoned to him, indicating he should ask which one it was. He then leaned against the breast of Jesus and said to him: “Lord, which one is it?”’¹¹² The passage tells us how the lowest power of production in man moves up into the breast, shown here by Christ Jesus' closest disciple. The Mystery of the Son, of Jesus, is suggested in the most delicate way. One cannot think of a more magnificent way. You will see that it is meant to be a mystery if you read what the initiated disciple himself writes at the end of this whole scene, having had living experience of how he would be transformed and come to the Father through the Son. What was he then able to say? At a higher level, he was able to say what initiates are able to say: ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.’ Those are his words. Read it for yourselves in John's gospel: ‘And Jesus said: Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him.’¹¹³

This Easter feast was the preparation for what then happened on the physical plane. In contemplating Christ's death we learn of death being overcome on the physical plane, and egoistical blood being overcome as the blood flowed from his wounds. We also come to perceive the great prospect that lies ahead as the words are once again heard coming from the cross, out of an awareness of what the future holds: The earth will have reached the goal of a great brotherliness, of becoming spiritual, overcoming everything that could drag the human spirit down.'

Those who have gone through this with the Christ will be able to gather around him once they leave earth evolution behind and rise to a higher form of evolution. And perceiving that the perfecting of the earth has been accomplished, Christ Jesus will once again be able to call out words he once called out on the cross: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!' that is ‘ My Lord, my Lord, how you have glorified the I in humanity, making it spiritual.' That is the meaning of these words. There is a later translation which is wrong, taking up the lines from the psalm.¹¹⁴ But the proper translation of the words is the one you have now heard. Those are the words that express the Mystery of Golgotha: ‘My God, my God, how greatly you have glorified me, made me spiritual.'

These words reveal to us how the spirit wrests itself free of the body. The Mystery of the Son reveals to us how at that time, the inner visionary eye of the world's redeemer looked ahead to the end of the earth's perfecting and put the great goal of humanity in words, speaking of overcoming all differences and the founding of utter human love. This goal will only be reached if people learn to enter more and more in a spiritual way into the world of the spirit. For it is in the spirit that humanity comes to be at one. Once human beings were at one as they stepped forth out of the spirit, out of that oneness, out of the way where everything merges into one in the divine. They became individualized as they entered into individual human bodies—the way water is individualized when droplets of it are absorbed into small sponges. And human beings, now become individual, will be at one again when they enter into the great bond of brotherhood, still maintaining their individual nature. They will thus prepare themselves to be deified creators, just as they were gods, creators, before they came to earth as human beings.

Human evolution took its origin in a divine spirit and it is going back to a divine spirit. The different ‘I’s will be individual, yet at the same time they will be a oneness, being united in the bond of brotherhood. This oneness will give birth to a new star, the new star which in the Book of Revelation is called 'the new Jerusalem'.¹¹⁵ The human ‘I’s will be born in their I-nature, and then the harmonies of the spheres will create the echo for the words in which the Mystery of Golgotha came together, the words: 'My God, my God, how you have glorified me!'

Those words were spoken then, in the past. They will be repeated when human beings ascend to the highest levels, to ever greater heights, when they will have gone through the Son to the Father. The Son guides humanity to the end of earth evolution; then human beings will be taken up into the cosmos again, retaining their I-nature. The earth will go back to the Father. 'No one comes to the Father except through me.'¹¹⁶

The inner eye is able to see a long, long way if human beings are prepared to seek insight into the profound secret of Golgotha. But festivals like the great seasonal festivals exist as important points where people should abandon their everyday routine, when they should let their inner eye go out to the great milestones in evolution, when they should survey not only centuries but millennia. We should consider humanity in a vision that comes to the conscious mind. If we let the distant goal of the future come alive in our hearts, as the great teachers of the human race have taught us, if we let this distant goal come alive in us, a goal that is so far away, yet can be so close if it becomes a power in our hearts—then alone shall we reach it.

Let us resolve never to let such festivals pass by without inscribing in our souls those great future prospects and goals for humanity. People have time for everyday things in their everyday lives, but when the bells ring on holy days, they do well to remember that they are children not just of their age, but in their spirit, also children of eternity.

• 109. Genesis 2: 7
• 110. John 13: 18.
• 111. Matth. 27: 46; Mark 15: 34. sabachthani generally translated as 'abandoned'. A similar sounding term, shevachthani means 'elevated' or 'glorified'. See Steiner R. The Gospel of St Matthew (GA 123), 12th lecture. Tr. D. Osmond, M. Kirkcaldy. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1985.
• 112. John 13: 23-25. The translation of the Greek ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ tends to be a problem. A kolpos was the space, a kind of pouch, created above the belt in a loose Greek-style tunic. It was the place where men in those times would keep things that were valuable to them. Translations vary between ‘bosom’ and ‘lap’ (in Abraham's bosom, in the lap of the gods). Verse 23 says kolchos, whilst verse 25 has στῆθος, stethos, meaning ‘breast’.
• 113. John 13:31.
• 114. Psalm 22:2.
• 115. Rev. 3: 12; 21:2.
• 116. John 14: 6.

Today I'd like to add a few things to our various spiritual scientific discussions relating to Christianity. In the first place we are going to consider the interpretation and explanation of Christian parables. Then I'd like to say a few things, just touching on the subject lightly, on the Book of Revelation, which I also spoke of in the public lectures.¹¹⁷

The first parable I want to consider is the one of the untrustworthy agent.¹¹⁸ As you know, this parable is a puzzle to many people. Let us look at it, at least in so far as we want to consider it today. I am going to present it in the literary translation¹¹⁹ and we'll then consider it in esoteric terms.

He also said to his disciples: ‘There was a rich man who had an agent of whom he heard complaints that he was wasteful with his property. So he called him and said to him:” What is this that I hear about you? Render an account of your management, as you cannot be agent any longer.” The agent said to himself: “What shall I do now that the lord takes the management away from me? I have not the strength to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what to do so that when I have been dismissed as agent they will accept me into their homes.” And he called his lord's debtors, one at a time, and said to the first: “How much do you owe my lord?” And he answered: “A hundred measures of oil.” So he said to him, “Sit down at once, take your account and write fifty.” Then he said to another: “And you, how much do you owe?” And he answered: “A hundred measures of wheat.” So he said to him: “Take your account and write eighty.” And the lord praised the untruthworthy agent because he acted with forethought, and said: “The sons of this age show more forethought in their own generation than the sons of light.” ’

This parable has been a great puzzle to many people, and rightly so. Before we go into it, let us just consider that parables like this have been explained in all kinds of different ways through the ages. We have known people to say that there is profound meaning behind such a parable. Many have tried to find explanations according to their own ideas. It is perfectly clear that if people come and explain such parables according to their own ideas, something intelligent will result if the individual concerned is intelligent, and something unintelligent if he's not. If people bring in their own ideas, there can of course be no guarantee that theirs is the right interpretation. The situation is completely different from the spiritual scientific point of view. What matters to us is to explain such parables the way it was done in the original Christian mysteries; that we know the profound significance which they hold and out of which they have arisen.

Such Christian mysteries existed and I have referred to them on several occasions. I said that Paul went forth to speak of Christianity, and that he founded the esoteric Christian school under Dionysius in Athens. We are going to explain the parables in the way they were explained at that time. We are not going to speak of our own ideas but of things we are truly able to know. The teachers at those Christian schools drew on the things they had received from Christ Jesus himself.

It is especially today that parables of this kind have suffered greatly because people's—and even theologians'—thinking is generally materialistic. To demonstrate what is actually possible in this regard, let me read you something about this parable from a small book published as part of a series.¹²⁰ The author is considered to be one of the most outstanding representatives of the Hamack approach; he was appointed associate professor at Jena University and a few days ago to the chair of New Testament studies. These are therefore the ideas presented by a university professor. What is more, his wisdom is available to everyone, for the book only costs a few pence. The best way of disseminating ideas like these is to present them in cheap books of this kind. Everything suggests that the matter is more important than one would generally think, for that is how the materialistic thinking of theologians reaches the hearts and minds of people.

The way of explaining such a parable is more or less like this: ‘The things people say regarding a deeper meaning to these parables are nothing special; it is something which simply is not there behind the parables. We need to go back to our original, childlike way of thinking.’ It is as if the Christ merely intended to tell an artfully composed story. What he said in the story is of so little importance that it is entirely in accord with modern thinking, where things cannot be reduced low enough, to bring them down to the level of the most ordinary commonplace.

His actual words are: 'Let us take the parable of the untrustworthy agent, for this often causes problems. We'll take it on its own, up to the words: "The lord praised the untrustworthy agent because he acted with forethought." The reason why we leave away the rest of the verses will be clear later on; one thing is certain and that is that they can no longer all be used for the interpretation, for they are about completely different ideas. If we take the parable as a parable again, all it is intended to say is that the agent knew that there would be an accounting followed by dismissal. He therefore considered what he might do in this situation, and right away took the only course he could think of. That was an intelligent way of doing things. Even his lord, whom he had cheated, had to admit this.

Now to what it was meant to tell Jesus' contemporaries: "You, too, know and believe that God will call you to account one day. Be intelligent, therefore, and prepare for this!' 'At least be intelligent about if, the parable is meant to say. Jesus was not concerned in this case with goodness, nor with the longing in human hearts. A harsh, ironical mood prevails. Nothing here of 'Blessed be they who bear pain, blessed those of a pure heart!' Instead we have: 'If you won't listen to everything, at least be as intelligent as that untrustworthy agent!' There's a note of sharpness in this parable, and this is why we have such a strange choice of image. Jesus did not consider it necessary to add that we cannot prepare for God's judgement by committing further villainies the way the agent did.

You see that Weinel himself compared the lord in the story with God. The last three lines clearly show that the parable could be seen to relate to this, for the author says that God might one day call the soul to account. So there should surely be the words: 'at least be good'. But if we then read what the lord says to the untrustworthy agent, using the words 'you should at least be as intelligent as such an untrustworthy agent', it means we have not understood the parable.

Such ideas are presented in popular books today and implanted in the minds of young students. It is not the kind of materialism which explains the outside world in materialist terms which is worst, but the materialism of people who do not want to know of any deeper insight into theological things. It is the kind of materialism which is the cause of the other, scientific materialism. Here materialism enters deeply into human souls, and then one cannot help oneself but interpret the facts of modern science in a materialistic way. We'll have to learn again to understand things of the spirit And this can only happen through the approach where it is truly possible to explain the Bible and other religious documents.

We come to understand such a parable if we enter more deeply into its meaning. One thing to be considered from the beginning is that it is in Luke's gospel and does not appear in the other gospels. What does it mean to say it is only in Luke's gospel? It means a great deal. If you study the gospels, for instance those of Mark and Luke, and compare them, you'll find that each has a particular mood. In yesterday's lecture I said these were canonical works coming from different initiation centres. Luke goes back to the initiation gone through by the Essenes and Therapeutists. You therefore have a medical aspect to it, seeking to restore balance for people, to bridge differences between them and make it come true that in the eyes of the world of the spirit, all human beings are equal. Luke's gospel often seems like a gospel for people who are oppressed and burdened. It will help them to stand up straight, for they are equal in the eyes of the world of the spirit. This needs to be considered, and then we shall find the basic note, the mood, which is to be found in the gospel of Luke.

In earlier times, the different gospels were in fact declared to be different even in tone. Let us hold on to this for a bit. Here we have to consider an important basic quality of Christianity, which you'll remember from earlier lectures. You know that I often reminded you of the words: ‘Anyone who does not disregard his wife, child, mother and brother, cannot be my disciple.’¹²¹ You know that these words refer to a major step forward in the evolution of the human race. It refers to the fact that in earlier times we had a love in the world that was founded on blood bonds; this love had to go, however, as soon as the bonds of blood were broken. In earlier times, in the past, blood relative loved blood relative. The Christ taught the love which will be such that one human being loves the other, irrespective of how their blood relates. This bond of brotherhood will mean that people are equal not in the greatest possible external sense, but in what Christianity teaches to be equality in the worlds of the spirit.

The coming of the Christ thus brought a decisive change in human evolution on earth. It gave the impulse for humanity to progress towards a great bond of brotherhood that encompasses the whole world. Christ Jesus has made it possible for human beings to be guided by the power that comes from his words, guided to that all-encompassing love for which we use the term 'bond of brotherhood'. The gospels give us the strength and power we need to establish this bond. This is something we need to understand clearly.

Seeing things in this way, we perceive the great profundity of a word we find in the gospels in many ways, a word which always refers to the old law, the law pertaining to the early times described in the Old Testament. Jesus did say¹²² that neither the dot on an i nor anything else should be gone against in this law, but he put something completely new in place of this law, something which has not yet become real. He put the free, loving attitude people have to one another in place of things that are governed by law today. Laws regulate the ways people live together and the things one person has to do for another. A time will come, however, when each individual will know, having an immediate feeling for this, what he needs to do for, and give to, his human brother.

Let us now consider the parable from the point of view of Christianity. If we take it seriously we'll grasp the profound significance and understand that the rich man may indeed be compared to the divine regent of this world. The analogy does indeed exist—rich man and divine regent of the world. But how? Putting the question like this, one might easily be asking why the agent was untrustworthy. It is generally assumed that it is because he let people put down 80 instead of 100 measures, and so on. People think the agent was untrustworthy because he put something down for people that was not in accord with their debt certificates. This was veiy wrong. Truth is that he was called untrustworthy because he had demanded excessively high prices for the grain and other produce which he had sold to the people. We can now understand why people would not support the agent if his lord dismissed him. If that were not the case, we'd have to assume that the rich man himself wanted to be untrustworthy. But the parable says nothing of the kind. And if we take the sentences that follow—the ones Weinel was arbitrarily leaving out—we'll find that we have no need to think the rich man to have been someone who would ask his agent to cheat people. The agent thought he'd serve his lord well by getting the best possible prices for him. Yet in spite of this he stood accused of not having acted in his lord's interests.

Let us approach the parable in the light of the above and get a clear picture. It was said of the agent that he had wasted his lord's property. He knew that people would not stand by him because of the way he had done things, asking high prices. So he thought: 'What am I to do? My master wants an accounting, and he'll dismiss me from my office. The others, he said to himself, won't accept me into their homes.' So what did he do? He made up for some of the things he had done wrong earlier, as an untrustworthy agent. He let people off a bit, that is, he now asked more humane prices. He let some of the mammon go which he had wrongly demanded for his lord.

If we take the parable like this, we may indeed compare the rich man with the divine regent of the world, and the agent with someone who was appointed to govern the old world at the behest of the divine regent, when life was regulated by laws. We may then also say that there was to be an accounting as to how affairs had been managed. It was found that the agent had grown untrustworthy. The same may be said of the law. It had been good originally, but had gradually become unfair. Class distinctions were made and rights established that could no longer be upheld. And so someone who had said that neither the dot of an i nor anything else should be gone against in this law, now had to demand an accounting from the Pharisees and Scribes who were administering the law. The parable was about the Pharisees; they were the untrustworthy agents, administrators of the law. It was they who must not imagine that if they were not accepted by the one they thought to be their god they would be welcome in the huts of those who were subject to the law.

We can now also see why there is no need to make the rich man in the parable untrustworthy. He actually praised the agent for having cut prices. If a rich man wants to cheat people, surely he's not going to praise someone who returns some of the money where prices have been too high. The agent thought to serve his lord and grew unjust towards others. In the same way the people whose task it was to guard the law believed they were serving their lord and grew unjust towards other people.

This changed the moment the Christ came. We also see that those who have been handling those laws needed to restore to rights anything they have done wrong in the process. The law had grown unjust. Now, when love of all people was demanded, those who wanted to gain the huts—meaning the souls—of people must put the just law in place of a law which in specific areas had become unjust. They have to write something off where things had become unjust. In the gospel, therefore, the old Scribes and Pharisees are divided into those who in rigid orthodoxy go on calling themselves ‘children of God’. They are the ones whom Christ Jesus condemns, saying he wants to have nothing to do with them. They are the ones of whom he says that they continue to be far removed from him; who say: ‘We serve God who has given us the laws.’ They were the ‘children of light’ because they held fast to the law, which was a technical term for the servants of God who were later compared to the untrustworthy agent The others, who lived among the people, who had to be involved with human inclinations, were the ‘children of the world’. They did not insist on the letter of the law; they let people off because one could no longer do things in an unjust way. They are people who were unjust before, but having to be in close touch with life they were forced to change. Because of this the 'children of the world' were wiser than the 'children of light'.

The parable refers to the way the world is ruled. What was good before may become a torment, and something else must take its place. So what is the situation now concerning the law, and the honesty of those who administer it? Where are the people who no longer base themselves on the old law? And those who have reason to fear that they will not be welcome in the huts of others, because they have been unjust? The parable is now easily understood, for we have given the old esoteric interpretation from which the parable originally arose. One should not interpret the parable in a materialistic, theological way, but very simply. These parables exist in order to show the profound significance of humanity’s great mission.

The other parable is the parable of the lost son. You know it. It also presents difficulties for some. It would be taking us too far to read out the whole parable. You know what it is about. A father had two sons. One asked for his inheritance so that he might go out into the world; the other stayed at home, was a good boy and helped to run his father’s affairs. The one who had gone out into the world lost everything, grew poor, and ended up in the greatest misery and dire want. When he came home, his father received him most lovingly. When the older son heard this, he grew angry and would not enter the house. His father went outside and asked him to come in. But he said to his father: 'Look, I have been serving you for so many years, but you've never given me a ram so that I might have a pleasant time with my friends. But now that this son of yours has come, having wasted his inheritance on bad girls, you have killed a fatted calf for him.' He said to him, however: *My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But you should be happy and delighted for your brother was dead and has come to life again. He was lost and has been found again.'

Imagine now that someone plays a part in the parable of the lost son today and that it is not covered with the dust of millennia of venerable tradition. Don't think that there aren't also people today who consider it to be extremely unfair that the father receives his runaway son with open arms, putting his other son at a disadvantage. Don't think that people are going to say anything else! And they do say it. There are people who do not venerate the Bible the way the faithful do. To some, the Bible is an ordinary book known the world over. A few lines from someone who sees it like this, a thoroughly bourgeois freethinker, will show you. The book is entitled Finsternisse (darknesses).¹²³ It says: 'Our sympathies are entirely with the older son... The way the father treats his younger son is extremely unfair to the older son,' and so on.

This is uninspired, but many people would think the same if the parable were to be written today. Consider, however, that there's something behind these things. Consider that we can understand the whole nature of these things out of what lies behind them. We can see, therefore, that we merely have to give them a deeper meaning. The most important of these parables may also be found in a kind of canon of the mysteries, taking different forms among different nations. Let me tell you one from the Hebrew Canon,¹²⁴ and then you can make the comparison.

A king had to accept the fact that his son left him and went away. He sent the tutor who had power over his son, that he might bring him home. The tutor did soften the son's heart. But the son said: 'How am I to face my father again?' And his father sent word: 'Surely it is me, your father, whom you'll be facing,' and so on. But it also says something else, and that is: 'This also happened to the people of Israel who had grown sinful and turned away from their father, the regent of the world. They had lost faith.' The story then goes on: The King sent messengers after his son. The son said, however: How can I face my father? His father replied: Surely it is your father whom you'll be meeting face to face?

The parable is not the same as in the gospel but it came into existence centuries before the Christian era, with definite similarities, and has been preserved in Hebrew tradition. The difference is merely that a deeper explanation is given. It is spelled out for people that the story refers to the nation which needs to return to the father. Jesus merely gave the images in the parables, interpreting them only for the disciples. The Jewish parable relates to the nation, a single nation connected by blood bonds; the Christian parable relates to the evolution of the whole of humanity.

Let us now remember how souls came down from the keeping of the divine spirit in ancient Lemurian times, how the soul entered into the human being, and how it was only because of this that he became an individual person. Let us follow the way the soul grew more and more individual; let us remember that animals still have group souls today and not individual souls—a group soul on the astral plane. If we go back in the evolution of the human race we find that humans also had group souls once, being closer to the divine spirit then than they are today. Human beings had not yet descended and entered into bodies at that time. They brought about what the god in them brought about. Once they had entered into human bodies they grew more and more individual, their own masters in the habitation of a human body. Others remained behind at the original level and at other early stages. Because of this we have the different types of human beings side by side. We have people who today still have almost a generic soul. We cannot perceive individual impulses in them, and they act less of their own accord and more in a generic way. The god instilled the group soul. It continued like this until the independent human being evolved who seeks the way back to his god again.

The process of evolution was such, therefore, that originally the human being was a group soul in the keeping of the divine spirit. Looking at an individual today and at human evolution, we are able to say: Primitive man still remains with the father; he has not left his father’s habitation. The other one, however, has gone out into the world, has asked for his inheritance, so that he may develop freely. A moment comes when the developing human being feels isolated, deprived of spiritual goods. He then seeks to find his way back to God again. That is the process of evolution—descent from the god into matter and then the re-ascent, returning to his father’s house. If we find the way back out of our own resources, we return having first grown poor, hungering for spiritual goods. We do, however, return as independent individuals, and the higher we advance in the spirit the more do we return home. Candidates felt themselves to be returning to the house of their divine father. What they said came from the group soul. It will become clear to us if we consider this in its occult sense.

It is not easy to study the human organism esoterically. The way people are today, they have a physical body, an ether body, an astral body and the actual I. All these bodies do not exist on their own; they are not yet independent entities. Please forgive the not very appetizing comparison, but it will show things a bit more clearly. Spirits that are more or less alien by nature are present in all these bodies, like maggots in a cheese. They move in and out. The influences to which human beings are subject come from the outside and from very different spirits. The spirits that move into and out of the physical body are called 'phantoms'. The human being becomes unfree because of this. The spirits present in the ether body are called 'spectres'. And the spirits present in the astral body are called 'demons'. As you know, people who were not superstitious but knew something of these things, were familiar with this. And the entities that have to do with the I are called 'ghosts'.

How does the human being grow individual? By purifying himself. He is most powerfully purified by becoming a companion to the world of the spirit. He then works on his astral body to free it from demons. When he is working on his ether body he frees himself from spectres. Working on the physical body he gets rid of his phantoms. Once this is done, he returns to the pure, divine realm. He will have won something in the process. He had been unfree. But now, having freed himself, he returns to his father’s house a free man. This will make it easier for you to understand the reports of Jesus driving out demons.

In the parable of the lost son, you need to think of the whole of human evolution. The spirits will be delighted at the soul's return, for it will not have remained the way it was when it went away. The individual has changed, has become free. This delights his companions. We should not see the sphere to which the parable relates as something lowly or small; we need to see it as the great cosmic tableau. You will penetrate even more deeply if you recall that everything is the other way round on the astral plane, as I told you. Remember I said that even figures have to be read the other way round in the astral world, in their mirror images. So if we come to the figure 64, we should read 46, not 64. When your passions take their leave of you, it seems to you that they are all kinds of spirits rushing towards you. If you want to create a parable with a profound, ethical core for the most sublime worlds, you use numerous images that appear the other way round in the physical world. This shows you the deeper reason why some parables, ethical in the world of the spirit, will sometimes offend in the physical world. You have to think of many things in parables. You are driven by them, through your feelings, into the world of the spirit. And that is also the mood, the tone, which lives in such parables. And it is in fact characteristic of such parables that they offend in their physical form.

Another parable I would like to mention briefly is the one of the wise and foolish virgins.¹²⁵ This also makes us think. Let us recall. The realm of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, however, and five were wise. The foolish virgins took their lamps but no oil with them. The wise virgins carried oil in their vessels as well as their lamps. The bridegroom was delayed and they all grew sleepy and went to sleep. At midnight, however, voices were heard: “Lo, the bridegroom is coming; go forth to meet him!” The virgins all rose and prepared their lamps. The foolish ones then said to the wise ones: “Give us of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” The wise virgins replied: “No, for then both we and you will not have enough; but go to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.” Yet as they went away to buy some the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him for the wedding, and the door was closed. Finally the other virgins also came and said: “Lord, lord, open up for us!” He said, however: ‘Truly, I tell you I do not know you. Watch and wait, therefore, for you will know neither the day nor the hour at which the Son of Man will come.”'

Here an indication is given that the parable has something to do with the Christ's future coming. Let us make this clear. We can do this if we once again consider the parts of the human being. If I work on my astral body, the Holy Spirit arises in Christian terms. If the I works on the ether body, budhi arises, or Christ, the logos. In my Theosophy, the Holy Spirit is called ‘spirit self,’ the Christ, the logos, is called ‘budhi’ or ‘life spirit’.

We look at people today and see the way they are living now that they have developed physical body, ether body, astral body and I. If the I works on the astral body, the Holy Spirit, spirit self, manas develops from the astral body. And because the I has already done some work on the astral body, people also have some manas, some Holy Spirit. This manas acts into the human being in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit A time will come when humanity will enter into the sixth of the root races. Manas will then have developed in those who have really done something for their development They will have developed manas. They will be ready to receive budhi, the Christ, the sixth basic part.

In the sixth race human beings will develop the Christ, and that will be the majority of people. We are moving towards that time. It will be the time when Christ Jesus will come. At that time human beings will be given the power to move to the place where they can receive the Christ in a new form, as a fruit, the place where the Christ laid down the seed, as it were, like a mustard seed that will grow ii the soul. The Christ will be visible to them, that is, to those who have developed the inner Christ eye.

A parable, a symbol, is used to describe what human beings are inwardly developing. Just as the physical human being comes into existence through the male and female principles coming together, so the idea is that the other parts of the human being were also inseminated, that the different parts were inseminated in a particular way. This was during the Saturn period. Then the ether body developed, and then the astral body. The coming of these new developmental aspects was thought to be like an insemination. This example can also show you how deeply the words of the Bible must be taken. It is not for nothing that it says in the Bible: 'And Adam knew his wife,'¹²⁶ when referring to an insemination, for at the back of it all is the idea of insemination out of the spirit. To know1, 'gain insight', is to be inseminated with the divine self. 'Know yourself means 'Let yourself be inseminated with the divine self which is present throughout the world'.

Something similar to this lies behind the parable of the foolish and wise virgins in Christian esotericism. The image of insemination is the lamp which has been given oil. Thus each of these parts of the human being is seen as a virgin who has not yet been inseminated, and the inseminated bodies of the human being are the virgins who have poured oil into their lamps. The undeveloped part of humanity remains where it is, with no oil in its lamp, and does not take its bodies up to the budhi level. The developed part has allowed the spirit to influence its bodies, pouring oil into the lamp, as it were. The others have poured no oil into their lamp, they have not developed their five bodies. The others did develop them, preparing for the important moment of the Christ's coming. The time of the Christ's coming then arrives. Some will have poured oil into their lamps; their souls will be illumined and ready to receive the Christ. Others, who have remained dark in themselves, will see that others have developed and they'll go to receive the wisdom from the others. They will need to go to the merchants to get their oil. But they'll be too late. And what will the Christ say to the wise virgins? ‘I know you.’ And what will he say to the foolish virgins? 'I do not know you.'

Applied to insemination the parable thus means: He will come to inseminate the sixth basic part, and he'll enter into the sixth basic part. 'Adam knew his wife, and she came to be with child.' And then the bridegroom says to the unwise virgins: 'I do not know you.' Such words taken from the profundity of Holy Writ will always be true. If we were to proceed in this way we would find that letter by letter the Bible contains the science of the spirit, and that we can learn the truths of that science by studying it. We need no other book. Anyone who says that the Bible contradicts the science of the spirit, does not know the Bible, and it does not matter if they are theologians who consider themselves to be at a very high level. Life in the spirit has to be found again in this ancient document.

Now a few comments on the things I was referring to in my public lectures on the Book of Revelation. You know that the sun once separated from the earth, and that it will unite again with the earth in the far distant future. The quality which makes it possible for human beings to become so spiritual that they are able to reunite with the sun is in occult terms called 'the sun's intelligence'. This good spirit in the sun has an adversary, the demon in the sun. The two are not only active in the sun but also send their influences down to the earth. The powers of the good sun spirit enter into plant, animal and human being; they bring forth life on earth. The adversary principle of the sun demon, the power which opposes the union of earth and sun, is active in man's evil powers.

Occult symbols of this have existed through the ages.¹²⁷ A seven-cornered sign is the symbol of the good sun spirit. The seven corners symbolize the seven planets. The pentagram is the symbol for the human being. In occultism, the stars are drawn into the figure [heptagram] in the form of seven eyes. They bind it all together. At the same time we also have the days of the week if you follow this line here (Fig. 21).¹²⁸

In the distant past, time could not yet be measured by external methods based on the way the sun moves around the earth. Early occultists thought of special regents for the orbit of the sun, and they were right in their thinking. The whole system was orbiting, and time was determined in relation to the twelve signs of the zodiac—Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, and so on. As you know, one cycle in the evolution of a cosmic system is called a manvantara, and this is always followed by a pralaya, a state of rest. They alternate like day and night, with both night and day of 12 hours duration. Those 12 hours correspond to the vast periods of time in the cosmic day that were regulated by the ancient rulers of the circling of the zodiac. I would need to draw 24 masters of rotations around this sign. If I were to draw it for you, you'd have the heptagon here (Fig. 21), then the seven eyes for the seven stars, and the 24 ancient rulers, 12 for the night and 12 for the day.

The good sun spirit is also called 'the lamb'. We have already referred to the pentagram as the symbol of the human being. A black magician uses it with the two 'horns' pointing upwards and the single peak pointing down. On completion of this development, the 'good' will have developed seven 'horns'. That is the sign of the Christ spirit.

Having gained this occult insight, read the passage where John receives the book sealed with seven seals. Let us read it as it is given in chapter 4 of the Book of Revelation. 'And immediately I was in the spirit And behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardius stone ... And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting'—I have presented them to you in the twenty-four hours of the cosmic day, night and day. And then, moving on to chapter 5: ‘And I beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts and in the midst of the elders, stood a lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of god sent forth into all the earth.’ This occult sign forms the background to John's writing of the secrets of cosmic existence in his Book of Revelation. You need to know these if you are to have some feeling for the profundity of this work, and what it signifies when the adversary of the lamb is spoken of as the two-homed beast. The symbol of the sun demon is drawn like this:

The Book of Revelation is all in occult writing, which is given expression in words.

One of its secrets also lies in the 'number of the beast', 666,¹²⁹ also 'the number of a man'. According to Aramaic occult teaching, the figure should be read like this: 400, 200, 6, 60. These four figures¹³⁰ are represented by the Hebrew letters:

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Hebrew writing is read from right to left:

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These letters symbolize the four principles that cause man to harden completely unless he is able to transform them. Sameh represents the principle of the physical body, vav that of the ether body, resh that of the astral body, and tav the lower I which has not developed into higher I. The whole word reads ‘Sorat’, which is the occult name of the sun demon, the adversary of the lamb.

This is the secret which in more recent theology has been turned into: It means ‘Nero’.¹³¹ I can’t think of anything more fanciful. The individual who invented this Nero story is considered to be one of the greatest theological thinkers. Vast volumes have been written on the subject. People thus misunderstand the meaning of those symbolic signs. Works like the Book of Revelation can only be understood by someone who is able to read the occult writing.

The prophetic significance of such signs and symbols may also make you realize that the spiritual science movement has an important mission. In choosing the seven seals from the Book of Revelation for the auditorium in Munich, we are also giving an outward indication of the direction we want to take. The spiritual principle is to come to face us again also in the outside world.

• 117. See Steiner R. Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55), lecture of 26 April 1907. Tr. R Stebbing. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1987.
• 118. Luke 16: 1-8.
• 119. Weinel H. Die Gleichnisse Jesu in Aus Natur und Geisteswelt. Sammlung wissenschaftich-gemeinverständlicher Darstellungen 46. Band, 2. Auflage Leipzig 1905, S. 130.
• 120. Ibid S. 23.
• 121. SGenesis 3: 14,Rev. 1: 8.
• 122. Matth. 5:17-18.
• 123. Zurich 1896; quoted by Weinel (see note 119).
• 124. Free rendering of story of Absalom according to 2 Samuel.
• 125. Matth. 25: 1-13.
• 126. Genesis 4: 1.
• 127. The sketches have not survived. See The Apocalypse of St John (Book of Revelation) (GA 104). Tr. rev. M. Cotterell. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1958; Occult Seals and Columns. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1924.
• 128. See also lecture given on 4 March 1907, in this volume.
• 129. Rev. 13: 18.
• 130. The Phoenician and later the Hebrew alphabet had a fixed sequence of letters, and this also made it possible to use the letters as numerals. This happens on several occasions in the Old Testament, in both the Hebrew and the Greek versions. The numerical value of letters is of considerable importance in occult writings.
• 131. The interpretation which Rudolf Steiner had shown to be wrong may still be found in reference works today, e.g. in Lexikon der Bibel, von Fritz Rienecker herausgegeben, 3. Auflage, Wuppertal 1961.

The Munich Congress,¹³²¹³³ being the fourth after Amsterdam, London and Paris, was intended to mark a certain milestone in our theosophical movement. A kind of connection is to be made between the different nations also for our theosophical cause in Europe. I am not intending to give an actual report on the congress today but just to offer a few comments for those who were unable to be there.

The congress was to show one thing, something I had been emphasizing many times with reference to our theosophical cause—it was to show that theosophy is not meant to be a personal matter of broodingly looking inward. It is meant to play a role in practical life, be concerned with education, come to be at home in all branches of practical life. Those who have deeper insight and understanding of the true impulses of theosophy will know, even today, what opportunities this theosophy will provide in the future. It will be the harmony between things we see [outside] and feel inwardly. Someone able to see into things more deeply will see a major reason for the scattiness [of today's people], disharmony between the situation as it is and the things theosophy aims at. Not only theosophists have felt this, but also other important figures, Richard Wagner, for instance...

In earlier times every door lock, every house, every structure was a structure of the soul. Soul stuff had flowed into it. In the old days a work of art was part of human feeling and thinking. The forms of Gothic churches were in accord with the mood of people who would often walk a long way to those churches. They had the soul mood of the people. The worshipper walking to the church would feel that those forms were like putting one's hands together in prayer, just as the ancient German [entering a grove] would feel [the movements of the trees] to be something like a putting the hands together in prayer. Everything was more familiar to people in those times. You can still see this most beautifully expressed in the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The way a whole small village would come together in the church was a true expression of the inner life in that village. Whole ether streams would gather in the place where the church stood. The materialistic age has split everything apart. People don't realize this, being unable to take a clear look at life. A seer will know, however, that when you walk through a town today you'll see practically nothing but things for our stomachs or the latest fashions. Anyone able to trace the secret threads in life will also know what has brought our materialistic civilization to this split-apart state.

Health can come for the outside world if it becomes a reflection of our inmost moods of soul. We can't achieve complete perfection right away, but an example has been given in Munich. The spiritual scientific view of the world was brought to expression in the auditorium. The whole hall was in red. People are often quite wrong about the colour red, one should not fail to perceive the deeper significance of the colour. Human evolution involves ascending and descending movements. Look at the original peoples. Their natural world is green. And what do they love most? Red! An occultist knows that red has a special effect on a healthy soul. It releases active powers in that soul, powers that encourage one to act, powers that should move the soul from taking it too easy to making an effort, even if this is far from easy. A room intended to have a solemn, festive mood needs to be papered in red. Someone who uses red wall paper in his living room shows that he no longer has a feeling for solemn moods, taking the red colour down to an everyday level. Goethe wrote the most excellent words one can think of about these things: 'The effect of this colour is as unique as its nature. It gives an impression both of solemnity and dignity and of charm and graciousness. It does the former in its dark, dense form, the latter when bright and diluted. And so the dignity of old age and the charm of youth may garb themselves in one and the same colour.'¹³⁴

Those are the moods which red creates, moods we are able to demonstrate using occult methods. Look at the countryside through a red glass and you'll get the impression: That's what it must look like on the day of judgement. Red makes us glad to see how far human beings have developed. Red is hostile to moods that hold us back, moods of sin.

Then we had the seven column motifs for the time when buildings might also be erected for theosophy. The column motifs were taken from the teachings of the initiates, from very early times. In theosophy it will be possible to provide architecture with genuinely new column motifs. The old columns have really long ceased to mean something to people. The new ones relate to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury and Venus. The capitals reflect the laws. Between the columns we had put the seven seals of the Book of Revelation, in Rosicrucian style. The seal of the Grail appeared in public for the first time.

We can also build theosophy. We can build it in architectural forms, in education and in the social field. The Rosicrucian principle is to bring the spirit into the world, to do fruitful work for the soul. And it will also prove possible to elevate art to the mystery art which Richard Wagner longed for so much. An attempt has been made in Edouard Schuré's mystery play.¹³⁵ He sought to follow the mystery plays of old. The underlying intention was to let theosophy crystallize in the developing structure of the world. The programme was in a solemn and festive red, showing a black cross with roses wound around it against a blue background. Rosicrucianism takes the things given through Christianity forward into the future. The initials given on the programme reflected the underlying thoughts.¹³⁶

Today I would like to consider some questions that may come up in relation to this. First of all: How would it be if theosophy were to move across into the Rosicrucian stream and come wholly into its own within this? In this respect let us consider some ideas relating to theosophical ethics or morality. It is not a matter of saying: You must do or not do one thing or another. Theosophy has nothing to do with demands and commandments but with facts and narratives.

Let us take just one example of a fact in the astral world; it will immediately be apparent that there is no need to preach morality—which does not serve any purpose anyway, for admonitions and commandments cannot be the basis of genuine morality which comes only with the facts of higher life. If you hear occultists say that a lie is murder and suicide, this acts as an impulse with such moral power that it simply does not compare with the simple admonition: You must not lie. If we know what a lie is and what the truth is, if we know that everything leaves its mark in the realm of the spirit, the situation changes. A narrative which is in accord with the truth creates vital energies for further development. Untruths that are spoken strike at the truth and this reflects on the individual himself. Every lie that is told will later have to be felt by the teller himself. Lies are the greatest obstacles to further development. It is not for nothing that the devil is called the spirit of lies and obstacles. The explosive substance of a lie kills objectively and discharges itself against the individual who put it out into the world.

We have three terms for the personal: the personal, the impersonal, and the more-than-personal. There were human ancestors once who were higher than any animal but lower than the human being. They consisted of physical body, ether body and astral body. Then the I was added, and this creates the higher parts out of itself, so that essential human nature will be sevenfold.

The evolution of physical body, ether body and astral body continued through long periods of time. They thus made themselves ripe to receive I-awareness into themselves. Today, we'll consider the tendencies of the three lower bodies and the way in which they developed. The human being gradually became more and more able to gain self-awareness. This is only possible with the power of egoism, self-seeking, which may be divine or devilish. We should judge these terms not merely by how we feel about them but according to their true essence. Independence made it necessary for human beings to grow egoistical.

Developing egoism brought with it the form of—apparent—loss of conscious awareness we call death in our present human life. Death developed to the same degree as self-seeking evolved. In the very beginning human beings did not die. They were like a part that dried up and would then grow again, more or less the way a finger nail may drop off and grow again. Our present-day way of dying and being reborn came into existence so that we may have the potential for our present I-awareness. Egoism and death are two sides of the same thing. The higher aspect of human nature is such that it overcomes egoism, works to rise to the level of the divine and thus overcomes death. The more the individual develops the higher part in himself, the more does he develop awareness of his immortality. The moment someone has become egoistical, he has also become an individual person. Animals are not persons and that is because they have their I as a group soul that does not descend from the astral plane. The individual personality lets the three bodies—physical body, ether body and astral body—be shone through by the I. This may of course be in an unclear, shadowy way, and in that case the individual concerned is weak in his personal identity.

This is clearly apparent to a clairvoyant. He sees a colourful aura around the individual which exactly reflects his moods, passions, feelings and sensations in currents and clouds of colour. If we were to go back to the time when the three bodies were only just ready to receive the human I, we would see an aura also for this creature which was not yet wholly human. This would, however, lack the yellow currents that reflect man's higher nature. Powerful personalities have an aura with powerful yellow radiation. Now you may be a powerful personality but not active; you feel things strongly inside but not be a man or woman of action. The aura will also show a lot of yellow. But if you are a woman or man of action, and your personality is actively influencing the world, the yellow will gradually change into a radiant red. An aura showing red radiance is the aura of someone who is active; but it must be radiant.

There is, however, a pitfall for personalities that want to be active. This is ambition, vanity. Strong natures are particularly prone to this. A clairvoyant sees it in their auras. Without ambition the yellow changes directly into red. If the individual is ambitious, the aura will contain a lot of orange. This pitfall must be avoided if the action is to be objective.

Weak personalities are more interested in being given things than in giving themselves and doing something. You will then see mainly blues, and if they are particularly indolent you see indigo. This is more an inner indolence than an outer one.

So you see how a strong or weak personality is reflected in the aura. People should overcome the personal element more and more and let the higher principle be active. This is why you hear such a lot about overcoming personal concerns and egoism. But this brings us to our main point. It is a question of whether we overcome the personal with the impersonal or the more-than-personal.

What does it mean, to overcome oneself with the impersonal? It means to weaken and force back the individual's powerful energies. That would mean being impersonal. More-than-personal would in some respect be the exact opposite of this. It would mean increasing the individual's energies, bringing out the powerful energies which a person has.

We find the I in the soul, and within it first of all the element of courage, but secondly also the soul's desirous and demanding qualities. Basically everything in the inner life goes back to these two things. And things receive different treatment there. This is due to the following. Human beings do not make enough of an effort to be open to higher things. They will develop, but it will be the lower principle which develops, with elements of courage and qualities of desire developing in a crude way. If they were simply to reduce this side of things, we'd have a civilization of the impersonal. Activity, which makes human beings human as they go out to be among others and do whatever they are capable of, will in a way always bring such individuals in collision with others. And they must experience collisions if they feel they are called on to do something.

We can also kill off our desires. This will make the personality colourless, however. Yet there's something else we can do, and that is to ennoble them. We need not reduce their strength. We can direct them towards higher objects. The personality need lose nothing of its strength then, though it will grow more noble and divine. We need not kill off desires, only transform them into finer and more noble desires. They can then come into their own with the same vehemence. An example. Think of a honky-tonk entertainment. Someone who does not go to it need not be an ascetic. He has merely transformed his lower desires into higher ones and so a honky-tonk would simply bore him.

This is an area where theosophy has been most misunderstood by theosophists. There can be no question of killing off the personal element. It needs to be helped to move up to something higher. Everything theosophy is able to give us will be needed for this. It is thus above all a matter of arousing interest in higher things. This does happen. People need not deaden their feelings for this, but direct them towards the higher, divine process of evolution, to the great realities in this world. If we direct our feelings towards these we will lose interest in the brutal side of life, yet our feelings will not be deadened but will grow rich, and the whole of our human nature will catch fire. If someone is fond of some nice roast pork, it is not a matter of getting rid of this feeling for roast pork but of transforming it. Our aim should be to metamorphose our feelings. The feelings which one individual has for the symphony of a meal are applied to a real symphony by another. If you preach overcoming desires and activity, you are preaching something impersonal. But if you show people the way in which they can direct their desires to things of the spirit, you point them towards things that are more than personal. And this more-than-personal must be the goal of the theosophical movement.

The science of the spirit is not intended to produce stay-at-homes and eccentrics but people who are active, going out into the world. How do we reach the more-than-personal, however? Not by eating into the personal, but by perceiving what is true, great and all-embracing. This is why it is not for nothing that we cultivate an eye for the great scheme of things in theosophy. This helps us to grow beyond trivial things and take things not in an impersonal way but in one that goes beyond being personal.

There is an area where we have a crossover experiment,¹³⁷ as it were, to establish the difference between personal, impersonal and more-than-personal. When it comes to love, you may easily think that the feelings which someone has for someone else are impersonal. But this may be a long way off from anything more-than-personal. People fall into a strange illusion here. They confuse self love with love for someone else. Most people think they love someone else but are in fact loving themselves in the other person. Giving oneself up to someone else is merely something to satisfy our own egoism. The individual concerned is not aware of this, but basically it is just a roundabout way of satisfying one's egoism.

We do not exist in isolation but are part of a whole. A finger is lovingly part of the hand and the organism. It would die if it weren't. In the same way a person could never exist without the rest of humanity. The result of this is that people like people.

Love sometimes simply comes from poverty of soul, and poverty of soul always comes from powerful egoism. If someone says he can't live without another person, his own personality is impoverished, and he is looking for something that will make him more complete. He dresses it all up by saying: I am getting impersonal; I love the other person.

The most beautiful and selfless love shows itself when one does not need the other person and can also do without him. The individual's then loving someone not for his own sake but for the sake of that other person. This does of course mean one has to be able to discern the true value of someone, which can only be done by entering deeply into the world. The more of a theosophist you are, the more you will learn to enter into the inner essence of another individual. And you'll then be all the more sensitive of his value and not love him for egoistical reasons. If you go through the world like this, you'll also see that some people have one kind of egoism, and others another, each living according to the value of his egoism.

What is needed is higher development of the personality. Impersonal love based on weakness will always also involve suffering. Love that is more-than-personal bases on strength and perception of the other person. It can be a source of joy and satisfaction. Swinging to and fro between all kinds of different moods in one's love is always a sign that this love is masked egoism and comes from an impoverished personality. This is how we can best see the difference between impersonal and more-than-personal—by looking at love.

Someone to whom the science of the spirit has not given a foundation in his life has failed to understand it, for it is a source of inner satisfaction in life for the future. If materialism were to continue to gain the upper hand, and with it also egoism, which is part of it, humanity would fall more and more into the pessimism which represents the burned-out ashes of burned-out minds. If humanity takes up the science of the spirit, true cheerfulness will be restored to it, and this is at the same time also the source of health. Disharmony ultimately comes from egoism, and the higher human being spreads a cheerful, happy mood. The more the higher, the divine comes into its own, the more will human beings be in harmony. We should think more about how we can help the whole of humanity than about how the science of the spirit may help us in particular. We will find it easier and easier to discover the source of genuine cheerfulness and joy, youth eternal, the more we make ourselves familiar with the ethics of the more-than-personal.

Negation is definitely not the aim with theosophy, but rather affirmation. The impersonal signifies negation, the more-than-personal affirmation, weak though it may still be. This also shows us the mission which the science of the spirit is given out of the essential nature of humanity. 'You'll know it by its fruits,' by the way it makes people fit and effective in life, with faces that reflect inner harmony. The spirit never shows itself in a woebegone face. Even the pain someone has to go through is transformed in the thinker's face and appears in a more noble form; the expression of pain has been purified in the harmonious face of a thinker. A woebegone face indicates that egoism has not yet been overcome. The science of the spirit encourages us to turn to the world around us without losing ourselves in that world. It takes us beyond the personal, not by destroying the personality, making it impersonal, but by enhancing it so that it will be more than personal.

• 132. Concerning this record of the lecture on 12 June 1907, based on poor-quality notes, see Rudolf Steiner's essay 'Der Kongress der Federation europäischer Sektionen der Theosophischen Gesellschaft in München' in Luzifer-Gnosis (GA 34), S. 590 ft".
• 133. Fourth Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, 18-21 May 1907 in Munich. See Steiner R. Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography (GA 28), ch. 28; . Tr. R. Stebbing. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977; Occult Seals and Columns. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1924.
• 134. Zur Farbenlehre, Didaktischer Teil. Sechste Abteilung. Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe, 796.
• 135. Das heilige Drama von Eleusis, reconstructed by Edouard Schuré, translated from the French by Marie von Sivers, cast in free rhythms by Rudolf Steiner. The premiere was given on 19 May 1907, at the Munich Congress.
• 136. E.D.N. -1. C. M. - P. S. S. R. as the initial letters of the Rosicrucian words Ex deo nascimur. In Christo morimur. Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
• 137. Testing two cross-over qualities that are inseparably bound up with one another. Either both are present or neither, so that one needs only search for one of them. The method goes back to Francis Bacon.

This single lecture is the 7th of 21 lectures in the lecture series entitled, The Original Impulse of Spiritual Science, published in German as, Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft.

We shall speak today about Karma and details of the law of Karma. You know that by Karma is meant the great law of cause and effect in the spiritual life and that this law of Karma comes into consideration in Spiritual Science since it applies to repeated lives on Earth. We speak of the interrelationship of Reincarnation and Karma. Now as you certainly know, the prevailing conception of this law of Karma is somewhat superficial, as if it were simply a matter of reward and punishment extending from one incarnation into the other, so that when the individual experiences something evil or reprehensible in the present life he must say to himself unconditionally: Because of some guilt incurred in my previous life, I have deserved this—or, if I do this or that, the corresponding reward or punishment will be mine in the next life—but the matter is not as simple as that. Whosoever desires to understand this law of Karma must penetrate more deeply into the nature of man and his whole being.

The law of Karma and Reincarnation, of repeated lives on Earth, comes in for the fiercest possible attacks from the opponents of Spiritual Science, attacks often beginning with the hackneyed phrase: One life on Earth is enough for me. I have no wish to endure it more than once—and finishing with the assertion that it is a teaching which leads to inactivity and blind resignation in face of destiny. We shall go closely into this opposition and be able in the case of every objection to refute it when we study the whole course of Karma. For this purpose, we must remind ourselves once again of what Man is in the deeper sense.

We know that man consists, primarily, of the physical body that can be seen by the eyes and touched by the hands, that is investigated and examined by physical science, dissected by anatomy and is familiar in ordinary life. Many materialistic thinkers regard the physical body as being the only evidence of the existence of man. We have then to regard the etheric body, or life-body, as a second member of the human being. It is a body which consists of a substance essentially different from that of the physical body. It is by no means enough to say that the matter, the substance, of which the etheric body consists is essentially finer than the substance of which the physical body is composed. Far rather we have here a completely different ‘substantiality’. It is active matter, matter of the nature of force. This etheric matter which has no connection whatever with what is called ether in Physics, has a certain creative quality and is actually the upbuilding, constructive principle. The best mental picture you can make of the etheric body is that its form is approximately the same as that of the physical body, but it is luminous throughout, although not fully transparent—even for clairvoyants. It is also penetrable; if it were alone one could therefore pass through it. At the same time, it is creative; man's physical organs are built of it. Heart, lung, liver and so forth are created out of this etheric body. From the materialistic standpoint it could therefore be said that in a young child the etheric body must be very small. And that is so. We must think of the etheric body more as a force which in certain circumstances may occupy a smaller space than what it actually creates. Thus, we have here to do with creative life, with a creative body which underlies the physical body that can be touched in space. This etheric body is the bearer of a man's habits. Above all it is the bearer of the memory and the temperament, of the permanent qualities of soul in a human being. In speaking of the soul-nature of a human being we do not mean only the temperament and the qualities of character. But in respect of form all this comes to expression in the etheric body.

The third member of man's being is the astral body. It fills and surrounds his body as an aura of light in which the impulses, desires and passions become visible. This has often been described.

A fourth member of man's being is what comes into manifestation in self-consciousness, in the ‘I.’ The other members are germinal only and are centred in the ‘I.’

In connection with karmic evolution it is these members of man's being that are of primary interest to us. Above all we must be mindful of a very important fact of life. When you look back over your life and think of your childhood, you will be able to say that you have learnt a very great deal. There was a time when you could not write or read and knew nothing about happenings in the world, about history or literature as well as a great deal else. Now you have knowledge of all this, and it has become a possession of your soul. But you also know that a person can learn a great deal and yet no great change takes place in his original character and temperament. There are individuals who in the course of their lives have amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge and have filled their souls with science of every kind, but who must admit to themselves: I once had a violent temper and still have it today—Or again: I was phlegmatic from the beginning and have remained so. Once upon a time I had this or that habit and still have it. Admittedly there are also individuals who have changed a great deal in their own natures and characters. Perhaps indeed there is no individual who has brought about no change whatever in his fundamental disposition. When you look back to your childhood you will certainly have to admit that you have achieved many changes in your character since then. But at the same time, you will realise that realisation of your characteristics and learning how to change them are processes related to each other as the minute hand of a clock and the hour hand. The transformation of character and temperament proceeds slowly, as does the hour hand of a clock and observations of life are comparatively rapid, rather like the minute hand. This is connected with the fact that everything an individual learns can be received quickly into the soul; the astral body is its bearer and it takes effect in the astral body. When you learn something fundamentally new a feeling comes over you at the moment and is forgotten the next day. Or if you experience pain that with time disappears from your consciousness—these are things which can be seen lighting up in the astral body and then disappearing from it. The astral body is the bearer of all this.

Whatever lights up in us temporarily and disappears again has its seat in the astral body. What becomes a man's permanent stock, as it were, in so far as it comes to expression in the life of soul, everything that becomes habit so that it is noticeable in an individual for a long time—perhaps always—in his life, everything that has to do with the temperament, is situated in the etheric body which is denser than the astral body. When an individual succeeds in changing a habit, a characteristic feature of his temperament, when, for example, he rids himself of habitual indolence and becomes alert and attentive, this becomes evident in the etheric body, not only in the astral body. When a person learns a great deal, assimilating it so thoroughly that it gradually becomes an asset of his very soul and an actual constituent of his inner nature—so that he does not only know it but possesses it in a deeper sense—then he is changing the configuration of his etheric body. When someone accepts a moral principle and is obliged to say to himself repeatedly: the principle exists so that is why I obey it—then the principle is rooted in the astral body only. But if the principle is rooted so firmly in him that he simply can do no other than obey it—then it is established in the etheric body. Transition from the astral body to the etheric body takes place slowly and gradually in the course of life.

We will now pass from a study of these members of man's constitution to their connection with Karma. What takes place during the same life on Earth only slowly, that is to say the transition of something that to begin with is in the astral body into the etheric body manifests karmically from one incarnation to the other in the following way.—Someone who has tried to judge things in accordance with true morality, and who in this striving may perhaps still have been prompted by other considerations, finds the fruits of this striving in his next life as a basic quality of his etheric body, as a kind of habit, as a quality of his character. What is active in the present life in the astral body becomes in the next life an attribute of the etheric body. When you come across a person with a certain praiseworthy habit which is constantly expressed in his life, this, is an indication that in his earlier incarnation he had absorbed the corresponding ideas or closely scrutinised his own nature. Propensities and habits stem from ideas, thoughts and concepts that had been formed in previous lives. If you pay attention to this, you can make provision for the next incarnation by laying the foundation of a definite organisation of the etheric body. You can say to yourself: I shall try in this life to convince myself over and over again that this or that is good and right. Then the etheric body will ultimately show you that it is good and right in the very nature of things to follow the corresponding principles.

A certain concept that can be explained in the light of karma, is particularly important here. It is the concept of conscience. What arises from a man's conscience is equally something that has been acquired. He has a conscience, an instinct for what is good, right and true only because in his past lives, in his experiences during life, in his moral principles, he has moulded this conscience. You can provide for the strengthening and enhancement of conscience if you undertake every day to deepen your moral conceptions. Moral conceptions become conscience in the next life and the one after that.

So you see, that what the minute hand on the clock of life shows us becomes the hour hand in the next life. There must, however, be a certain strengthening of the moral principle and its realisation in one life and then they are consolidated for the next. What is established in the etheric body of one life brings to maturity the attributes of the physical body of the next life. Good habits, good inclinations, good traits of character, prepare healthiness, physical proficiency, physical strength, therefore a healthy physical body, for the next life. A healthy physical body in one life indicates that the individual concerned prepared this physical body for himself in an earlier life through self-acquired habits and qualities of character. A particularly strong connection exists between a well-developed memory in one life and the physical body in the next life.

Let us take as an example a person who forgets everything immediately and another who has a faithful memory. One need only consciously recall experiences into the memory and practise this consistently, and it will finally be noticed that not only has a good memory of things for which one has had specific training been acquired, but that this memory also becomes a quite different faculty which comes into consideration during the process of spiritual development. The capacity to survey the past develops to a very marked degree. An individual who develops his memory conscientiously will be reborn with physical soundness, with limbs that can be truly useful to him for giving effect to what his soul inwardly desires. A body that is incapable of giving effect to what the soul wishes stems from a previous life during which no care was given to the development of a good and healthy memory but when, through slovenliness, forgetfulness prevailed.

Today we are speaking only of single phenomena, but you can realise the magnitude of the domain of which we are speaking. A genuine occultist will never indulge in speculations on this subject. What I have put before you are not theories but definite cases that have been tested. What has been said here is based upon specific results of research. When it was stated that a sound physical organism which obeys the soul can be traced back to a good memory in the previous life, a number of cases had been investigated and the indications given were based upon the facts ascertained by that investigation. Facts alone have been presented.

Now what develops in the etheric body passes in the next life into the physical body. Good inclinations, qualities of character, and proficient habits in life come to expression in a healthy physical body in the next incarnation, whereas the opposite qualities produce a sickly organism in the next life. This is not to be understood in the sense that a particular disease stems from a particular quality, but certain predispositions for illness can always be led back to quite definite qualities of character and temperament in the previous life. An individual whose life in the past was fraught with tainted qualities of character has, in the present life, an organism that is more easily prone to physical illnesses than the organism of an individual who was equipped with healthy characteristics and a sound temperament. Such an individual will be reborn with a body that can be exposed to every possible form of epidemic without being infected.

You see, therefore, that things in the world are complicated and are subject to the law of cause and effect. To give an example, here is a case based on definite results of investigation. It may at first be something of a shock but in a study group it may certainly be spoken of. A certain individual had developed an entirely egoistic urge for acquisition, a veritable greed for external wealth. It was not a matter of a healthy striving for riches which may spring from an altruistic aim to be of help and engage in selfless activity in the world—that is something different—but it was a case of an egoistic longing for acquisition due to a particular constitution of the etheric body; the striving for acquisition was abnormal. Such an individual may very possibly be born in the next life with a physical body prone to catch infectious diseases. In numerous cases it has been established by occultism that individuals readily prone to infection from epidemics in the present life, were possessed of a pathological sense for acquisitions in the previous life.

Other examples could be specifically quoted. Thus, there are two characteristics which have a clearly recognisable influence upon the karmic formation of the following life. There we must speak to begin with of the strong influence exerted by a loving, benevolent attitude towards one's fellow men. There are individuals who accept everything from their fellowmen with benevolence, who deal with their environment lovingly and sympathetically. In many cases this love extends far beyond pure philanthropy. Such individuals love nature and the whole world. The more strongly this sense of all-embracing love has developed and become habit in the soul and is therefore rooted in the etheric body, the greater becomes the capacity of the individual concerned to retain the qualities of youth for a long time in a subsequent incarnation. Therefore an individual who ages very late in life, who remains youthful and mobile, has behind him an earlier life—or maybe several lives—during which he had a true love of his environment. The more strongly he expresses love for his environment, the longer he remains physically youthful in a following incarnation. An individual prone to show antipathy towards his fellowmen, ages early in the next life. A body that shows the signs of age at a physically early age, stems from the life of a perverse critic, from a life of aversion and ill-will. Thus, we see that life can be influenced by a conscious intervention in Karma. A person capable of love in the present life can rest assured that in the next life he will have a body that reveals all the traits of youth. Individuals who become harsh critics at an early age will in the next life be people who are almost born with wrinkles! That is a radical expression, but it is based upon truth.

Thus, the laws of Karma reveal the connection between health and the spiritual life. Everybody will agree that this connection cannot be immediately obvious but that individual details must doubted that a genuinely moral, sincere, conscientious soul is the future creator of a healthy body. But actual knowledge of this cannot be expected from one day to the next, nor can it be believed that a person afflicted with flaws of soul can be healed overnight. It should also be realised that one must rise above egoism and adopt a selfless mode of life that does not want to garner the fruits of its deeds immediately. What becomes habit, however, can react upon the physical body already in the present life. A proof of this is afforded by occult development which can acquire conscious influence not only upon the astral body but also upon the etheric body. An individual who achieves occult development learns how to influence not only his astral body but also his etheric body and his physical body. Through the transformation of habitual behaviour, a violent, choleric individual can become a gentle character, a highly emotional human being an equable, harmonious person. An occultist must change his habits in a comparatively short time. Genuine development pre-supposes that what a man learns does not remain mere teaching but penetrates into the etheric body. In an occultist it penetrates even into the physical body. He learns to control the heartbeat, the pulse beat and the breathing. A process that in ordinary life is distributed over many incarnations is therefore shortened. The process of Karma itself is shortened in the case of an occultist.

Much that will be discussed this Winter will become more intelligible to us when we learn of certain more intimate karmic connections, for example the difference between the karma of a beautiful and an ugly human being. What is the karma of a beautiful human being? Something comes into consideration there that at first seems incredible, nevertheless it is a fact. Beauty of the physical body is in many cases, not always but very often, a consequence of suffering endured in the preceding life. Suffering in the preceding life—physical and also soul-suffering—becomes beauty in a subsequent life, beauty of the external physical body. In these cases, it is permissible to use an analogy which I have often applied. How does the beautiful pearl in a pearl-oyster originate? Actually, as the result of an illness. Approximately speaking, therefore, there is a karmic process which represents the connection of illness, of suffering, with beauty. This beauty is often bought at the cost of suffering and illness.

Wisdom too is in many respects bought at the cost of pain. It is not without interest that a. certain example of outer investigation today confirms in many ways what occultists have said for thousands of years, namely, that wisdom is connected with pain and sufferings, with a life of earnestness and renunciation in the previous existence. It is sometimes very rewarding to consult ordinary scientific investigation. A book on the effects of thinking has recently been published. Its aim is to show how in the physiognomy of a human being there is engraved the quality and trend of his thinking. The author of the book who clearly does not know much about occultism has nevertheless discovered through outer observation that an impression of pain once endured can be recognised in the physiognomy of a thinker. Modern science is on the point of confirming ancient occult wisdom little by little. In the coming years this will be the case far more often than any learned scholar dreams of.

It will now be still easier for you to realise that one cannot give way to blind belief or submission to authority in connection with certain revelations of the history of spiritual life. Faced with the problem of understanding Karmic law in the case of a phenomenon such as Schopenhauer, whose whole world-conception was filled with a mood of pessimism, nobody possessed of deeper insight must believe that this pessimism represents the fundamental attitude of humanity in general. It is far rather the individual trait of Schopenhauer's soul, karmically forecast and brought about by a certain constitution of his etheric body. This pessimistic mood of his thinking can only be understood by examining the karmic aspect. In an earlier life—and this is an absolutely real explanation—a personality of this nature had had no opportunity of doing much good. Because of his position in life and vocation this man had been obliged to commit much evil and injustice. And this evil and injustice which he was fated—not by karma but by his vocation—to bring about, returned to him in the form of a certain feeling of antipathy towards the world he now encountered. This antipathy was the recapitulation of his own deeds. If you want to understand karma you should not adopt the fatalistic standpoint that everything is predestined. A man need not be condemned by his previous lives to carry out his present deeds. Adjustment is often made in the next life. Thus, deeds are not always the fruits of an earlier life but in certain cases find their adjustment in a future speaking of the cause of the pessimistic mood in Schopenhauer.

We must strictly differentiate between everything a man accomplishes as his own individual deeds, deeds which proceed entirely from himself, and those made obligatory by his race, family and profession. Two Councillors may do the same thing because they happen to be Councillors but that too is exempted. They may however also perform utterly different deeds because they are different human beings. And that is what we are considering now. Deeds that stem from a man's personality—that is what meets him as his outer destiny in the next incarnation. If some individual finds himself in fortunate circumstances of life, if he enjoys a favourable destiny, this leads back to the just, ingenious and good deeds of an earlier life. If a man's circumstances in life are unfavourable, if he has many failures and is surrounded by adverse conditions—external circumstances are meant, not the qualities of the physical body—this equally leads back to personal deeds of the previous life. What an individual has accomplished as the result of his vocation and family circumstances is stored in his temperament and character. Thus, the destiny of a man is determined by his personal deeds in the preceding life. Vice versa, through good, intelligent and righteous deeds, he can bring about a favourable or unfavourable destiny in the next incarnation.

An individual who comes into contact with particular personalities has himself created the conditions for this in a preceding life. He had had something to do with these individuals and has himself now led them into his environment. Here is an example from the time of the Vehmic tribunals.¹ One such tribunal was concerned with an execution. The victim was placed before masked judges who immediately gave effect to the judgment. This is a case where a man was condemned and executed. Occult investigation of his destiny in the earlier incarnations brought to light the fact that the individual who had been executed by the five judges had, at the time, when he was a chieftain, allowed these five persons to be murdered. His deed in days gone by had brought these five individuals as it were with magnetic force again into his life and they wreaked their vengeance upon him. This is a radical case, but it is founded upon universal law. You cannot come into contact with an individual who makes an impact upon your life if you have not yourself brought him into your orbit on the basis of earlier relationships. It may, of course, also he the case that through general conditions, through his vocation or family a man is led into contact with individuals he had never yet encountered. But then, through their mutual behaviour, the foundation is laid for a meeting in the next incarnation, a meeting connected with the destinies and lives of the individuals concerned. You will realise that these illustrations of Karma are in many respects complicated and by no means so easy to explain. It is important to study these examples individually because only so can we really understand life.

It must again and again be stressed that the idea of Karma, rightly understood and to be found in Christianity, must never be thought to contradict the teaching of the Redemption. To many of you I have already spoken of the compatibility of the Christian teaching of the Redemption with the idea of Karma, but there are new listeners here. Many misunderstandings are to be found, due very often to the fact that numbers of people talk about Theosophy without much understanding. It is stated that Karma means simply that a man must take upon himself all the effects of his deeds. If he has committed some offence, he alone can redeem himself from his sin. From this point of view many Theosophists declare that the thought of the Redemption through Christ Jesus is unfounded, that Theosophy could not accept the idea of Redemption through another being, for every man must redeem himself. Christian Theologians dispute this, saying: we believe in the Redemption through Christ Jesus, but you believe in self-redemption. This is irreconceivable.²

Meanwhile, Karma is a kind of life account that can quite rightly be compared with a salesman's accounts. On the one side there are the debit entries and on the other the credit entries. They are added and the balance struck. It would be a peculiar salesman who said: I will do no more business in order that my balance shall not be upset.—Just as in every moment of a salesman's life a new transaction can be made, so at every moment through a new deed, new karma can be created. When somebody says: A man has himself brought about his suffering, he has deserved it, so I may not help him—this is so much nonsense. It is just as if one thousand marks would help you, but if I were to give them to you, I should upset your account book.—That would certainly not be the case! The sum of money lent would simply be entered in the account book. It is the same with life. Compensation must be made but it need not necessarily be made by oneself. Karma does not signify self-compensation but only that compensation shall be made through a deed. Now suppose you are a wealthy, powerful person who can help not only one but two. Then you can intervene in the Karma of two human beings. Just because Karma exists you can intervene in the life accounts of both these two people. There are individuals who can help three, four, five people—indeed even hundreds. Such individuals will not say: I must not help those others because then I shall intervene in their Karma.—Far rather, they will help them.

Such help can be vouchsafed by a most mighty Being who once appeared in the world co those who account themselves His followers. This Being is Christ Jesus. The fact that the Redemption was brought about by a certain form of evil, does not contravene the law of Karma. The Redemption through Christ Jesus is perfectly compatible with the law of Karma, just as is the help given by the wealthy man to the bankrupt salesman. The misunderstandings arise from the fact that Theosophists do not basically understand Karma and Theologians have not bothered about it. It is precisely through the intrinsic nature and importance of the deed of a single sublime Being that the validity of the law of Karma is guaranteed. When, in the future, these things are rightly understood, it will become evident for the first time that Theosophy is not an opponent of any confession that has a genuine foundation and how it leads far rather to a true understanding of it. If you have discerned the law of Karma in a certain number of cases, you will feel that you have here perceived a deep necessity of spiritual life. Truth to tell, the law of Karma has been rightly understood only by one to whom it is not merely a piece of theoretic knowledge but has become part of his whole world of feeling and perception. Inner security and harmony then pervade the whole of life. And those people who again and again assert that the law of Karma leads to inactivity and lethargy, that it causes a person to abandon himself to his destiny and does not lead to freedom in life—such people have not made any endeavour to live in harmony with the law of Karma. To live in accordance with the law of Karma means to infuse courage and hope into the soul.

The law of Karma must above all throw light upon our future. We must think less about the past than about the future. It has been indicated in many ways that in compliance with the law of Karma a man can produce effects far into the future by preparing in his astral body the future configuration of the etheric body and in the course of further progress the future formation of the physical body. When you have grasped the implications of this you will realise the tremendous importance of these connections and what a deepening the idea of education, especially of that of peoples, will experience in the light of the law of Karma. If efforts are made today to induce human beings to live in conformity with the law of Karma and to prepare the configuration of their future accordingly, they are at the same time preparing the future communities of peoples. After all, life in the future will consist of the reincarnated human beings of the present. Healthy races and especially healthy leaders of the future races will come into existence if human beings live on into the future intelligently, in accordance with the law of Karma. For if the single individual achieves perfection in some degree, he has an effect upon the organisms of the peoples and of races.

The actual mechanism of Karma is a matter for early discussion. The question is concerned with which forces are being activated when the astral characteristics of the present life are transmitted to the etheric body in the next life and which forces bring it about that the qualities established in the etheric body of the present life—habits and inclinations—are carried over into the physical predisposition of the next life. It is still more difficult to answer the following question: Which forces are at work in cases where a man's deeds in the present life determine his external environment in the next incarnation when he not only gathers around him the individuals with whom he has and previously had, something to do, but also takes his place within the world of Nature that surrounds him, in the plant world and animal world, also in the conditions of the race and society which he himself has prepared? What is the character of these forces which bring all this again to the individual concerned? How does it come about that two human beings who had some connection with each other in an earlier life and of whom one is reborn in America and the other in Europe are nevertheless led together? Such are the great questions which we will endeavour to answer next time. Briefly, how do the relationships of the one life form the relationships of the next? As we shall have many guests, this question will also be suitable for study at the general Meeting. Naturally, those who have been present at this series of lectures will be at an advantage. The title of the next lecture will be: The Technique of Karma.

Thus, consideration of an important question in life will have been dealt with today and next time. I ask you to bear in mind that what has been said consisted of selected cases, based upon actual occult facts. Everything that has been disclosed today on the subject of karmic connections leads back to actual investigation of the Karma of specific individuals. The study of Karma also gives us knowledge of how to evaluate, even in the present life, the connection between illness and specific characteristics, of the life of soul, especially the awakening of certain forces of the soul. So far those who have assimilated the lectures on Karma given here, what is said in general outline in the Architektenhaus lectures about illness and death, suffering and evil, will have been amplified in greater detail. During this Winter special consideration will be given here and elsewhere to the place of the spiritual—scientific view of the world in practical life. In this way we shall strengthen the impulse and the insight ensuring that Spiritual Science is not presented as something impractical but that it is a factor in practical life itself.

• 1. A German system of irregular Tribunal prevailing in Westphalia in the 14th and 15th centuries. More serious crimes were tried in secret night sessions.
• 2. Perhaps intended to be inconceivable, or irreconcilable. The original German text is “Das vereinigt sich nicht recht.”

Today I should like to indicate the extent to which religious systems reveal, in specific instances, their hidden spiritual-scientific foundations.

It is a small but important aspect of the occult scientific basis of religions that I wish to discuss. Even the simplest people in contemporary society recognize this hidden background of religions as a spiritual fact involving the deepest truths. Seeking these truths brings to light how wisdom-filled and fraught with mystery are the ties binding together the spiritual life of mankind.

Think of Christian prayer. You all know what it is. It has often been spoken of, and anthroposophists have often reflected upon its relation to the spiritual-scientific world view. This spiritual-scientific world conception has brought to members of the anthroposophic movement another method of elevating the human being—the human soul—to contact with the divine, spiritual, cosmic forces. This method is meditation, by which a person experiences the spiritual content within himself, and receives something of what is given by the great guiding spirits of humanity or by the spiritual content of great civilizations in which the human being immerses himself and so identifies himself with the divine spiritual currents in the world.

Meditating in even the simplest way upon one of the formulas pronounced by the spiritual leaders of mankind, admitting to the mind a formula that embodies a great thought—not every thought is suitable, as you know, but only one handed down for this purpose by the guiding spirits of humanity—and letting such a formula really live in the heart and experience, brings a person to union with the higher spirituality. A higher power, in which he lives, streams through him, and patient perseverance to the point of letting this flow of power strengthen him enough morally and intellectually, brings him to the moment when the content of his meditation can awaken the deeper forces latent in the human soul. This kind of meditation may reach any of a number of stages, from the smallest gain in moral strength to the highest attainments of clairvoyance. But time, patience and energy are needed to bring most people to the higher degrees of clairvoyance by this means.

Meditation is usually thought of as an oriental approach to the divine. In the Occident, especially in Christian communities, prayer has taken its place. It is by prayer that the Christian customarily approaches the Divine, and through it he seeks entry to the higher worlds.

It should be noted by the way that what passes for prayer today would by no means have been considered such in early Christian times, least of all by the Founder of Christianity, Christ Jesus Himself. For if it were to happen that someone were really to gain the gratification of his personal wishes by prayer or entreaty, he would soon entirely disregard the all-embracing effect that the granting of the prayer should bring. He would assume that the Deity granted his wishes rather than those of others. One peasant might pray for sunshine for a particular crop; another for rain for another crop. What would Divine Providence then do?

Or suppose two opposing armies are facing each other, with each side praying for victory and supposing its cause alone to be just. Such an instance makes immediately obvious how little universality and sense of brotherhood attach to prayers arising out of personal wishes, and the granting of such prayers by God can satisfy only one group of supplicants. People so praying disregard the prayer in which Christ Jesus set forth the fundamental attitude of mind that should prevail in all prayer: “Father, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” This is the Christian attitude of prayer.

Whatever the object of the prayer, this fundamental temper of mind must echo readily as an undertone in the soul of the petitioner for his prayer to be given in a Christian manner. When this is the character of his plea, the form of his prayer will be but a means of rising to higher spiritual realms to experience the Divinity within the soul. It will be such, moreover, as to expel every selfish wish and will-impulse. Its spirit will be that of the words, “Not my will, but thine, be done.” The result will be a rising to the divine world and absorption in it. Attainment of this soul mood in Christian prayer renders it similar to meditation, though more colored by feeling. Originally, Christian prayer was not essentially different from meditation. Meditation is more imbued with thought, however. Through it, the thoughts of the great leaders of mankind draw the meditant onward toward harmony with the divine currents streaming through the world. Through feeling, prayer accomplishes the same result.

The goal of both prayer and meditation is thus clearly the soul's union with the divine currents in the world. This union, on the highest plane, is the so-called unio mystica, or mystical union, with the Godhead.

Never could the human being attain to this union with God, never could he gain a relationship with higher spiritual beings, were he himself not an emanation of the divine-spiritual. Man's nature is twofold, as we know. In him are the four oft-mentioned human principles—physical body, etheric or life-body, astral body and ego. Then, within the ego, he has the possibility of unfolding for the future the three higher principles—manas, buddhi and atma, known in our western languages as spirit self, life spirit and spirit man.¹

To understand rightly this twofold human nature, let us consider the period of man's origin. From previous lectures, you will remember that man now represents the blending of these two natures—the blending of the three higher potentials (spirit self, life spirit and spirit man) with the four existing lower principles (physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego) developed in a far-distant past, which we term the Lemurian epoch of the earth. Tracing man backward from the present epoch through the Greco-Latin, Egypto-Chaldean, Persian and Indian periods of mankind to the great Atlantean flood recorded in the deluge-myths of all nations, we reach those ancestors of ours who lived on the land-mass we call Atlantis, between present-day Europe and America. Still further back, we come to a primeval land-mass, which we call Lemuria, lying between Australia and India. It was in the middle of that Lemurian period that the higher triad of spirit self, life spirit and spirit man united with the four lower human principles—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego.

Correctly speaking, at that period in the Lemurian epoch, the highest being on earth was not yet a physical human being in our sense of the word. Only a kind of envelope existed, made up of the highest animal nature—a being, or collection of beings, made up of the four lower principles of human nature. But until then the higher human being, which is the internal part of human nature, destined to evolve further and further in the future through the three principles of spirit self, life spirit and spirit man, rested in the bosom of the Godhead.

To picture the scene at that time by a trivial modern comparison, it was as though all the people living on earth had been building bodies capable of receiving a human soul as a sponge absorbs water. Picture a vessel of water. It is impossible to tell where one drop of water ends and another begins. But picture also a number of little sponges immersed in the water, each soaking up a part of it. What had been a uniform mass of water is now distributed among the many little sponges. So it was with human souls in that remote age. Previously, they had been at rest, without individuality, in the bosom of the Divine First Cause, but at that particular moment they were absorbed by human bodies and so individualized, like the water by the sponges.

What was then absorbed by the separate bodies, or four lower principles, continued to evolve further, and will so continue into the future. In spiritual science it has always been called the higher triad, and the triangle and the square were made symbols, especially in the Pythagorean school, of the human being as he came into existence at the middle of the Lemurian epoch. The diagram on the next page thus represents the constituent elements of the human being,

But the higher, eternal portion, which passes through all incarnations, has a double character, as you can see, From one side it may be regarded as the primordial, eternal element of humanity and, from the other, as a drop of the Divine Essence given up by the Godhead and poured into the fourfold human vessel. As a result, a drop of the independently individualized Divinity is to be found in each of us human beings.

The three higher members of the human being—the eternal portion—may thus be looked upon as the three highest principles in man, but equally as three principles in the Godhead Itself. Actually, the three highest principles of human nature are at the same time the three lowest principles of the Divinity nearest to man. An enumeration of man's principles must start with the physical body, continue with the etheric body, astral body and ego, thence from spirit self to spirit man. But a corresponding enumeration of the principles of those Divine Beings who gave a drop of their own soul nature to man at the time of which we are speaking in the far-off past, must begin with spirit self, continue with life spirit and spirit man, and thence proceed to principles above spirit man, of which contemporary man can only conceive when he is a pupil of Initiates.

You see that the three principles of higher human nature may be looked upon as three divine principles, and today we shall so regard them, not as human, but as divine principles, describing them accordingly. The highest principle in us, which we shall only develop at the end of our earth incarnations, or, we may say, at the end of our present planetary course, is called spirit man in terms of spiritual or occult science. The original essence of this human principle is faintly comparable to the will element in present-day human nature. This comparison is not exact, but only a faint indication. Yet the fundamental character of this highest of the divine principles in us is of the nature of will—a kind of willing. This will element in us, today only feebly developed in our inner being, will become in the course of our ever ascending development the predominating principle in us.

Man is today essentially a consciousness, or understanding being, whereas in many ways his will is limited. He understands the surrounding world as a totality—that is, to a certain degree—but has no real control over all that he penetrates with his knowledge. This control by his will is a development of the future, and it will become ever stronger until he attains that central goal of existence known to spiritual science as “the great sacrifice,” signifying the power of will to sacrifice oneself completely, not merely in driblets of human sacrifice of the kind of which man is capable today with his puny present feelings and will power. In future time he will have developed the strength to sacrifice his whole being by letting it flow directly into material substance.

One may picture this “great sacrifice,” the highest expression of will in divine nature, by imagining oneself before a mirror in which one's image is reflected. This image is, of course, an illusion, a semblance. Now carry over this image to the point of imagining yourself dying, sacrificing your existence, your feeling and thought, your very being, to inject life into that image. Spiritual science in all ages has called this phenomenon the “outpouring,” “the emanation.” If you could really make this sacrifice, it would be clear that you would no longer be here because you would have given up your whole being to this reflected image to imbue it with life and consciousness.

When the will has become capable of making the “great sacrifice,” it actually creates a universe, great or small, whose mission is bestowed upon it by its creator. Such is the creative will in the Divine Being.

The second principle in the Godhead, life spirit, insofar as it has flowed into humanity, has already been indicated in the comparison that has been made with the mirror. This second principle is the reflected image itself.

Now imagine the inner being of a Divinity that has in this way created a universe, with itself as the center. If, for example, you imagine yourself as the central point in this room, surrounded not by these six surfaces of walls, ceiling and floor, but by a hollow globe that reflects its content, you will see yourself, as the central point, reflected on all sides, everywhere. In like manner you can picture a Divinity as a central will, reflected on all sides, and the mirror is both image of Divinity and the universe. For what is a universe? Nothing but a mirror of the essential nature of Divinity.

The universe lives and moves because the Divinity is poured into it—the “outpouring”—when Divinity makes the “great sacrifice” and is reflected in the universe. The pouring of life and being into a reflected image is an exact picture of this divine creative process.

The divine will expresses itself in infinite diversity, animating thereby the entire universe. In spiritual science, this process of Divinity repeating itself in infinite differentiation, in multiplicity, is known as “the kingdom,” distinguished from the will itself. The will is the central point; its reflection, the kingdom. The will is in this sense comparable with spirit man; the kingdom, or will's reflected image, with life spirit.

The kingdom, in turn, reproduces the being of the Divine in infinite variety. Observe it fully, at least to the extent to which it is our kingdom, our multiplicity, or universe. Observe its visible manifestations in minerals, plants, animals and human beings. The kingdom is manifested in each separate being of all these, a fact that even our language expresses in the terms “mineral kingdom,” “vegetable kingdom,” “animal kingdom” and all the great divisions of our universe. The kingdom is all these; each of these in turn, is a kingdom, and if we observe the mass of details involved, we find the nature of all to be divine. In all of them the divine being is reflected, just as the central being is reflected in a hollow globe.

So an observer, looking at the world in the sense of spiritual research, sees God reflected in every human being as an expression and image of the Divine. In a graded series of beings, in infinite diversity, the Godhead appears in the kingdom, and the separate entities are distinguished from one another in the sense of spiritual science by their names. An observer at a stage of existence sufficiently lofty to look upon all these separate entities as “emanations,” or “outpourings,” of the Divine is able to give these entities their names, to give each manifestation of the Divine its name.

Of all beings in the universe, only man thinks the name of each of the separate members of the great multiplicity of the kingdom, distinguishing each from all the others. The will, as we have noted is comparable with spirit man; the kingdom, or reflected image into which the will has been “outpoured,” is comparable with life spirit. The third of the three highest human principles that emanate from the Divine, by which the separate members of the great multiplicity of the kingdom are distinguished from one another and separately named, is comparable with spirit self. The occult science of the different religions has thus simply taught what it was that emanated from the Godhead and flowed into a person to become his eternal image or archetype.

Thus, if you could see yourselves in that condition to which you should finally rise—the condition of spirit man—you would recognize its will-like nature.

If you would rise in thought to a comprehension of the vehicle of will (spirit man)—in other words, to life spirit—you would see that it is the kingdom that represents it in the divine sphere.

If you would rise to penetrate what the names, or conceptions or ideas of things really signify in spirit, you would see that it is the name that represents this wisdom in the divine sphere.

So does ancient teaching reveal that the emanation of Divinity, which has flowed into human nature to form its eternal part, consists of name, of kingdom, of will. Thus what is called the higher triad in man is recognizable as part of the Divine.

To complete this picture, think of the four lower principles of perishable human nature. The three higher principles may be thought of, we know, as principles of the Godhead. Similarly, the four lower principles may be considered as of the perishable world, as human principles.

Think of the physical body, composed as it is of the same substances and Forces as is the seemingly lifeless world around it. The physical body could not go on existing without the inflow into it of matter and force from the surrounding world. The physical body, in a strict sense, is a continual thoroughfare for all that is in it. Into it and out of it again the substances continuously flow that are at one time of the outer world and at another time within us. In the course of seven years, as we have mentioned in other connections, the entire material composition of the human body is renewed. In none of you are the substances that were in you ten years ago. We are perpetually renewing the substances of our physical body. What was formerly in us is now somewhere else, distributed outside us in nature; something else has replaced it inside of us. The body's life depends upon this continual inflow and outflow of matter.

Just as we have considered the three higher human principles as parts of Divinity, we may observe the four principles of our lower nature as parts of Divine Nature.

The physical body may be seen as part of the physical substance of our planet. Its substance is taken from the material planet, then is returned to it. The etheric body likewise may be considered a part of the environment surrounding us here, and so also the astral body.

Think of the etheric body and the astral body together. The astral body, as you know, is the vehicle of all that lives in man as impulse, desire and passion, all that surges up and down in the soul as joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. The etheric body, on the contrary, is the vehicle that represents and bears within it the more lasting qualities of soul.

Often I have compared the development of the etheric body and astral body with the hour-hand and the minute-hand of a clock. A great difference is observable between what you knew and experienced as an eight-year-old child and what you now know and have experienced, as I have also reminded you on other occasions. You have learned so much, gained so many concepts, in the intervening period. Much that your soul has taken in of joy and sorrow has left it again, actually has passed through it. How different are these relatively ephemeral experiences from such human elements as temperament, character and tendencies that are persisting and continuing. You will find, for instance, that if you were passionately inclined as a child, you are probably still so in later years. Most people keep throughout their lives such basic elements in their natures. It is to overcome this relatively stationary quality of the etheric organism that spiritual training and development are instituted; for, as has often been emphasized, such training is no matter of mere theoretical knowledge. The student has accomplished a great deal, indeed, if he has changed one quality of temperament to which he is predisposed, so speeding up the hour-hand of the clock even a little.

Whatever evolves slowly in this way—a human being's lasting tendencies, enduring qualities of temperament, habits that persist—is rooted in the etheric body; whatever changes quickly by contrast, minute- hand-wise, has its roots in the astral body.

Applying these facts practically to the human being in his environment, to life in the external world, the observer notices a person's connections with the epoch in which he lives, with a nation, with a family, all of which are revealed in his habits, temperament and enduring inclinations. These relatively fixed and abiding qualities tend to be observable, not only in the person himself, but in all with whom he is in any way connected—his family, his nation, etc. A nation's separate individuals are recognizable through their common habits and temperament. An individual who is to achieve a higher spiritual development, to unfold his higher nature, must change his disposition and basic habits. Such a man is called “homeless” in the terminology of spiritual science, because he is obliged to change his etheric body, through which he has been, except for this higher development, connected with his nation.

Life in one's native community reveals, too, that the qualities linking one to a family or nation, stirring one to feel relationships with individual people of the nation, are similar also to qualities widely discernible in one's era. If an ancient Greek should walk into your life, you would have little in common with him. His etheric body would be so unlike yours. Human beings understand one another through common qualities in their etheric bodies.

In the astral body, however, is rooted a man's ability to lift himself more readily out of certain qualities binding him to a common life with others, and to establish himself as a separate individual in his family, in his folk, so that he is not a mere Frenchman nor a mere German nor a member of a family, but stands out as a special individuality within the folk, the family, etc. Thus he can outgrow the totality of characteristics of his nation. Those qualities that he transcends are rooted in the astral body. The astral body is their bearer. The astral body is thus seen to bear more of what is individual and personal in man.

So it is that faults committed through the etheric body render a man more a sinner toward his fellow men through neglect of those obligations and conditions making social life possible among them, between one man and the next. On the other hand, faults of a more individual nature, a man's wrong-doings as a separate personality, result from qualities in the astral body.

Spiritual science has always termed as “guilt” (German, “Schuld”) those sins that are against the community, and that originate in a faulty etheric body. The more common English word “debts” (“Schulden”) has in German an origin similar to the word “guilt,” with its more moral connotation in English, signifying what one man owes another in a moral sense. Debt, or guilt, derives from defective qualities in the etheric body, whereas a defective element in the astral body leads to what spiritual science associates with the word “temptation.” The man yielding to temptation takes upon himself a personal fault, or failure.

The ego, or true personality, too, can commit faults. The Paradise story indicates the kind of fault through which an ego may fall. The human being's higher soul became an ego when it descended from the bosom of the Godhead and entered an earthly body for the first time. It was taken up by the earthly body like a drop of water by a sponge.

The higher soul, or individuality, can commit faults within the ego. These ego-failures, which are different from those stemming from faulty qualities of the etheric and astral bodies, occur through the very fact of a man's attaining independence. To rise gradually, in full consciousness, to freedom and independence, man had to pass through selfishness and egotism. As a soul, he is descended from the Godhead, which is incapable of egotism. A member of an organism never imagines itself independent; if a finger were to imagine itself independent, it would fall away from the rest of the hand and wither.

The self-dependence that is so necessary to human development, and that will attain its full meaning when its fundamental nature is unselfishness, could originate only from selfishness.

It was when this selfishness entered the human body that man became a self-seeking, egotistic being. The ego naturally follows the body's inclinations. Man devours his fellow man, follows selfish impulses and desires, is completely entangled in his earthly receptacle as the drop of water in the sponge.

The Paradise story shows the individual placed in a position to sin just by having become an individual, a really independent being. Whereas formerly he drew in what he needed from the universe, as a single drop in a mass of water derives its force from the mass, his impulses as a fully independent individuality derive wholly from himself. The eating of the apple in Paradise signifies this kind of error stemming from independence. It is significant, too, that the Latin malum means both “evil” and “apple.” All real meanings of words, of course, provided they have any spiritual scientific background, are deeply connected in an inner sense. Spiritual science never uses the word “evil” for any transgression that does not stem from the ego.

Evil is thus the fault proceeding from the ego. Trespass, or guilt, is the fault proceeding from the etheric body of a man in social relationships with his fellow men. Temptation may assail the astral body in any respect in which it is individually and personally at fault.

The fault of the etheric body:
Debts, or Guilt.
The fault of the astral body:
Temptation.
The fault of the ego:
Evil.

Consider the relation of the four lower principles of human nature to their environment, that is, the planetary conditions surrounding them. The physical body continually takes in physical substance as nourishment; so it maintains its existence. The etheric body's life in a finite condition is possible only by maintenance of fellowship with people into whose community one has grown. The astral body is maintained by overcoming temptation. The ego is maintained, and undergoes development in the right way, by not succumbing when “evil” threatens.

Now bring before your mind's eye the whole human being—the lower quaternary and the higher triad—so that you can say: In individual man there lives a drop of Divinity; he is evolving to the Divine through the expression of his deepest, innermost nature. In once expressing outwardly that deepest, innermost nature, he reveals that he has by gradual development transmuted his own being into what Christianity calls the “Father.” What lies hidden in the human soul and hovers before humanity as its great goal is called the Father in Heaven.

One wishing to attain that degree of development must be capable of bringing his higher triad and lower quaternary to the point at which they can maintain the physical body adequately. The etheric body must live socially so that an adjustment is effected with whatever exists of “trespass” within it. The astral body must not perish in “temptation,” nor the body of the ego fall in “evil.” Man must strive upward to the Father in Heaven through the three higher principles—the Name, the Kingdom, the Will.

The Name must be felt in such a way that it becomes hallowed. Look around you. All things in their diversity express the Godhead. In calling each thing by its name, you make it a member of the divine order of the world. By beholding in every single thing or being that you name in your environment some element that reveals in it a principle of Divine Being, you help make each part of your environment sacred. You hallow each part. You grow into the Kingdom—which is the outpouring of Divinity—and develop yourself up to the Will, which is spirit man but at the same time a principle of the Godhead.

Think, now, of a meditant who concentrates wholly upon this meaning of human development, and who wishes to gather this meaning—the seven principles of man's spiritual evolution—into seven petitions in prayer. How will he pray?

To express the aim of the prayer, he will have to begin, before he utters the seven petitions:

In this form of salutation, man concerns himself with the deepest foundation of the human soul, the inmost element of the human being, which Christian esoteric teaching characterizes as of the kingdom of spirit. The link of the first three petitions, which follow this exalted salutation, is with the three higher principles of human nature, with the divine substance within man:

The following lecture was given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, on the 24th of December, 1912. It is from the unpublished lecture series entitled, Experiential Knowledge of the Supersensible, published in Germas as, Erfahrungen des Uebersinnlichen. Die wege der Seele zu Christus. This lecture is known by two titles, The Birth of the Light, and Thoughts on Christmas Eve. The latter title can be found in the 1928 edition of the book, The Festivals of the Seasons.

This lecture was translated from shorthand reports, unrevised by the lecturer, by Harry Collison. It is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.

It is beautiful that circumstances permit of our uniting here this evening at this festival. For though the vast majority of our friends are able to celebrate the festival of love and peace outside in the circle of those with whom they are united by the ties of ordinary life, there are many among our anthroposophical friends who to-day are alone in a certain sense. It also goes without saying that those of us who are not thus drawn into this or that circle are, considering the spiritual current in which we stand, least of all excluded from taking part in the festival of love and peace. What should be more beautifully suited to unite us here this evening in the atmosphere, in the spiritual air of mutual love and peace that radiates through our hearts than an anthroposophical movement? And we may also regard it as a happy chance of fate that it is just in this year that we are able to be together on this Christmas Eve, and to follow out a little train of thought which can bring this festival near to our hearts. For in this year we ourselves stand before the birth of that which, if we rightly understand it, must lie very close to our hearts: I mean the

Birth of our Anthroposophical Society.

If we have lived the great ideal which we want to express through the Anthroposophical Society, and if we are accordingly inclined to dedicate our forces to this great ideal of mankind, then we can naturally let our thoughts sweep on from this our spiritual light or means of light to the dawn of the great light of human evolution which is celebrated on this night of love and peace. On this night—spiritually, or in our souls—we really have before us that which may be called the Birth of the Earthly Light, of the light which is to be born out of the darkness of the Night of Initiation, and which is to be radiant for human hearts and human souls, for all that they need in order to find their way upwards to those spiritual heights which are to be attained through the earth's mission.

What is it really that we should write in our hearts—the feeling that we may have on this Christmas night?

In this Christmas night there should pour into our hearts the fundamental human feeling of love—the fundamental feeling that says: compared with all other forces and powers and treasures of the world, the treasures and the power and the force of love are the greatest, the most intense, the most powerful. There should pour into our hearts, into our souls, the feeling that wisdom is a great thing—that love is still greater; that might is a great thing—that love is yet greater. And this feeling of the power and force and strength of love should pour into our hearts so strongly that from this Christmas night something may overflow into all our feelings during the rest of the year, so that we may truthfully say at all times: we must really be ashamed, if in any hour of the year we do anything that cannot hold good when the spirit gazes into that night in which we would pour the all-power of love into our hearts. May it be possible for the days and the hours of the year to pass in such a way that we need not be ashamed of them in the light of the feeling that we would pour into our souls on Christmas night!

If such can be our feeling, then we are feeling together with all those beings who wanted to bring the significance of Christmas, of the ‘Night of Initiation,’ near to mankind: the significance and the relation of Christmas night to the whole Christ-Impulse within earthly evolution.

For this Christ Impulse stands before us, we may say, in a threefold figure; and to-day at the Christ-festival this threefold figure of the Christ-Impulse can have great significance for us. The first figure meets us when we turn our gaze to the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The Being who is born—or whose birth we celebrate—on this Christmas Eve, enters human evolution in such a way that three heads of mankind, three representatives of high magic come to pay homage to the kingly Being who is entering man's evolution. ‘Kings’ in the spiritual sense of the word: magic kings come to pay homage to the great spiritual King Who appears in the high form that He has attained. For as high a being as Zarathustra once was, passed through his stages of development in order to reach the height of the spiritual King whom the magic kings came to welcome. And so does the Spirit-King of St. Matthew's Gospel confront our spiritual gaze: He brings into human evolution an infinite fount of goodness and an infinite fount of mighty love, of that goodness and that love before which human wickedness feels itself challenged to battle. Thus again do we see the Spirit-King enter human evolution: that which must be enmity against the Spirit-King feels itself challenged in the figure of Herod; and the spiritual King must flee before that which is the enemy of spiritual kingship. So do we see Him in the spirit, in His majestic and magic glory. And before our soul there arises the marvellous image of the Spirit-King, of Zarathustra reincarnate, the flower of human evolution, as He has passed from incarnation to incarnation on the physical plane, and as wisdom has reached perfection, surrounded by the three magic spirit-kings themselves, by flowers and heads of human evolution.

In yet another figure the Christ-Impulse can come before our souls, as it appears in the Gospel according to St. Mark, and in St. John's Gospel. There we seem to be led towards the cosmic Christ-Impulse, which expresses how man is eternally related to the great cosmic forces. We have this connection with the great cosmic forces when, through an understanding of the cosmic Christ, we become aware how through the Mystery of Golgotha there entered into earthly evolution itself a cosmic impulse. As something yet infinitely more great and mighty than the Spirit-King Whom we see in the spirit surrounded by the magicians, there appears before us the mighty cosmic Being who will take hold of the vehicle of that man who is himself the Spirit-King, the flower and summit of earthly evolution. It is really only the short-sightedness of present day mankind which prevents men from feeling the full greatness and power of this incision into human evolution, wherein Zarathustra became the bearer of the cosmic Christ-Spirit. It is only this short-sightedness which does not feel the whole significance of that which was being prepared in the moment of human evolution which we celebrate in our ‘night of initiation,’ in our Christmas. Everywhere, if we enter but a little more deeply into human evolution, we are shown how deeply the Christ-Event penetrated into the whole earthly evolution. Let us feel this as we follow this evening a relevant line of thought, whence something may stream out into the rest of our anthroposophical thought, deepening and penetrating into the meaning of things.

Many things might be brought forward for this purpose. It could be shown how, in times which were still nearer to the spiritual, an entirely new spirit appeared before mankind: new in comparison with the spirit that held sway and was active in earthly evolution in pre-Christian times. For instance, there was created a figure, a figure, however, which lived, which expresses to us how a soul of the early Christian centuries was affected when such a soul, having first felt itself quite immersed in the old Pagan spiritual knowledge, then approached the Christ-Impulse simply and without prejudice, and felt a great change in itself. To-day we more and more have a feeling for such a figure as Faust. We feel this figure, which a more modern poet—Goethe—has, so to speak, reawakened. We feel how this figure is meant to express the highest human striving, yet at the same time the possibility of deepest guilt. It may be said, apart from all the artistic value given to this figure by the power of a modern poet, we can feel deep and significant things of what lived in those early Christian souls, when for example we sink into the poem of the Greek Empress Eudocia. She created a revival of the old legend of Cyprian, which pictures a man who lived wholly in the world of the old heathen gods and could become entwined in it—a man who after the Mystery of Golgotha was still completely given up to the old heathen mysteries and forces and powers. Beautiful is the scene in which Cyprian makes the acquaintance of Justina, who is already touched by the Christ-Impulse, and who is given up to those powers which are revealed through Christianity. Cyprian is tempted to draw her from the path, and for this purpose to make use of the old heathen magical methods. All this is played out between Faust and Gretchen, in the atmosphere of this battle of old Pagan impulses with the Christ-Impulse. Apart from the spiritual side of it, it works out magnificently in the old story of the Cyprian and of the temptation to which he was exposed over against the Christian Justina. And even though Eudocia's poetry may not be very good, still we must say: there we see the awful collision of the old pre-Christian world with the Christian world. In Cyprian we see a man who feels himself still far from the Christian faith, quite given up to the old Pagan divine forces. There is a certain power in this description. To-day we only bring forward a few extracts, showing how Cyprian feels towards the magic forces of pre-Christian spiritual powers. Thus in Eudocia's poem we hear him speak: (‘Confession of Cyprian.’)

‘Ye faithful ones in Christ, who in your hearts
Do cherish true and warm our Saviour great in praise:
Behold my tears outpouring and then hear
While I relate the fountain of my grief.
And ye, who still are lost in dark illusion bound
To idol images, pay heed, ye too, to that
Which I shall tell of their deceit and falsehood.
For never lived a man, who to false Gods
Was given up as I was; never one
So deeply versed in all the demon's arts.

‘Yea, I am Cyprianus, whom, a child,
My parents brought unto Apollo dedicate.
The orgies' hue and cry became my lullaby,
What time the fearsome dragon's feast was celebrate.
At seven years they consecrated me
Unto the Sun-God Mithras. Then I lived
In Athena's noble city, as a citizen—
Such was my parents' wish. When I was ten,
I lit Demeter's torches, and I sank myself
In Kora's mournful death-complaint. Then as a temple-child
I nourished Pallas' serpent in the castle's walls.

‘Then I ascended on the forest-mount,
Olympus' height, where fools would make believe
The radiant dwelling-place of Gods sublime.
I saw the Horae and the hustling winds,
The days' long chorus, wafted on wings
Of fantasy, to speed through life on magic wings.
I saw the spirits' fiery headlong fray,
And ambuscades deceitful. Some of them anon
Bluster and burst with ridicule and glee,
While others petrified in terror rooted stand.
I saw the ranks of Goddesses and Gods;
For forty days or more I fingered there.
And as the sun did set, I ate the fruits
Of leafy shady bowers. And there, like messengers
From kingly castles, sped the spirit-beings,
Then to descend to earth with thousand ills
To vex the race of men.

‘I numbered fifteen years, already knew
The power and work of spirits and of Gods;
And of high priests my teachers there were seven—
It was my parents' will that I should gain
Science of all that bides upon the earth,
And in the airy realms, and in the oceans' depths.
I searched through that which in the human breast
Destruction brews—what ferments in the herb,
In flowery juices; and what sickening creeps
Around the wearied body; nor did I neglect
That which the gaudy snake, prince of the world, conceives
To challenge the eternal goals of God.

‘I wandered on in Argos' fairest land—
Argos that nourished the rose.
'Twas just the season's round of Eos' feast,
Eos white-raimented, Tithonos' spouse,
There I became their priest.
I learned to know what windy brothers speed
Through airy spaces and this pole's long round;
What binds the ploughland with the waters' flood,
And darkens o'er the skies with showering rain.’

Thus had Cyprian learned to know everything that was to be learned by being, so to speak, initiated into the pre-Christian mysteries. Oh! he describes them exactly—those powers to whom those could look up who were entrusted with the ancient traditions of initiation in a time when those traditions no longer held good; his description of them and of all their fruits which were no longer suitable to that age is fascinating.

‘Myself I saw the demon face to face,
When I had won him by my sacrifice.
I spake to him, and he did answer me
With words of flattery. He praised my youth,
My fairness and my skill unto his works,
Assigned to me dominion o'er this world
And spirits to accomplish my behests;
He greeted me by name, what time we parted,
And all his great ones looked on us amazed.
His countenance is like unto the flower
Of purest gold: and on his head a diadem
Of glittering stones; his raiment's like a flame,
And all the earth doth shiver as he moves.
In dense array around his mighty throne
Spear-bearers stand, their eyes cast on the ground.
Thus he makes up to be a God; he imitates
The Great One's works, whom boldly challenging,
yet creates but powerless fantasies—
For all their demons' being is emptiness.

And then it goes on to describe how the temptation approaches him, and how all this works on him before he comes to know the Christ-Impulse.

‘I wandered from the Persian land away,
And came to Antioch, great town of Syria.
Here I accomplished many a miracle
Of hellish mystery and of enchantments' crafts.
Here a fair youth, Aglaidas, once sought me out;
And others with him, fired with passionate love.
Towards a maiden was his heart aglow,
Justina was her name. He now entreated me,
Clasping around my knees, to conjure her
Into his arms by means of magic craft.
I hearkened to his prayers and then at first
Appeared to me the demon's powerlessness.
Many as were the spirit-throngs he ruled,
So many he sent out to tempt her soul;
And every one returned from her abashed.
Me too, who pleaded for Aglaidas, Justina's faith
And purity and piety could put to shame.
She shewed me then the vanity of mine arts,
And many a sleepless night I lingered on
With manifold enchantments' drudgery.
Ten weeks the prince of spirits stormed the heart
Of yonder maiden. Till Eros, alas,
Not only sped his shaft to wound Aglaidas:
I too was seized and torn with frenzied love.

And from this confusion into which the old world brought him, Cyprian is healed through the Christ-Impulse, in that he cast aside the old magic to understand the Christ-Impulse in its full greatness. We have later in the Faust poem a kind of shadow of this legend, but filled with greater poetic power. In such a figure as this, it is brought home to us very strongly how the Christ-Impulse, which, with some recapitulations we have just brought before our souls in a twofold figure, was felt in the early Christian centuries.

A third figure, as it were a third aspect of the Christ-Impulse, is one which can especially bring home to us how, through that which in the full sense of the word we may call Anthroposophy, we can feel ourselves united with all that is human. This is the aspect which is most uniquely set forth in St. Luke's Gospel, and which then worked on in that representation of the Christ-Impulse which shows us its preparation in the ‘Child.’ In that love and simplicity and at the same time powerlessness, with which the Christ Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel meets us, thus it was suited to be placed before all hearts. There all can feel themselves near to that which so simply, like a child—and yet so greatly and mightily—spake to mankind through the Child of St. Luke's Gospel, which is not shown to the magic kings, but to the poor shepherds from the hills. That other Being of St. Matthew's Gospel stands at the summit of human evolution and paying homage to him there come spiritual kings, magic kings. The Child of St. Luke's Gospel stands there in simplicity, excluded from human evolution, as a child received by no great ones—received by the shepherds from the hills. Nor does he stand within human evolution, this Child of St. Luke's Gospel, in such a way that we were told in this Gospel, for example, how the wickedness of the world felt itself challenged by his kingly spiritual power. No! but—albeit we are not at once brought face to face with Herod's power and wickedness—it is clearly shown to us how that which is given in this Child is so great, so noble, so full of significance, that humanity itself cannot receive it into its ranks. It appears poor and rejected, as though cast into a corner by human evolution and there in a peculiar manner it shows us its extra-human, its divine, that is to say, its cosmic origin. And what an inspiration flowed from this Gospel of St. Luke for all those who, again and again, gave us scenes, in pictures and in other artistic works—scenes which were especially called forth by St. Luke's Gospel. If we compare the various artistic productions, do we not feel how those, which throughout the centuries were inspired by St. Luke's Gospel, show us Jesus as a Being with whom every man, even the simplest, can feel akin? Through that which worked on through the Luke-Jesus-Child, the simplest man comes to feel the whole event in Palestine as a family happening, which concerns himself as something which happened among his own near relations. No Gospel worked on in the same way as this Gospel of St. Luke, with its sublime and happy flowing mood, making the Jesus-Being intimate to the human souls. And yet—all is contained in this childlike picture—all that should be contained in a certain aspect of the Christ-Impulse: namely, that the highest thing in the world, in the whole world, is love: that wisdom is something great, worthy to be striven after—for without wisdom beings cannot exist—but that love is something yet greater; that the might and the power with which the world is architected is something great without which the world cannot exist—but that love is something yet greater. And he has a right feeling for the Christ-Impulse, who can feel this higher nature of Love over against Power and Strength and Wisdom. As human spiritual individualities, above all things we must strive after wisdom, for wisdom is one of the divine impulses of the world. And that we must strive after wisdom, that wisdom must be the sacred treasure that brings us forward—it is this that was intended to be shown in the first scene of The Soul's Probation, that we must not let wisdom fall away, that we must cherish it, in order to ascend through wisdom on the ladder of human evolution. But everywhere where wisdom is, there is a twofold thing: wisdom of the Gods and wisdom of the Luciferic powers. The being who strives after wisdom must inevitably come near to the antagonists of the Gods, to the throng of the Light-Bearer, the army of Lucifer. Therefore there is no divine all-wisdom, for wisdom is always confronted with an opponent—with Lucifer.

And power and might! Through wisdom the world is conceived, through wisdom it is seen, it is illumined; through power and might the world is fashioned and built. Everything that comes about, comes about through the power and the might that is in the beings and we should be shutting ourselves out from the world if we did not seek our share in the power and might of the world. We see this mighty power in the world when the lightning flashes through the clouds; we perceive it when the thunder rolls or when the rain pours down from heavenly spaces into the earth to fertilise it, or when the rays of the sun stream down to conjure forth the seedlings of plants slumbering in the earth. In the forces of nature that work down on to the earth we see this power working blessing as sunshine, as forces in rain and clouds; but, on the other hand, we must see this power and might in volcanoes, for instance, which seem to rise up and rebel against the earth itself—heavenly force pitted against heavenly force. And we look into the world, and we know: if we would ourselves be beings of the world-all, then something of them must work in us; we must have our share in power and in might. Through them we stand within the world: Divine and Ahrimanic powers live and pulsate through us. The all-power is not ‘all-powerful,’ for always it has its antagonist Ahriman against itself.

Between them—between Power and Wisdom—stands Love; and if it is the true love we feel that alone is ‘Divine.’ We can speak of the ‘all-power,’ of ‘all-strength,’ as of an ideal; but over against them stand Ahriman. We can speak of ‘all-wisdom’ as of an ideal; but over against it stands the force of Lucifer. But to say ‘all-love’ seems absurd; for if we love rightly it is capable of no increase. Wisdom can be small—it can be augmented. Power can be small; it can be augmented. Therefore all-wisdom and all-power can stand as ideals. But cosmic love—we feel that it does not allow of the conception of all-love; for love is something unique.

As the Jesus-Child is placed before us in St. Luke's Gospel, so do we feel it as the personification of love; the personification of love between wisdom or all-wisdom and all-power. And we really feel it like this, just because it is a child. Only it is intensified because in addition to all that a child has at any time, this Child has the quality of forlornness: it is cast out into a lonely corner. The magic building of man—we see it already laid out in the organism of the child. Wherever in the wide world-all we turn our gaze, there is nothing that comes into being through so much wisdom as this magic building, which appears before our eyes—even unspoiled as yet—in the childlike organism. And just as it appears in the child—that which is all-wisdom in the physical body, the same thing also appears in the etheric body, where the wisdom of cosmic powers is expressed; and so in the astral body and in the ego. Like wisdom that has made an extract of itself—so does the child lie there. And if it is thrown out into a corner of mankind, like the Child Jesus, then we feel that separated there lies a picture of perfection, concentrated world-wisdom.

But all-power too appears personified to us, when we look on the child as it is described in St. John's Gospel. How shall we feel how the all-power is expressed in relation to the body of the child, the being of the child? We must make present in our souls the whole force of that which divine powers and forces of nature can achieve. Think of the might of the forces and powers of nature near to the earth when the elements are storming; transplant yourself into the powers of nature that hold sway, surging and welling up and down in the earth; think of all the brewing of world-powers and world-forces, of the clash of the good forces with the Ahrimanic forces; the whirling and raging of it all. And now imagine all this storming and raging of the elements to be held away from a tiny spot in the world, in order that at that tiny spot the magic building of the child's body may lie—in order to set apart a tiny body; for the child's body must be protected. Were it exposed for a moment to the violence of the powers of nature, it would be swept away! Then you may feel how it is immersed in the all-power. And now you may realise the feeling that can pass through the human soul when it gazes with simple heart on that which is expressed by St. Luke's Gospel. If one approached this ‘concentrated wisdom’ of the child with the greatest human wisdom—mockery and foolishness this wisdom! For it can never be so great as was the wisdom that was used in order that the child-body might lie before us. The highest wisdom remains foolishness and must stand abashed before the childlike body and pay homage to heavenly wisdom; but it knows that it cannot reach it. Mockery is this wisdom; it must feel itself rejected in its own foolishness.

No, with wisdom we cannot approach that which is placed before us as the Jesus-Being in St. Luke's Gospel. Can we approach it with power?

We cannot approach it with power. For the use of ‘power’ can only have a meaning where a contrary power comes into play. But the child meets us—whether we would use much or little power—with its powerlessness and mocks our power in its powerlessness! For it would be meaningless to approach the child with power, since it meets us with nothing but its powerlessness.

That is the wonderful thing—that the Christ-Impulse, being placed before us in its preparation in the Child Jesus, meets us in St. Luke's Gospel just in this way, that—be we ever so wise—we cannot approach it with our wisdom; no more can we approach it with our power. Of all that at other times connects us with the world—nothing can approach the Child Jesus, as St. Luke's Gospel describes it—neither wisdom, nor power—but love. To bring love towards the child-being, unlimited love—that is the one thing possible. The power of love, and the justification and signification of love and love alone—that it is that we can feel so deeply when we let the contents of St. Luke's Gospel work on our soul.

We live in the world, and we may not scorn any of the impulses of the world. It would be a denial of our humanity and a betrayal of the Gods for us not to strive after wisdom; every day and every hour of the year is well applied, in which we realise it as our human duty to strive after wisdom. And so does every day and every hour of the year compel us to become aware that we are placed in the world and that we are a play of the forces and powers of the world—of the all-power that pulsates through the world. But there is one moment in which we may forget this, in which we may remember what St. Luke's Gospel places before us, when we think of the Child that is yet more filled with wisdom and yet more powerless than other people's children and before whom the highest love appears in its full justification, before whom wisdom must stand still and power must stand still.

So we can feel the significance of the fact that it is just this Christ-Child, received by the simple shepherds, which is placed before us as the third aspect of the Christ-Impulse; beside the Spirit-Kingly aspect and the great Cosmic aspect, the Childlike aspect. The Spirit-Kingly aspect meets us in such a way that we are reminded of the highest wisdom, and that the ideal of highest wisdom is placed before us. The cosmic aspect meets us, and we know that through it the whole direction of earthly evolution is re-formed. Highest power through the cosmic Impulse is revealed to us—highest power so great that it conquers even death. And that which must be added to wisdom and power as a third thing, and must sink into our souls as something transcending the other two, is set before us as that from which man's evolution on earth, on the physical plane, proceeds. And it has sufficed to bring home to humanity, through the ever-returning picture of Jesus' birth at Christmas, the whole significance of love in the world and in human evolution. Thus, as it is in the Christmas ‘night of initiation’ that the birth of the Jesus-Child is put before us, it is in the same night as it comes round again and again that there can be born in our souls, contemplating the birth of the Jesus-Child, the understanding of genuine, true love that resounds above all. And if at Christmas an understanding of the feeling of love is rightly awakened in us, if we celebrate this birth of Christ—the awakening of love—then from the moment in which we experience it there can radiate that which we need for the remaining hours and days of the year, that it may flow through and bless the wisdom that it is ours to strive after in every hour and in every day of the year.

It was especially through the emphasising of this love-impulse that, already in Roman times, Christianity brought into human evolution the feeling that something can be found in human souls, through which they can come near each other—not by touching what the world gives to men, but that which human souls have through themselves. There was always the need of having such an approaching together of man in love. But what had become of this feeling in Rome, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place? It had become the Saturnalia. In the days of December, beginning from the seventeenth, the Saturnalia took place, in which all differences of rank and standing were suspended. Then man met man; high and low ceased to be; every one said ‘thou’ to the other. That which originated from the outer world was swept away, but for fun and merriment the children were given ‘Saturnalia presents,’ which then developed into our Christmas presents. Thus ancient Rome had been driven to take refuge in fun, in joking, in order to transcend the ordinary social distinctions.

Into the midst of all this, there entered about that time the new principle, wherein men do not call forth joking and merriment, but the highest in their souls—the spiritual. Thus did the feeling of equality from man to man enter Christianity in the time when in Rome it had assumed the merrymaking form of the Saturnalia, and this also testifies to us of the aspect of love, of general human love which can exist between man and man if we grasp man in his deepest being. Thus, for example, we grasp him in his deepest being, when at Christmas Eve the child awaits the coming of the Christmas child or the Christmas angel. How does the child wait at Christmas Eve? It awaits the coming of the Christmas child or angel, knowing: He is coming not from human lands, he comes from the spiritual world! It is a kind of understanding of the spiritual world, in which the child shows itself to be like the grown-up people. For they too know the same thing that the child knows—that the Christ-Impulse came into earthly evolution from higher worlds. So it is not only the Child of St. Luke's Gospel that comes before our souls at Christmas, but that which Christmas shall bring near to man's heart comes near to every child's soul in the loveliest way, and unites childlike understanding with grown-up understanding. All that a child can feel, from the moment when it begins to be able to think at all—that is the one pole. And the other pole is that which we can feel in our highest spiritual concerns, if we remain faithful to the impulse which was mentioned at the beginning of this evening's thoughts, the impulse whereby we awaken the will to the spiritual light after which we strive in our now to be founded Anthroposophical Society. For there, too, it is our will that that which is to come into human evolution shall be borne by something which comes into us from spiritual realms as an impulse. And just as the child feels towards the angel of Christmas who brings it its Christmas presents—it feels itself, in its childlike way, connected with the spiritual—so may we feel ourselves connected with the spiritual gift that we long for on Christmas night as the impulse which can bring us the high ideal for which we strive. And if in this circle we feel ourselves united in such love as can stream in from a right understanding of the ‘night of initiation,’ then we shall be able to attain that which is to be attained through the Anthroposophical Society—our anthroposophical ideal. We shall attain that which is to be attained in united work, if a ray of that man-to-man love can take hold of us, of which we can learn when we give ourselves in the right way to the Christmas thought.

Thus those of our dear friends who are united with us to-night may have a kind of excellence of feeling. Though they may not be sitting here or there under the Christmas-tree in the way that is customary in this cycle of time, our dear friends are yet sitting under the Christmas-tree. And all of you who are spending this ‘initiation night’ with us under the Christmas-tree: try to awaken in your souls something of the feeling that can come over us when we feel why it is that we are here together—that we may already learn to realise in our souls those impulses of love which must once in distant and yet more distant future come nearer and nearer, when the Christ-Impulse, of which our Christmas has reminded us so well, takes hold on human evolution with ever greater and greater power, greater and greater understanding. For it will only take hold, if souls be found who understand it in its full significance. But in this realm, ‘understanding’ cannot be without love—the fairest thing in human evolution, to which we give birth in our souls just on this evening and night when we transfuse our hearts with that spiritual picture of the Jesus-Child, cast out by the rest of mankind, thrown into a corner, born in a stable. Such is the picture of Him that is given to us—as though he comes into human evolution from outside, and is received by the simplest in spirit, the poor shepherds. If to-day we seek to give birth to the love-impulse that can pour into our souls from this picture, then it will have the force to promote that which we would and should achieve, to assist in the tasks that we have set ourselves in the realm of Anthroposophy, and that karma has pointed out to us as deep and right tasks in the realm of Anthroposophy.

Let us take this with us from this evening's thoughts on the Christmas initiation night, saying that we have come together in order to take out with us the impulse of love, not only for a short time, but for all our striving that we have set before us, inasmuch as we can understand it through the spirit of our anthroposophical view of the world.

In these lectures I should like to bring before you a picture of the nature of the Mysteries and their connection with the spiritual life of humanity. First, by way of introduction, we must come to an understanding with regard to various experiences on the path to the higher worlds. We shall have to bring forward things which in a certain connection have already been touched upon in the course of our anthroposophical studies; but during the next few days we shall need certain points of view which may have so far received less attention, at least in their necessary setting.

Everything that belongs to the Mysteries in their true nature is founded ultimately on the experiences of Initiates in the higher worlds. It is from the higher worlds that the knowledge and the impulses for practical training in the Mysteries have to be brought. We have often emphasised that as human evolution in different regions takes on different forms in successive periods, so is it with everything that we call the nature of the Mysteries. It is not for nothing that our souls pass through successive human lives; we go through them because in every incarnation we experience something fresh and can add it to what we have garnered in previous incarnations. In most cases the appearance of the external world has completely changed when, after our passage through the spiritual worlds between death and a new birth, we enter again through birth into physical existence, And for reasons that we can easily recognise, the principle of Initiation must also change in the successive epochs of humanity. In our own time the principle of Initiation has already undergone a great change, in that Initiation can be attained up to a certain stage without any personal guidance; for it has been possible to set out publicly the principles of Initiation as far as has been done, for example, in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Anyone who tries quite seriously to work through the experiences described in this book can go very far in relation to the principle of Initiation. He can go so far that the existence of the spiritual world becomes for him a matter of knowledge, equally with his knowledge of the external physical world. By slowly and gradually applying to his soul in due sequence the exercises given, he will break through to an understanding of the spiritual worlds. The Way of Initiation can now be described and pursued without exposing the soul to certain events which could lead it into particular catastrophes and revolutions.

Up to this point, accordingly, it is possible today to discuss in public the Way into the higher worlds. But it must be said also that for anyone seriously resolved to go further, the Way is even today bound up with the enduring of certain pains and sorrows, and with some quite special experiences which can have a dismaying, revolutionary effect on a man's life, and for these he must have undergone a thorough preparation. I must again emphasise, however, that anyone can follow through everything that has been published without risk of harm, and by this means he can go very far along the Way. The path to the higher worlds, one need hardly say, is never closed, but anyone who wishes to follow it beyond a certain frontier must be specially prepared if he is to reach the end of it without having his inner life shaken—not morbidly, but shaken through and through. Even these shocks pass quite naturally over the soul when the whole course of Initiation is carried out rightly. But it is very necessary that it should be carried through in the right way.

Now we must understand clearly that if anyone wants to plunge into the Mysteries, everything in his soul-life must gradually become different. The change can be characterised in a few words by saying: for anyone wishing to penetrate the Mysteries, the aims and goals that figure in ordinary soul-life must all become a means to higher purposes, higher goals. In ordinary life a man perceives the external world through his senses. He perceives it in colours, forms and sounds and other sense-impressions. He lives within this world of sense-impressions. At the moment when Initiation is to enter a certain stage, he must not simply experience blue or red or any other colours all the time; without losing these experiences he must learn to make them a means to higher ends. In ordinary life a man looks out on a clear day into space and sees the blue sky and enjoys the sight. But if he wants to be an Initiate of a certain degree he must come to the point of being able to see the blue of the heavens as completely transparent. While normally it is a limit or boundary, it must now become transparent, and he must be able to see what he wants to see through the blue sky. For him it must no longer be a boundary. Or let us take a rose: for external vision the surface of the rose is bounded by its red colour. At the moment of Initiation the red colour ceases to be a boundary. It becomes transparent, and behind it appears that which is being sought. The colour does not cease to produce its own natural effect; but the Initiate perceives something different when he looks through the blue sky, when he looks through the red of the rose, and again when he looks through the rosy dawn, and so on. The colour is experienced in a quite definite manner, but for unmediated vision it becomes transparent and is eliminated by the soul-force which has been acquired through the training that leads to clairvoyance. So it is with all sense-impressions. Whereas previously they were in themselves a complete experience, after Initiation they become merely a means of experiencing what lies behind them.

Thus it is with the whole thought-world. In ordinary life man thinks ... I beg you not to misunderstand this in any way; if you compare it in the right sense with other explanations you will see the agreement, but it is none the less true to say that from a certain stage of Initiation, thinking in the usual sense of the word ceases. It is not that the Initiate could ever come to a time when he would regard thinking as of no significance, but instead of being the aim and object of the life of the soul, thinking must become merely a means to an end. The Initiate, in fact, is entering a new world. In order to experience it, it is necessary for him—besides other things of which we shall have to speak—to pass beyond the standpoint of ordinary thinking on the physical plane. When a man lives on the physical plane he judges things and forms opinions about them. After a certain stage of Initiation these opinions no longer have any meaning or value. But as we are speaking about regions of the soul-life so different from those to which we are accustomed, I must point out that it is very easy for misunderstandings to arise. When this stage of Initiation, which I shall have to describe later on, is reached, then as a rule a person will have to lead a kind of double life. For in everyday life it is impossible not to reflect and form judgments upon things. On the physical plane we are forced to form judgments and to think. Suppose you were sitting in a train and were not thinking, you would go past your station. It could even happen that although an Anthroposophist ought to take care of his membership card, a thoughtless person might leave it lying about, which would be against all the principles that should be observed in looking after it. Well, life is such that we must use our judgment and reflect.

But with this attitude towards judging and thinking we cannot attain to the higher worlds. A mixing of the two attitudes may occur: one can be so absorbed in the urge to reach the higher worlds as to be guilty of such a lapse of memory as I have just mentioned. However, on the whole it should. certainly be possible to keep these two things apart: a truly sound power of judgment for the physical plane, holding all life's duties in view and at the same time never forgetting that what we develop so assiduously for the physical plane can be only a means to an end where the higher worlds are concerned.

Thoughts, ideas, judgments, must be for the would-be Initiate what colours, for example, are for the painter. For him they are not an end in themselves but a means of expressing what he wants to say in his picture. In ordinary physical life thoughts and ideas are an end in themselves; for the Initiate they become the means of expressing what he experiences in the higher worlds. This stage can be reached only when a certain attitude of soul towards one's personal views and opinions has been acquired. A person who has any preference for one view or another; who still prefers one thing or another to be true, cannot enter the stage of Initiation referred to here, but only he who esteems his own views as little as he does those of others, and is prepared to set aside his own opinions and to observe quite objectively what is really there. In general, one of the greatest difficulties of inner experience is to get beyond the standpoint of “opinions” and “points of view”. Here we touch upon certain difficulties which may arise in living together with other people when one is seeking to follow the path into the higher worlds. Anyone who is seeking this path, or has already arrived at a certain stage on it, will take an attitude towards many things in life, through the soul-condition he has attained, which will be different from the ordinary one. Above all, he will reveal the characteristic of knowing quickly, let us say, how one ought to behave in this or that circumstance of life. Then perhaps he is asked by those around him: “Why should we do that?” Certainly, when he can appreciate the other person's point of view, he will always be able to account for this “why”. But first he will have to come down from the level where he sees in a flash what has to be done, and take his stand beside the person, forcing himself to follow the train of thought of ordinary life in order to show what proof there is for what he sees through in a flash. This rapid comprehension of widely varying and complicated circumstances of life is a phenomenon, which accompanies the faculty of rising above personal opinions and views and standpoints.

Apart from this, the attainment that must be sought is connected with various other inner moral qualities. Of these we shall have to speak later. We will point now to only one quality to which allusion has often been made. It is fearlessness. For we must bear in mind that, when the entire soul-life is reduced to being a means, instead of ranking as an end in itself, the experiences into which one enters are transformed. In the first place there will be a quite new mode of experiencing. One is indeed entering into the unknown, and this is at first always accompanied by conditions of fear. And because the whole experience takes place in the intimate depths of the soul, the state of fear may lead to all kinds of inner soul-experiences. Hence the preparations for the path into the higher worlds involves the achievement of a certain fearlessness. This fearlessness must be won by means of definite meditations. It can be done. Only, generally speaking, people lack sufficient perseverance for the kind of meditations required. A good meditation is to give oneself up again and again to the thought that knowing about something makes no difference to the thing itself. If, for instance, someone were at this moment to know that something bad is going to happen in an hour's time, and that nothing he can do could prevent it, his knowledge of it would probably cause him anxiety and fear. But his knowledge does not alter the thing in the least. Hence the fear and anxiety are entirely futile. It is a futility to which all souls quite naturally give way; a folly which assuredly would assail anyone at a certain stage of Initiation if his training had not prepared him for fearlessness by requiring him to say to himself again and again: Is anything at all altered by the fact of knowing about it?

The person who is meditating, who has worked up to certain stages of Initiation, then comes to a very remarkable piece of knowledge: the knowledge that in a certain sense things are in a bad way with regard to his inner being, his own human soul.

Beneath the threshold of the consciousness there is indeed something that one would wish to be different, judging by the opinions of ordinary life. In a certain respect it is something quite terrifying. And it would be in the natural order of things that if a man were to be led unprepared into the depths of his own soul, he would get an incredible shock. One must prepare oneself, then, by an ever-repeated meditation on the thought: Things cannot be altered by knowing about them. Of a truth, the thing that is terrifying in the subliminal regions of the soul is not called forth only when one approaches it and looks at it. It is always there, even when one is not aware of it. But through constantly repeated meditation on the thought that things cannot be altered by knowing about them, one expels a great part of the fear that must be got rid of.

Thus you see from just a few things I have mentioned that in the moment when one is preparing to rise into higher worlds, intellectual and moral qualities of the soul intermingle. For the ordinary external knowledge of our time one requires only intellectual qualities. In this connection I call courage and fearlessness moral qualities. Without them, certain stages of Initiation cannot be reached.

Whether we are speaking of Eastern Mysteries or Western Mysteries, all have certain stages in common, Hence for all Mysteries certain expressions have a valid meaning and can be rendered somewhat as follows. Every soul that wishes to attain to a certain stage of Initiation and the Mysteries must go through certain experiences. The first can be called “Coming into contact with the Experience of Death”; the second is “Passing through the Elementary World”; the third was called in the Egyptian and other Mysteries “Seeing the Sun at Midnight”; and a fourth one is “The Meeting with the Upper and the Lower Gods”. These experiences must be gone through by everyone who attains to a certain stage of Initiation. Through inner experience he must come to know what these phrases mean and must be capable, so to speak, of living in two worlds—the actual world in which man lives today, the world of the physical plane; and a world in which a man can live only when he knows what is meant by having “come into contact with Death”, by having “gone through the Elementary World”, by having “seen the Sun at Midnight”, and by “meeting with the Upper and. the Lower Gods”.

“To come into the vicinity of Death.” The point here is that in his waking condition between birth and death a man really lives continually, in so far as he lives consciously, in all that concerning which I have just been saying: it must be overcome, must become for the Initiated a mere means to an end. Let us try now to be quite clear as to what a man lives in while he is on the physical plane. On the physical plane he lives in his sense-impressions and in the ordinary experiences of his soul. All this must become merely a means, as soon as he enters into the Mysteries. What then remains, over and above what a man feels himself to be in ordinary life? Nothing remains. Everything sinks down into a reality of secondary degree. A man must lay aside all his usual experiences, both of an inward and of an outward nature. Only think, the blue vault of heaven becomes transparent, is no more there; all boundaries produced by colour on the surface of things vanish, are no longer there. The sounds of the physical world cease, are no longer there; the experience of touch ceases, is no longer there. And I beg you to take note that this becomes actual experience. Thus, for example, the feeling, “to stand with one's feet on solid ground” which is nothing else than an expression of the sense of touch, ceases, and the person feels as if the ground has been taken away from under him and he were standing upon nothing; but he cannot draw back and cannot rise. So it is with all impressions of the senses—with everything for which the physical body is an instrument. All that a man goes through in his normal life between waking and sleeping is brought about through the instrumentality of the body, and all this ceases. A condition from which man in ordinary life is preserved now actually occurs—the condition that would come about if someone while sleeping were suddenly to become conscious without waking up again in his physical body. This is not a condition reached in ordinary dreams. The dream is in a certain sense an extra-physical experience, but the consciousness of it is so lessened that the person is not aware of being outside all physical experience. This intensity of consciousness, “Thou standest outside all physical life”, is not produced until Initiation. During the ascent into the higher worlds a moment comes when a man confronts his physical body, whose hands he can move during waking life, with whose feet he can walk, whose knees he can bend, whose eyelids he can open and shut and so on, but now he feels as though his whole physical body were petrified, as though it were impossible to move the eyelids, the legs, the hands, etc. A moment then comes when he knows that there are eyes in this physical body, but they are of no use for seeing. On the one hand all things become transparent, and on the other the possibility of approaching these things with the usual and familiar means ceases completely. Try to grasp what a contradiction this is, in the ordinary sense of the word. When a man prepares himself to reach this point, he finds all things are, so to speak, transparent, that he sees through everything. But at the moment when this begins—e.g. when the heavens become transparent—the eye ceases to have the power of seeing the blue vault of heaven at all. This means that the first moment in the Mysteries consists in a person coming to the point when he overcomes the method of perception by the senses, and also the act of thinking, but what he should thereby attain is at the same moment taken from him. He has worked his way through to the moment where something quite new is given to him; he reaches precisely the moment in which this new thing comes to meet him—but in this very instant it is also taken away. He now knows nothing but: “Thou hast won thy way through in such manner that thou standest before the Higher Worlds, and now in that very moment they are taken from thee.”

Picture this experience to yourselves, and you have the moment which has been designated in the Mysteries of all ages as “The Approach to the Gate of Death.” For the person knows now what is meant by the words: the world is taken from you, i.e. the entire world of impressions. And he knows that he consists of nothing but these experiences of inner impressions. For in reality there exists nothing but these experiences, these inner impressions. As soon as a person falls asleep, when all impressions cease, he normally falls into unconsciousness. This means that he lives in his impressions. Now he overcomes these impressions of ordinary life; he knows he has progressed so far that he can see through everything, but at this moment a new world is taken from him. We shall have to speak more in detail on this point; but first we want to make still clearer what is meant by the expressions used.

In face of this unavoidable halt, with no way of getting further, the only deliverance lies in having developed the inner life—in advance of the actual moment—to such a degree that the aspirant is able to carry with him the only thing which it is at all possible to take beyond that point. He must come to the point where the external world actually denies him all power, and he must have progressed so far in his inner development that at this moment, through training in self-reliance, in self-confidence and presence of mind and other inner virtues (virtues here meaning capabilities), he possesses inner power, inner energy, so that at the moment when the world is taken from him, he has at his disposal a surplus of inner energy. But this brings with it at the same moment an extraordinarily significant experience. Imagine a man coming to the boundary he has striven for, where the world is transparent; then it is taken from him. Now he has preserved nothing; he cannot have saved anything but a certain inner strength through having trained his self-reliance, presence of mind, fearlessness and similar inner qualities. Thereby he comes to the significant experience, one that forces itself upon him: Thou art alone in the world. Thou art quite alone in the world. And then comes an experience which I cannot indicate otherwise than in the words: Thou alone art the whole world. This experience becomes ever stronger and stronger, more and more comprehensive. And the remarkable thing is that from this experience in the soul a whole new world can arise, and truly must arise in him who is to be initiated. He feels he has come to a certain boundary where he has confronted the Void, but that he has brought with him a certain power. It is perhaps quite small at first, but it becomes ever greater and greater and spreads out on all sides. He begins to penetrate into the whole world, to permeate himself with the whole world; and the more he permeates the world with his own being, the more does it appear always different. He extends the power that he has brought with him to one side or the other, and according as he extends it, he will always experience something different. But at first these experiences will be felt to be quite terrifying, because two things are entirely lacking from them. At a certain stage of knowledge the lack of these things may not seem dreadful before it is experienced, because in the ordinary experience of the physical plane the thing is always there, and one first gets a real idea of it only when it is no longer there.

One thing that ceases is every feeling for physical materiality. Everything material has disappeared into indefinite nothingness, the Void—it is not there. The feeling of contacting something hard, or even something soft like water or air—in short, the feeling of being surrounded by matter ceases, is not there. One is concerned only with the qualities of things, not the things themselves. Of heavy, dense physical bodies only the density remains, not the substantiality; of fluid bodies, only the fluidity, but not the water or the fluid; of the air there remains only the tendency to expand in all directions, but not the substantiality. One grows into the qualities of things, but with the feeling that one is growing only into the qualities; that the objects have vanished, all materiality has gone. This is one thing that ceases.

The other thing that ceases for the aspirant at this stage of experience is everything connected with what in ordinary physical life we call sense-perception. This follows from what has already been described. Nothing makes an impression on him, but he is everything himself. The only impression that remains is at the most that of “time”—“Now art thou not yet anything, and after a while thou wilt be something.” But as for having objects external to himself, which are present elsewhere and make an impression on him, nothing like that remains. Either he is something himself, or nothing at all is Elementary there. Everything he encounters becomes himself; he becomes submerged in it, becomes one with it, and finally he becomes as great as the world that is at his disposal; he becomes one with it.

I am picturing actual experience. It is what is generally known in the Mystery centres as “Experiencing the Elementary World”. The aspirant has risen beyond the mere “Contact with Death”, but he is, so to speak, an undifferentiated unity with the whole world that is available to him.

There are now two possibilities. Either the preparation was good or it was not good. If it was good, then the intending Initiate, after having poured himself out to a certain extent over the world, must have so far progressed that he still has surplus strength. In that case—you see that I am describing today from a different point of view things I have often described., but we now need this other point of view—then he now has the following experience.

Whereas in the ordinary world, one confronts an object, gazes at it, and the object makes an impression on the eye so that one then knows something about the object, when the point of Initiation which has just been described is reached, such a thing no longer happens. For the aspirant is not concerned with a reproduction of the ordinary world, but from a definite point onwards he must now have sufficient forces at his command to pour more out of himself. Thus, after he has spent force enough in becoming one with the world, he must now have sufficient strength to spin forces out of himself as the spider spins a web. You see how the whole process of the Mysteries shows the importance of developing strong inner energy in the life of the soul; for one must have large reserves in order that all this may take place.

Then the following may happen. The aspirant naturally has no physical eyes, for they belong to the physical body and he has long left this behind. But because he has poured out something from himself and can pour out still more, as the spider spins her web out of herself, something akin to organs is built up, and he can discern that together with what he is himself producing, something absolutely new appears. Things present themselves not as if, for instance, I had my watch here and my eyes there, but as if the eyes were to send out a ray which formed itself into a watch, so that the watch was there through the activity of the eyes. It is not a matter of constructing or creating a subjective world, but of spinning soul-substance out of ourselves, and the higher worlds we are beginning to live in have to choose this indirect way, in order that we may be able to confront them and recognise them. They must first infiltrate our own soul-substance which we have placed at their disposal. In the physical world things confront us without our co-operation. In the higher worlds nothing confronts us unless we first place our own soul-substance at its disposal. That is why it is so difficult at this point to distinguish the subjective from the objective, for what we spin out of our soul-substance is bound to be entirely subjective, and whatever uses our soul-substance in order to become perceptible is bound to be entirely objective.

I have brought forward these things so that you may experience a definite feeling that all training in the Mysteries consisted pre-eminently in a strengthening of the energies of the soul. That was the important thing—to make the soul powerful, strong, energetic. From the outset the candidate for Initiation had to give up the hope that anyone would hand, him the objects and entities of the higher worlds as though on a platter. He had first to develop himself point by point towards the higher worlds. Nothing without effort, absolutely nothing without effort! So it is for everything that has to be reached individually in the higher worlds; so it is for everything that has been reached in the course of human evolution with regard to the higher worlds.

Let us suppose that some being, the Moses individuality for example, was to be incarnated in the course of human evolution and had to work upon this evolution through his spiritual power. It would be childish to suppose that nothing now needed to happen except that human evolution would proceed on its way, and that at some point or other in its course Heaven would send Moses. Moses is now there; men know that he is Moses, and need only carry out what was being done when Moses came! If Moses had been sent anywhere in this way, the result could only have been that those around him would not have recognised him. The point is not that this or that external personality was there, but that a number of persons should be capable of judging what spiritual being lived in this particular personality. One would never have needed to tell these persons: “This one or other is Moses.” One would. have needed only to prepare their souls in the proper way. Then their souls, without being told, “This one or the other is Moses”, would have known that this was the particular spiritual being who was to be recognised as a certain person.

This, then, is what we have to recognise: that the path into the higher worlds is bound up with an energising, a strengthening of the inner soul-powers; nothing can be given from outside, but it all can be attained only through the strengthening of the inner life; for only by this means can the Threshold be passed into those worlds through which a man passes between death and a new birth. That is what I wished to bring before you today as an introduction.

tomorrow we will go further, by describing first of all what the worlds are like between death and a new birth, and in how far it has become necessary and important that through the Mysteries something should. be communicated to man during his physical life concerning the knowledge of these higher worlds.

From what has been said we can well see that the ascent into the spiritual worlds depends upon the strengthening of the inner forces of the soul-life, so that through the exercises which a person undertakes for the purpose of penetrating into the higher worlds, he develops forces in his soul which far surpass those needed in ordinary life. This requirement is shown by the fact that when the soul becomes independent of the physical body in ordinary life, i.e. in sleep, it falls at once into unconsciousness. This means that in normal life the individual lacks sufficient force to unfold inner activity and maintain consciousness when, as in sleep, the physical and etheric bodies are not helping him to do so. The other members of the human organism, the ego and the astral body, must be worked upon and illuminated through the exercises of meditation, concentration and contemplation, so that they become capable of conscious experience when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies, as in ordinary sleep. The stronger-than-ordinary soul-forces that a man develops are what enable him to reach the stage we spoke of yesterday. They give him the power, after he has confronted the Void, to enter a new world which he can experience through the fact that—as the spider spins its web out of itself—he pours out into space the spiritually substantial content of his soul, and receives into it the spiritual worlds which then present themselves to him.

So now, after having left behind him the physical sense-world in this way, and gone through the stage of having stood over the abyss—for that is how it feels when one confronts the Void—the aspirant is in a new world. And in this new world he not only experiences something different, but he experiences it in a quite new way. We can begin from an ordinary experience on the physical plane. There, events occur in two apparently quite separate domains. In one domain the events are subject to the laws of nature; in the other they are subject to moral laws. When in ordinary physical life we observe the events of nature, even when we ascend to the animal kingdom, we know that we are looking only for natural laws and that moral standards are inapplicable there. We do not enquire, for example, why a rock crystal has the form of a six-sided column ending in two six-sided pyramids; we do not ask why this mineral substance aggregates itself in such a way that this crystal form appears. We expect no answer except that it obeys a natural law. We do not ask what good thing the rock crystal has done that it should have become a rock crystal. We do not ask what its intentions are, We do not apply moral standards to the mineral world. Neither do we apply them to the plant world. And only in a somewhat indirect sense—and, one might say, according to the sympathies of Darwinistically-inclined persons—do we apply moral concepts to the animal kingdom. What interests us in the animal kingdom, first of all, is its conformity to natural law. When we rise to the human kingdom, we feel obliged to judge men according to the standards of goodwill, love, and so forth. As already said, we regard the facts of the physical world as enmeshed in the web of natural laws, while we judge human actions and soul dispositions by the standard of moral laws; and we are indeed not doing well in our estimate of the physical plane if we mix up these two sets of facts. We are accustomed on the physical plane to judge the world in this twofold way. Hence it is not very easy, after one has sprung, as it were, over the abyss of the Void, to pass into the spiritual world where a different kind of judgment is necessary; where, in fact, there is no separation between something that could be ascribed to natural laws, as with natural events on the physical plane, and a purely moral happening, which likewise exists on the physical plane. When, therefore, the point is reached of which we spoke yesterday, one must accustom oneself to judge events in like manner as we judge natural facts, but also as we judge moral facts in the physical world. The world of natural law and the world of moral law intermingle when one enters the spiritual world.

That shows itself at once, for example, when a man is confronted with the realm that he inhabits between death and a new birth. When the seer has in all earnestness come as far as we have already indicated, he can and will meet those souls who, having passed through the Gate of Death, are going through their development between death and a new birth. He then learns to know the kind of experience these souls are encountering, and if he is to form any judgment of what their experience is, he must adopt quite different habits of thought. A few examples will explain this.

In that realm we find souls which for a certain period between death and a new birth have to undergo very hard conditions. The seer has at first the impression that in the spiritual world these souls—of a certain category—have become the servants of very terrible beings, and that it was through their own lives before death that they condemned themselves to this labour for the terrible spirits. As seer he gradually learns to understand their hard fate, and he does so in the following manner. He cultivates the thought of how a man lives in his physical body from birth to death and how—as has often been described in the course of our lectures on spiritual science—so-called natural death is brought about through an inner conformity to law, when a man has in old age expended his life-forces. We will not speak of this death at present. But there are other deaths. There are those deaths by which a man is snatched away, through accident or illness, in the very flower of his life. We do not all die after having fulfilled our measure of life. Men die at all ages, and we must ask ourselves: Whence come the forces which are responsible for these deaths at different ages? We understand that a man must die when his measure of life is fulfilled. We have often seen how that is brought about by the spiritual worlds. But everything that happens in the physical world comes about through influences from the spiritual worlds. Those deaths which are to a certain extent untimely also happen through influences from the spiritual worlds; that is, they are caused by forces and beings of the spiritual world.

There is something else in the physical world to which we must pay attention if we want to understand the life between death and the next birth. We see the physical world permeated by illnesses and diseases, and in earlier times afflicted by well-known pestilences. One need but recall those devastating visitations among earlier European peoples when the plague, cholera, etc., swept through the land. In this present age we are comparatively fortunate in regard to such things. But already—as indicated in the course of our lectures—certain epidemics are preparing. So we see what appears to be untimely death pass over the Earth; we see disease and pestilence. And. the seer sees souls living between death and a new birth who are helping those spirits who bear from the super-sensible worlds into the sense-world the forces which bring epidemics and illnesses, and so-called untimely death.

It makes a terrifying impression to perceive how during certain periods of their lives between death and a new birth human souls have become servants of the evil spirits of illness and death, and have condemned themselves to this servitude. If one tries to trace back the lives of such persons to the time before they went through the Gate of Death, one always finds that during their life on the physical plane they were lacking in conscience, lacking in feelings of responsibility. A fixed law is evident here. The seer perceives how souls who were morally irresponsible in their dispositions in their lives on Earth have to co-operate, for a period after death, in bringing epidemics, illnesses and untimely deaths into the physical sense-world. Here we see a natural ordinance to which these souls are subject, but we cannot say of it that, like a crystallisation, or like the concussion between two elastic balls, it has no connection with morality. These souls show us how in the higher worlds there is an interweaving of natural law with the moral world-order. The manner in which things come about in the higher worlds is dependent on beings whose fate is conditioned by their moral behaviour in the world.

To take another example, we can look at what the seer learns when he turns his attention to a characteristic, the desire for ease and comfort, that is very widespread among men—more widespread than is generally supposed. People indulge far more in indolence than one realises. They are indolent in their thinking, indolent in their manners and behaviour and particularly so when they are required to alter their thinking or their habits. If men were not so ease-loving in their innermost souls, they would not have so often resisted a necessary change in their ideas. They struggled against it because to have to unlearn anything is uncomfortable. After having thought so long that the Earth stood still and that the

Sun and Stars went round it, it was tiresome to have to learn something different when they suddenly heard through Copernicus about the movement of the Earth! It was an uncomfortable thing when—theoretically, at least—the ground was taken from under their feet. All the resistance of those times against this new idea sprang from indolence of thought, from the love of ease, for to unlearn anything is tiresome. But one need merely consider the most ordinary everyday life and one will find how widespread is the quality—really a vice—of indolence. In recent times we have gained some idea of the enormous extent of indolence, love of ease, among humanity. This will be seen from the following example.

There are many theories of political economy. I need not speak about them now. But there is one theory of political economy which is somewhat out of date today but once played a great role. It was based upon the idea that all men should be free to compete in the exchange of commodities, etc.; and that the best social structure would be obtained if completely free competition were allowed. Then other, more socialistic theories took root. But latterly some political economists have drawn attention to the fact that all these theories were in the highest degree one-sided. For what takes place in the world of commerce and in social life is much more dependent on the love of ease than on the law of competition or the law of getting on in the world—yes, even more than on the laws of conscious egoism. Thus even into political economy a knowledge of the law of slothfulness finds entry—which means that even in this realm one can discern good sense, and a readiness to recognise facts that cannot be overlooked, unless one adopts an ostrich policy towards life.

Love of ease is a general and widespread attribute of mankind. And if one follows up after death the souls who were subject to it, one sees how this love of ease persists, and how for a certain time after death these souls have to live in a region where—as a result of indolence—they become servants of the god or gods of Opposition, those gods who place particular obstacles in the path of evolution. And these again are spirits under the rule of Ahriman. Ahriman has various things to do; one of his tasks, is to conduct out of the spiritual worlds into the physical world the forces which call forth opposition in physical life. Thus men are on the one hand ease-loving, but on the other hand the fate of lovers of ease is such that when they want to do anything they run up against a general cosmic law. Obstacles are everywhere, and even if they are not in the grotesque form once pictured by a German poet, they are there in the most tragic guise. He called them the “malice of things”. This “malice of things” is especially apparent when, for instance, a preacher in the pulpit is in the midst of a tremendously long tirade and a fly alights on his nose, causing him to sneeze violently. That is the “malice of things”. But it appears first in full force when persons who in this sense are the children of misfortune are exposed to it at every step. Friedrich Theodor Vischer once wrote a novel in which someone was continually exposed to this “malice of things”.

In truth, these things rise from the grotesque to the tragic. All such obstacles are directed from the spiritual worlds and the Lord of Opposition is Ahriman. And souls that are lovers of ease make themselves into servants of Ahriman for a certain time between death and a new birth. On the whole it is not so terrible to see the punishment of the devotees of ease as it is to see the souls who are living in servitude to the spirits of illness and. death. But it shows again how moral and natural law intermingle as soon as we come into the higher worlds.

Such are the experiences that are gone through when one has come to the point described yesterday; and a man has to go through these experiences in order that he may also experience other necessary conditions (we shall see later why “necessary”) and so may advance still further in regard to higher experiences. This matter of ascending into the higher worlds is not such that one can say: Today you are beginning your ascent into the higher worlds, and then you will mount upwards stage by stage. For him who wants to become an Initiate, things go forward unnoticed in relation to external happenings amid the affairs and events of ordinary life. He does indeed come stage by stage into the higher worlds, but from this sojourn in the higher worlds he must again come forth and live in the ordinary world. From the experiences in the spiritual worlds, however, he brings with him something into the physical world. He realises, after he has become an Initiate, that while moving around in the physical world he is endowed with feelings and perceptions other than those pertaining to anyone who is not a seer. He need only train himself (and a correct schooling will see to this) not to be misled in ordinary life through the alteration of his perceptions and feelings. He must learn to be a seer only for the higher worlds, and not to bring into the ordinary world the characteristics and attitude of soul needed for the higher worlds. This must be strictly avoided. He should be able to be a seer, while remaining as rational as anyone else in the ordinary physical world.

Hence the least suitable persons for the development of seership are those who from the outset are predisposed to be visionaries. Enthusiasts and intellectual idealists, those who already experience in the physical world that which has its justification in the spiritual world; people who in the physical world “hear the grass grow”, who see everywhere the visions of the dreamer, not the realities perceived by a sober disposition; people who indulge their imagination—there are many more such than is generally supposed—such people are of no use for training in seership. Persons who stand with both feet on solid ground, who understand something of actuality and judge things as they are—these are the people best fitted for developing seership.

This will have indicated how a person should not let feelings and perceptions necessary for the physical world be misled through what he acquires for the ascent into the higher worlds. Quite definite feelings and perceptions remain with him, once he has become a seer; in the physical world he will be too, a different person. But in order that this may do him no harm he must also apply these new feelings and perceptions to things in the external physical world to which he had previously paid no attention or had not noticed. Then he will find—not in a bad sense but emphatically in a good one—that his relations with nature are somewhat altered. For instance, he will feel differently towards the plant world which spreads itself like a carpet over the Earth. Formerly he looked at the plants and was delighted with their greenery, with the wealth of flowers and their colours, with everything that the plant world offered to him as it grows out of the Earth and delights the eyes and perhaps the other senses. Let us not think in this connection of some dull, prosaic person, but of someone who can really enjoy to the full the effect which the beauty of the Earth's plant-cover can evoke in the soul. And do not let us imagine that anyone who has become a seer must forfeit in the very least any part of his feeling for the plant-vesture of the Earth. Something else, however, arises within him. When he looks at the plant world he feels that a certain inner relationship links it with Sun, Moon and Stars. In his feeling and perception the green carpet of plants grows together with the out-there in the Cosmos.

Nowadays men build up plenty of abstract ideas on this subject. Everyone with a mere smattering of learning knows how the Earth's carpet of plants is connected with the activity of the light from the Sun; how the plants cannot grow without the specific action of the Sun's rays. And men have some inkling that not only the Sun's activity has an influence on the plant world, but that the rest of the starry world also has an influence. Certainly some people are incredulous about this, but not so long ago there lived a great and significant thinker who applied himself in a thoroughly scientific way to studying the influence of the Moon on the weather, and so on the vegetation of the Earth. I refer to Gustav Theodor Fechner. Not from the standpoint of any superstition, but from that of quite empirical observation, he tried to show that the influence of the new Moon on rainfall is different from that of the full Moon, and so on. There were many people who wanted to prove their scientific outlook by laughing at Gustav Theodor Fechner and his studies of the Moon. One of those who laughed loudest was the celebrated botanist, Schleiden, who voiced his opinion that it certainly does not depend on the full Moon or the new Moon whether for fourteen days we have more rain or less. Fechner replied (conditions then were somewhat more patriarchal than they are today): “Let the matter be put to the test indirectly through the women; learned men soon begin to quarrel.” Now the two wives, Frau Professor Schleiden and Frau Professor Fechner, always put out tubs in their Leipzig backyards to catch rain-water for washing-day. Fechner proposed that Frau Professor Schleiden should put out her tubs at new Moon, while his own wife put out hers at full Moon, and they would soon see in which period. the greater quantity of rain would fall. And behold, Frau Professor Schleiden was by no means in agreement with her husband, for she caught the smaller quantity of rain-water!

Thus—ironically, one might say—a decision was reached, though we would not want to attach any value to it now. Later on, however, it will emerge that sunlight, sun-heat, and also the other stellar influences, all have effects on the plant world. At first, this is theoretical knowledge. But the seer has direct perception of how influences from the Earth interact with those from stellar space. He regards them ultimately as one, and he feels as a vital occurrence the pouring out of the sunlight upon the vegetation of the Earth, and again the withdrawal of the sunlight. He feels how it is with the plants when the sunlight is withdrawn from them. As one feels sympathy with a child that is very much attached to its mother when the mother is removed from its sight for a while, so does the seer feel sympathy when the sunlight is withdrawn from the plants? This sympathy with the plant world is an experience that comes to the seer; so that when he has reached the point spoken of in the preceding lecture, he acquires perceptions of such a kind that he becomes a participant in the relations between Earth-growth and plant-growth and the Sun and Stars.

Through the birth of this feeling he is adapted for feeling something else besides. He can feel this something when he returns into the physical world from the spiritual world and looks for instance, at a waking or sleeping person. Also when he has, so to speak, laid aside his seer's gift and sees only the physical world and the sleeping person, then, too, comes the feeling that the sleeper has been forsaken by something. This is very similar to the feeling one has when, for example, in autumn the relation of the Sun's rays to the Earth's vegetation changes in the usual way. Quite similar are the feelings towards nature now forsaken by Sun and Stars to the feelings towards the human organism forsaken by its ego and astral body. And now one has the specific experience that in this respect man is independent of his relation to the physical heavens, whereas the plant-growth is dependent on this relationship. Concerning the plants we know that they cannot go to sleep as they like, owing to their inner constitution; they must wait until the Sun sets in the evening, or until autumn comes. Concerning man we know that in our time, and especially under our conditions of civilisation, he is no longer in the least guided by the Sun. For instance, if we had to guide ourselves by the Sun, as do the plants, we could not be assembled here together. The transition, which for the plants is so strictly ruled by the course of the Sun and Stars, has no influence on man. Certainly if we come into primitive rural conditions and see how not only the fowls but also the village folk go to sleep at a certain time and wake at a certain time, we feel as if there were something of a plant-like connection between human beings and the course of the Sun and Stars. But we have to conclude that in the course of human evolution man has emancipated himself from the cosmic course of events. With his physical and etheric bodies he is able to come into the situation which the plant comes to through the position of the Sun and Stars—he comes to it through inner conditions, I will not say by dint of inner free will. A man can have his afternoon nap through his own inner condition; that is he can come out of his physical and etheric bodies. The plant cannot have an afternoon sleep at will; it has to regulate itself entirely in accordance with the course of the stars. But what is man when as physical and etheric body he lies asleep, with his astral body and his ego outside? His physical and etheric bodies then have the value of the plant. A physical and an etheric body are what the plant has. Considering all this, you may say: A plant grows gradually into connection with the Sun and the starry world, becomes one with them. Hence we must direct our feeling from the plant to the world of the Stars and Sun. This same direction of feeling applies to the sleeping man, who also consists of physical body and etheric body, and has the value of a plant in relation to his ego and astral body, for these, quite independently of the Sun's position, are outside his physical and etheric bodies when he sleeps, just as the physical Sun is outside the physical body and etheric body of the plant.

What I have here explained to you is experienced by the seer. Now when, proceeding from such perceptions, a man deliberately brings about the independence of the ego and astral body from the etheric and physical bodies; when he has got so far as deliberately to make the physical body and the etheric body into a kind of plant by passing out of them, then he comes to know something very strange—it is as if the Sun were speaking, as if it were looking down on the plants and observing itself in relation to them, and then saying: Yes, this physical and this etheric body of the plants belong to me, for they need what I can send them! Exactly as the Sun might speak to the plant growing below, so can the ego of a person say of his physical and etheric bodies: “They belong to me as the plant does to the Sun; I am like a Sun to the physical and etheric bodies.” A Sun to the physical and etheric body—so does a man learn of necessity to speak of his ego. And just as he learns to speak of his ego with reference to his physical and etheric bodies as the Sun would speak to the plant, so does he learn to speak of his astral body as the Moon, and also the planets, would have to speak to the plant. That is a quite special and important experience in the Mysteries. It was cultivated as a real and immediate experience, first in the Mysteries of Zarathustra and then wherever the world was developing, right on to the Mysteries of the Holy Grail.

This experience was always called “Seeing the Sun at midnight”, because a man had it most clearly—especially at the time of the Egyptian Mysteries—when in sleep he saw the Sun spiritually at midnight and felt himself united with the forces of the Sun in the manner described. It was an experiencing of the Sun-element in one's own ego, as a Sun-force that shines upon the physical and etheric bodies. This, then, was a third experience common to all the different Mysteries. Common to them all were, and are, the “Pressing forward to the boundaries of Death”, the “Experiencing of the Elementary World”, and now “Seeing the Sun at midnight”. But it must be clearly understood that at the moment when the seer feels himself isolated and as though sun-like or star-like in relation to his own etheric and physical bodies, he no longer feels the Sun and Stars only in their physical substantiality but becomes acquainted with the spiritual beings and worlds belonging to them. The experiencing of the Cosmos is an experience in the spiritual worlds—one must be quite clear about that.

Now in order to grow up correctly into the higher worlds, and to have the experiences which correspond with the spiritual realities, it is important and necessary that one should first gain acquaintance with the quite different nature of the spiritual world as compared with the physical world. One learns enough of this when, as a seer, one can test and observe the consequences of indolence, or of a lack of conscience for the experience of the soul in the time between death and a new birth, and much else besides. Through these things the seer must, so to speak, open out his soul for conditions essentially different from those on the physical plane. Only then is he ripe for gaining living experience of the spiritual Cosmos, for recognising the inner connection of the ego and the astral body with the Cosmos. Directly one comes to the experience that man, in regard to the highest members of his being, belongs not only to the Earth but is at home in the whole Cosmos, then all previous theorising is seen as a mere playing with words. One knows then that every person, when on going to sleep in the evening he passes out of his physical and etheric bodies, enters into participation with cosmic forces. He seeks strength for himself out of the whole universe, and on reawaking brings back the forces he has gathered during sleep in order to use them in the physical world. The connection with the Cosmos is experienced. at a quite definite stage of the Mysteries. From this stage we will go on tomorrow.

When a man of our time goes through an occult training which leads him to such experiences as were described in the last two lectures, he enters by means of this training into the spiritual worlds; and there he experiences certain facts and meets with certain beings. The phrase, “To see the Sun at Midnight”, is fundamentally only an expression for spiritual facts and for the meeting with spiritual beings who are connected with the Sun-existence. But when this man of our time ascends into the higher worlds, he goes through certain experiences which one cannot describe otherwise than by saying: A man experiences much that is significant in the higher worlds through such an ascent, but he also feels himself forsaken and alone. He feels that he can gather up his experience in some such words as these: “Much, very much, you are seeing here, but the very thing you must long for above all else, after all you have gone through—that you are not able to experience.” And he would like to question all the beings whom he meets after such an ascent concerning certain secrets he longs to understand. That is the feeling he has. But all these beings, who unveil much that is immense and powerful, remain silent when he wants to learn from them about those mysteries which he must now regard as the most important of all. Hence the man of our time, when he has thus mounted to the higher worlds, feels it to be above all painful that in spite of all the splendour, in spite of his meeting with those glorious beings, he has an immense emptiness in his inner life. And if nothing else were to happen, a protracted experience of this loneliness, this forlorn condition in the higher worlds, would finally bring about something like despair in his soul.

Now at this point something can happen—and usually does happen if the ascent has been undertaken according to the true rules of Initiation—which may be a protection from this despair, at first, though not permanently. Something like a remembrance may arise in the soul, or one might say a retrospect into far-off times of the past, a kind of reading in the Akashic Record about long-past happenings. And what is then experienced (one cannot characterise these things except by trying to clothe them in approximate words) might be put in the following way: “When as a modern man you ascend into these higher worlds, you are met by forlorn-ness, despair. But pictures call up for you long-past happenings, showing you that in distant times men ascended into the worlds into which you now wish to rise. Yes, from these memory pictures you may well come to recognise that in earlier incarnations your own soul took part in what these men experienced when formerly they rose into the higher worlds. It might even appear that the soul of a present-day man, in contemplating these pictures, looks at experiences of his own, gone through in times long since past. Then in those remote ages this soul would have been an Initiate. In other cases, the man would know only that his soul had been connected with those who as Initiates had then risen into the higher worlds; but his soul now feels lonely and forsaken, whereas those once initiated souls did not feel lonely and forsaken in the same worlds, but experienced innermost bliss. He will recognise further that this was so because in those ancient times souls were differently constituted, and for this reason they experienced differently what they beheld in the higher worlds. What is it, then, that is really experienced?

The experience now in question is such that it brings before the soul beings of higher worlds who are working upon the sense-world from the super-sensible worlds; beings are perceived who stand behind our sense-world; conditions are seen such as were described yesterday. But if one tries to summarise all one sees, it can be characterised in some such way as the following: The seer feels himself to be in the higher worlds, and gazing down, as it were, into the sense-world; he feels himself united in some way with spirits who have passed through the Gate of Death, and, with them, too, he gazes downward, and sees how they will again employ their forces in order to enter physical existence. He looks down and sees how forces are sent out of the super-sensible worlds in order to bring about the processes of the different kingdoms of nature in the sense-world. He sees the whole current of events which are prepared for our world out of the higher worlds. Because in the course of a sojourn of this kind in the higher worlds he is outside his physical and etheric bodies, he looks down upon them and sees also those forces in the Cosmos, in the whole spiritual universe, which are working on the physical and etheric bodies of man. And through the activity of the beings into whose company he has entered, he learns to understand how physical and etheric bodies come into existence within the physical world. He learns to understand this thoroughly. He comes to understand how certain beings who are associated with the Sun send their activity into the Earth and work on engendering the physical and etheric bodies of man. He learns also to know certain beings associated with the Moon-existence, who work down out of the Cosmos in order likewise to co-operate in bringing about the physical and etheric bodies of human beings.

Then, however, arises a great longing, a longing that becomes terrible for a man of the present time. It is the longing to know something of how the astral body and the ego are born out of the Cosmos, how they come into existence. Whereas the seer can discern exactly how the physical body and the etheric body arise out of the forces of the Cosmos, completely hidden from him is everything that could point to how the astral body and the ego of man are brought into being. In deepest darkness and secrecy is veiled everything that has to do with the astral body and ego. Thus the feeling grows: What you are in your innermost nature, what you yourself really are, is veiled from your spiritual sight; and that in which you sheathe yourself when you are living in the physical world is disclosed to you precisely enough!

All this is experienced by a man of the present time when he rises to higher worlds in the manner described. It was experienced. also by those who in ancient times undertook the ascent. But they did not feel the great longing we have spoken of: they had no need to behold their innermost being, for they were so constituted that they felt a deep inward satisfaction in perceiving how the spiritual beings whose company they had reached were at work in building physical and etheric bodies on the Earth. In contemplating how these beings worked down from the Sun to accomplish this task, the souls who were initiated in past times found their highest satisfaction. It must be added that the work performed by these beings presented itself under a different aspect in those times; hence the satisfaction it could afford. In our time the work appears in such a light that one asks: Wherefore all this preparation of the physical and etheric bodies, if one cannot understand what these sheaths conceal? That is the difference between a person of the present time and a man of old. And the period in the past which was connected particularly with these experiences is that in which Zarathustra initiated his pupils and guided them up into the higher worlds. If aspirants were to be led up into the higher worlds in the same way today as they were by Zarathustra, they would feel that emptiness and loneliness to which reference has been made. In the time of Zarathustra those who were to be initiated experienced the working of Ahura Mazdao on the physical body and the etheric body, and in the unveiling of this wonderful mystery they felt bliss and satisfaction, for they were so disposed that they felt inwardly stirred when they saw how the sheaths which man needs if he is to accomplish his Earth-mission are brought into existence. In this they found satisfaction.

Thus it was with the Zarathustrian Initiation. For the initiates could “See the Sun at Midnight”; that is, they were not looking upon the physical form of the Sun but upon the spiritual beings who are linked with the Sun. They saw emanating from the Sun the forces which play into the physical body; saw how the forces which the Sun is able to send forth mould the human head and form the different parts of the human brain. For it would be folly for anyone to think that a marvellous construction such as the human brain could come into existence merely through terrestrial forces; solar forces must work into it. These forces bring together the complex lobular formations of the human brain, poised above the human face. Engaged in this task are quite numerous beings; Zarathustra gave them the name of “Amshaspands”. They furnish the stimulus for the forces of the Cosmos which make possible the building of the human brain and the upper nerves of the spinal cord, with the exception of the lower twenty-eight pairs of nerves. Then Zarathustra also pointed out how other currents flow from beings who are linked with the life of the Moon; he showed how wonderfully the structure of the Cosmos is adapted so that from twenty-eight groups of entities—“Izeds” as they are called—currents proceed which build up the spinal cord with its twenty-eight lower pairs of nerve fibres. Thus are physical and etheric bodies formed out of currents which stream forth from cosmic beings.

They were powerful impressions that the initiates of Zarathustra received in this way. And in receiving them as an expression of the work of Ahura Mazdao, they felt an inner bliss concerning all that is thus accomplished. in the world. If a modern man were to raise himself in the same way into the higher worlds, he would of course also be capable of wonderment; he, too, would be able to begin to experience the same bliss. But gradually he would pass on to the feeling which one cannot clothe in words other than these: “What is the purpose of it all? I know nothing about that being who passes from incarnation to incarnation! I know solely about those beings who in each new incarnation build up sheaths out of the Cosmos, but they build only sheaths.” That was precisely the essence of the Zarathustra Initiation: its revelation of the connection between the earthly part of man and the life of the Sun. It was characteristic of the time of Zarathustra that men were able to absorb into their occult knowledge those mysteries we have now described.

Again, it was in a different way that souls in ancient Egypt entered the higher worlds at Initiation—souls, for example, who went through the Hermes Initiation. We have already spoken about all these things; but in these lectures they will be presented in rather more detail than was possible previously. When in ancient Egyptian times souls were raised into the higher worlds through the Hermes Initiation, then—as it must always be after Initiation—they felt themselves to be outside their physical and etheric bodies and knew that they were now within a world of spiritual facts and spiritual beings. Wide was the circuit of vision through which these souls were then led. They were shown the individual beings and facts, as can happen also with the soul of today. But one must not think of it as though they went about on physical feet; it was their vision that was guided, as if a person's sight were to be led all round a region as wide as the universe. Thus it was in this Initiation.

Then came a moment of experience wherein the initiates felt as though a traveler in a country encircled by the sea had reached the shore. They knew they had come to the farthest point attainable. In the Egyptian Initiation they experienced what one cannot clothe in other words than these: “In your vision you have been led far and wide through cosmic realms and have come to know the beings and forces that work on your physical body and your etheric body. But now you are entering the most holy place. You are entering a region where you can feel yourself united with the Being who works with others on the part of you that goes from one incarnation to another, and on your astral body.” It is a significant experience that occurs at this point, for after it all things become in some sense different.

For the initiate, after that, one possibility is closed. In the world he has now entered, on the shores of cosmic existence, he is no longer able to make use of his former ways of thinking and judging. If he cannot cast off all this earthly, physical power of judgment; if he cannot disregard what has guided him so far, then he cannot have this experience on the borders of existence; he cannot feel himself united with that Being who is active when the human being as spirit and soul approaches his birth into a new incarnation, and seeks nation, family and parents in order to clothe himself with new sheaths. All the beings whom he has already come to know, and who make it clear to him how the etheric and physical sheaths arise and are formed out of the Cosmos, are unable to explain what kind of forces are working in that Being with whom he now feels himself united, and who is building and weaving in the innermost astral being of the man himself. It becomes quite apparent to the seer, as it was to the Egyptian soul who was going through the Hermes Initiation, that now, after the soul is outside its sheaths and has passed through the “cosmic existence” already alluded to, it feels itself united with a Being. The soul can feel the qualities of this Being, only it feels itself as if it were within these qualities and not outside this Being, and it can know that this Being is really there, but that it is at the same time within this Being. And the first impression that the aspirant receives of this Being is such that one says to oneself: In this Being lie the forces which bring the soul from one incarnation to another, and also the forces which illuminate the soul between death and a new birth. All that is there within. But when there surges towards you a force like unto spiritual cosmic Warmth, one that conveys the soul from death to a new birth; and when there presses towards you the spiritual Light that illumines souls between death and a new birth, and when you feel how this Warmth and this Light stream out from the Being with whom you are united, you are now in a quite peculiar situation. You have had to drink the waters of Lethe, to forget the art of understanding which formerly guided you through the physical world, to lay aside your former power of judgment, your intellectuality, for here these would only lead you astray; and as yet you have gained nothing of a new kind. In your experience of the cosmic Warmth which brings the soul to a new birth, you are within the ocean of forces which illuminate the soul between death and a new birth. You experience the force and the light which issue from this Being. You behold this Being in such manner that you can do no other than ask of it: “Who art Thou? For Thou alone canst tell me who Thou art, and only then can I know that which takes the essential inward part of me as a human being from death to a new birth. Only when Thou tellest me this can I know what my innermost nature is as man!” And mute remains the Being with whom the aspirant knows himself to be united. He feels with the deepest part of himself that he is united with the deepest part of the Being. The urge towards self-knowledge arises, to know what a man is—and yet the Being remains silent. The aspirant must first have stood for a while before this silent Being, and have felt deeply the longing to have the riddle of the universe solved after a new manner, as it never can be on the physical Earth; he must have brought into this world, to this Being, as a force out of himself, the deep longing to have the riddle of the universe solved in a way foreign to physical existence, and the soul must entirely live in the longing to have the cosmic enigma solved in this manner. Then, when he has felt himself united with the mute spiritual Being, and has lived in him with longing for the solution that we have indicated, then he feels that there streams forth into this spiritual Being with whom he is united, the force of his own longing. And because this force of the aspirant's own longing for the solution of the riddle streams out into the spiritual Being, after a time it gives birth to something like another being projected from it. But what is born is not after the manner of an earthly birth, as the aspirant knows at once through his own vision. An earthly birth arises “in time”; it enters into the stream of time. But concerning the birth from this Being, the aspirant knows: It is born from Him, it has been born from Him since primordial times—always, and this birth continues from primordial ages up to the present. Only this birth-process of one being from another has hitherto not been visible to man; until now it has been withheld from his sight. This birth-process consists in his: it is really continuous, but man, owing to his having prepared himself by means of his yearning for the solving of the riddle, now sees it—it is now perceived in the spiritual world. The aspirant knows this. Thus he does not say: Now a being is born, but: From the Being with whom you have united yourself, ever since primordial times, a being has always been born; but now the process of the being's birth, and the being itself who is born, are perceptible to you.

What I have now pictured to you, as far as it can be done in the words of our language, is that to which the Hermes Initiator led. his pupils. And the feelings that I have just described (I might say with stammering words, for the things contain so much that the words of our tongue can express them only in a stammering way)—these feelings were the experiences of the so-called Egyptian Isis Initiation.

When the aspirant who was going through the Isis Initiation had reached the furthest shore of existence and had gazed upon the beings who build up the physical body and the etheric body, when he had stood before the silent Goddess from whom Warmth and Light come forth for the innermost of the human soul, he said to himself: “That is Isis. That is the mute and silent Goddess whose countenance can be unveiled to no-one who sees only with mortal eyes, but only to those who have worked themselves through to the shores which have been described, so that they can see with those eyes which go from incarnation to incarnation and are no longer mortal. For an impenetrable veil hides the form of Isis from mortal eyes.”

When the aspirant had thus gazed upon Isis and had experienced in his soul the feeling described, he understood what has been described. as the birth. What was this “birth?” He understood that it can be designated as “The resounding through all space of the Music of the Spheres,” and as the merging of the tones of this Sphere-music with the creative cosmic Word—the Word which permeates space and pours into the beings everything that has to be so poured into them, as the soul has to be poured into the physical and etheric body after passing through the life between death and a new birth. Everything that has to be thus poured out from the spiritual world into the physical world, so that what is poured out acquires the inward character of soul, is poured in from the Harmony of the Spheres resounding through space. The Harmony of the Spheres gradually assumes such a form that through the inner significance it expresses it can be understood as the Cosmic Word—the Word which ensouls the beings that are vitalised by the forces of Warmth and Light which pour into those bodies that arise from the divine forces and beings perceived with the vision already attained.

Thus did the aspirant look into the world of the Harmony of the Spheres, the world of the Cosmic Word; thus did he look into the world which is the veritable home of the human soul during the time between death and a new birth. That which is hidden deep in the physical earthly existence of man, but lives between death and a new birth in the splendour of the Light and Warmth; that which deeply veils itself in the physical world as the world of the Harmony of the Spheres and the Cosmic Word, was experienced in the Hermes-Initiation as coming to birth from Isis. There Isis stands before the aspirant, Isis herself on the one side, and on the other side the being she has borne, whom one must speak of as Cosmic Tones and the Cosmic Word. The aspirant feels himself in the company of Isis and of the Cosmic Word born of her. And this “Cosmic Word” is in the first place the appearing of Osiris. “Isis in association with Osiris”: thus do they appear before direct vision; for in the very oldest Egyptian Initiation it was said that Osiris was at the same time spouse and son of Isis. And in the older Egyptian Initiation the essential thing was that the aspirant, through this Initiation, experienced the mysteries of soul-life, which remains united with man during the period between death and a new birth. Through the union with Osiris it was possible to recognise oneself in one's deeper significance as man.

So it was brought to pass that the Egyptian Initiate met the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Tones as the elucidators of his own being in the spiritual world. But that was up to a certain point of time only in the old Egyptian period. After that it ceased. There was a great difference—this is shown also by the Akashic Records when one looks back into ancient times—between the experiences of the Egyptian Initiate in the ancient Egyptian temples and what he experienced later on.

Let us bring before our souls what the Initiate experienced in these later times. He could still be led through the vast spaces of the universe to the confines of existence; there he could meet with all the beings who build up the physical and etheric bodies of man; there he could approach the shores of being and could have the vision of the mute, silent Isis, and could apprehend in her the Cosmic Warmth which contains for man the forces that lead from death to a new birth. There he could also become acquainted with the Light which illumines the soul between death and a new birth; and the longing arose to hear the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony; longing lived in the soul when it united itself with the silent Isis. But the Goddess remained dumb! In that later age no Osiris could be born, no Cosmic Harmony resounded, no Cosmic Word expounded that which now showed itself only as Cosmic Warmth and Cosmic Light. And the soul of the aspirant could not have expressed. these experiences otherwise than by saying something like the following; “Thus, 0 Goddess, do I look up in grief to thee, tormented by the thirst for knowledge, the yearning for knowledge, and thou, thou remainest silent and speechless towards the tormented and sorrow-laden soul. And this soul, because it cannot understand itself, seems to itself as though extinguished, as if it must lose its very existence.” And through her mourning countenance the Goddess expressed her powerlessness to bring forth the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony. The aspirant saw in her that she had been deprived of the power to bring forth Osiris and to have him at her side, Osiris as Son and Spouse. He felt that Osiris had been torn from Isis.

Those who went through this Initiation and came back into the physical world had a serious but resigned world-outlook. They knew her, the Holy Isis, but they felt themselves as “Sons of the Widow”. And the point of time between the old Initiation, wherein one was able to experience the birth of Osiris in those ancient Egyptian Mysteries, and that wherein one met only the mute, mourning Isis and could become a Son of the Widow in the Egyptian Mysteries; the point of time which separates these two phases of the Egyptian Initiation—when was it? It was the time in which Moses lived. For the karma of Egypt was fulfilled in such a way that not only was Moses initiated into the Mysteries of Egypt, but he took them with him. When he led his people out of Egypt he took with him the part of the Egyptian Initiation which added the Osiris-Initiation to the mourning Isis, as she later became. Such was the transition from the Egyptian civilisation to that of the Old Testament. Truly, Moses had carried away the secret of Osiris, the secret of the Cosmic Word! And if he had not left behind the powerless Isis there could not have resounded for him, in the way that he had to understand it for the sake of his people, that great, significant Word, “I AM THE I AM”, (“Ejeh asher Ejeh”). So was the Egyptian Mystery carried over to the ancient Hebrew Mystery.

We have tried now to show, using such words as are available for these matters, what the experiences were like in the Mysteries of Zarathustra and of Egypt. These things do not lend themselves to intellectual presentation. The essential point is that the soul goes through experiences corresponding to what I have endeavoured to describe. And it is important to enter into what took place in the soul of the aspirant in the later Egyptian Initiation: to feel how he raised his soul into the higher worlds and met Isis with the mourning look and sorrow-stricken countenance, the result of her having to look on the human soul which was well able to yearn and thirst for knowledge of the spiritual worlds, but could not be satisfied.

Thus also certain Greek Initiates experienced the same Being of whom the Egyptians spoke as the later Isis. Hence the seriousness of the Greek Initiation, where it appears in its solemnity. What had been experienced in earlier times in the super-sensible worlds—that which gave significance to those super-sensible worlds in that they resounded to the Cosmic Word and Cosmic Tone—was no longer there. It was there no more ... The super-sensible worlds were as though desolate and forsaken by the Cosmic Word, those worlds into which in earlier Initiations man had been able to enter. The Zarathustrian Initiate could still feel satisfied when in these worlds he encountered the Beings already described, for he felt himself fulfilled by the Cosmic Light, which he perceived as Ahura Mazdao. He perceived it as masculine, of solar nature; the Egyptian perceived it as feminine, lunar. And at a higher stage in the Zarathustrian Initiation he perceived also the Cosmic Word, not so concretely as if born from such a Being as Isis; but he experienced it and he knew the Harmony of the Spheres and the Cosmic Word.

In the later Egyptian time—and also in other lands during this late Egyptian time—when a man raised himself into the higher worlds, his feelings were quite similar to those of a present-day man, as described at the beginning of the present lecture. He rises up into the higher worlds, becomes acquainted with all the Beings who co-operate in building up the physical and etheric bodies, but he feels himself forsaken and alone if nothing else appears, because he has something in himself that longs for the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony, and the Cosmic Word and the Cosmic Harmony cannot resound for him. today such a man feels lonely and forsaken; in the later Egyptian Age he did not only feel forsaken and desolate, but, if he was a true “Son of the Widow” and was out of the physical and etheric bodies and in the spiritual worlds, he felt himself as a human soul in such a way that be was constrained to clothe his feeling in the words: The God is preparing to leave the worlds which you have always trodden when you felt the Cosmic Word; the God has ceased to be active there. And ever more and more did this feeling condense itself into what one may call the super-sensible equivalent of that which one encounters in the sense-world as the death of man—when one sees a person die, when one knows that he is passing out of the physical world. And now, when the Initiate of the later Egyptian Age rose up into the higher worlds, he was a partaker in the gradual dying of the God. As one feels with a person when he is passing into the spiritual world, so did the Initiate of the later Egyptian period feel how the God took leave of the spiritual world in order to pass over into another world. This was the significant and remarkable part of the later Egyptian Initiation—that when the aspirant raised his life into the spiritual worlds, it was not into rapture and bliss, but in order to partake in the gradual passing away of a God who was present in these higher worlds as Cosmic Word and Cosmic Harmony. Out of this frame of mind there gradually condensed the myth of Osiris, who was torn away from Isis and conveyed to Asia, and for whom Isis mourned.

With this lecture we have placed ourselves on one bank of the stream which separates the evolution of humanity into two parts. We have come from the direction of this evolution as far as the bank; we stand upon it, and what this standing there signifies has been brought home to us through the frame of mind, of the later Egyptian Initiate, the “Son of the Widow”, who was initiated in order to experience mourning and resignation. It will now be our task, in the boat of Spiritual Science, to cross the stream which separates the two shores of human evolution.

In the last lecture we shall see what is on the other shore—when we push off our boat from the place where we have experienced the mourning for the God who is dying in the Heavens, when we leave that place in order to traverse the stream and arrive at the other bank. When the boat of spiritual science has carried us across, with the remembrance that we have previously experienced the dying of a God in the Heavens, we shall see what is offered to our view on the other side.