The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report in an unknown Cologne newspaper

Birth and death in the life of the soul. A look at the theosophical worldview. On Monday evening, Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave a lecture on this topic at the Theosophical Society (Cologne Section), which was attended by almost 100 people in the Isabellensaal of the Gürzenich. The thought process of the captivating two-hour speech is briefly summarized here.

Those who are not completely absorbed in material life will have to ask themselves the questions: What happens to us after death, what were we before we were born? These questions have been raised by the oldest philosophers. From the conversation of the dying Socrates with his students, it becomes clear to us that Socrates firmly believed in the continued life of his soul. This belief has been further developed by his student Plato. He asked the question: “Why do we live?” It was clear to him that the purpose of our life could not be fulfilled with the death of the body. Through birth, our life is essentially already predetermined. The environment into which we are born determines whether we live in wealth or poverty, in joy or sorrow, whether our spirit will progress or remain at a lower level. Should death be the fulfillment of life for the poor and ignorant? Only rarely does a person die without desires; they indicate that there must be another life for us in which we can achieve higher development. The body is indeed perishable, but our spirit is eternal. It can never be a product of the body. The body draws its nourishment from the physical, while the spirit draws its from the spiritual. What the spirit has absorbed does not perish. The truth and goodness that allow the spirit to reach a higher level are eternal. The outstanding physiologist Wilhelm Preyer said: “Everything physical perishes and disintegrates into its component parts, but the power and the movement remain.” Speaker adds to this saying: and the spirit is lasting. If we believe in the eternity of the soul, we must also assume that our soul continues to develop and that there is a highest level of this development. To achieve this, the soul will embody itself again and again. The doctrine of reincarnation has been more or less expressed by the founders of the great religions, and our great sages believed in it. The speaker reminds the audience of Giordano Bruno, Lessing, Goethe and of natural scientists of the past and the present. Even in the early centuries of Christianity, the belief in reincarnation prevailed. But in the Middle Ages it was lost. At that time, man knew only heaven and earth. Today, however, when we have progressed far in our knowledge of nature, it has become necessary to study our soul again on the basis of this view of nature. Like the lily in the field, which fades away and leaves behind a seed in which all the power to bring forth a new plant like itself lies dormant, so the soul of man returns again and again in a new body. These are not speculative thoughts that have led to this belief, but what highly developed people have seen with the spiritual eye. This study of the soul is called Theosophy. In a narrative style, Redner now provides insight into the theosophical worldview. He explains how a person consists of three parts. The outer shell is the perishable body, which encloses the soul, which gives one the ability to grasp the perceptions of the outside world, to feel joy and sorrow, love and hate. These soul-substances separate from the body soon after death and spread out into the universe. But the core of the human being is formed by the spirit. The spirit, which is only possessed by humans and not by highly developed animals, is eternal and will always return to a human body until it has reached the highest level and entered the spiritual realm.

The speaker's remarks were met with enthusiastic applause. It may interest you to know that Dr. Steiner was formerly a librarian at the Goethe Archive in Weimar and was involved in editing the scientific journals for the great Weimar collection.

It is repeatedly emphasized that Theosophy is not something new, not something that has only come to mankind in our time. But it is particularly interesting that even personalities close to us face it in such a way that we may count them among the spirits we can call “Theosophists”. Alongside Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing, Goethe appears as one of the most outstanding Theosophists. Some people, however, might object to this, because there is not much evidence of theosophy in Goethe's works that we know of. In Goethe's time, it was not yet possible to spread esoteric truths throughout the world. The “higher truths” were only disseminated in a limited society, for example, the Rosicrucians. No one who was not prepared was admitted into this society. But those who belonged to it spoke of it in all kinds of allusions. Thus Goethe at the most diverse places of his writings. Only those who are equipped with theosophical wisdom can read Goethe correctly. For example, “Faust” cannot be understood without that.

The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's apocalypse, his revelation, in whose symbolic representation the deepest secrets are contained. That Goethe reveals his theosophical worldview in the “Fairy Tale” can only be understood if one knows the reason for it. Schiller had invited Goethe to collaborate on the “Horen”. Schiller himself had contributed the essay “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” to this journal. It poses the question: How does the person who lives in the everyday arrive at the highest ideals, at a mediation between the supersensible and the sensible? Schiller saw in beauty a descent of the highest wisdom into the sensible. He was able to express in a wonderfully vivid way what seemed to him to be a bridge leading from the sensual to the supersensual. Goethe now says that he cannot express himself in philosophical terms about the highest questions of existence, but he wants to do so in a great picture. At that time he contributed the “Fairytale” to the Horen, in which he attempted to solve these questions in his own way.

Goethe also expressed himself in a thoroughly theosophical sense elsewhere. He had already incorporated his views into “Faust” in his early youth. Between his studies in Leipzig and his stay in Strasbourg, Goethe received an initiation from a personality who was deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, he speaks in a mystical, theosophical language. In the first part of “Faust” there is a strange phrase that is put in quotation marks: “the sage speaks”. Goethe was already attached to the theosophical idea that there are beings among us today who are already further along than the rest of humanity, that they are the leaders of people from supersensible spheres, although they are also embodied in the body. They have attained a knowledge that goes far beyond what can be understood with the senses. The passage in question reads:

Only now do I realize what the wise man says:
'The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, disciple, unwearied,
Bathe the earthly breast in the morning light!

When you get to know Jacob Böhme, you get to know one of the sources from which Goethe drew his theosophical wisdom. [J. Boehme's “Aurora” is the dawn, the astral world.] We can only understand some of Goethe's work if we grasp it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law that we call karma, and also of those exalted beings:

According to eternal, ironclad
great laws
we must all
complete
our existence

Hail to the unknown,
higher beings
we sense!

If anyone now wants real proof of Goethe's theosophical way of thinking, let them read the poem under “God and the World”, called “Howard's Memorial”. The first line reads:

When Gottheit Camarupa high and lofty

— Kama Rupa is the principle of man, the astral body, as we know it from theosophical teachings. When Goethe spoke intimately to those with whom he was united in the lodge, he spoke of ideal divine beings who shine forth as examples for mankind. This was intended for his close circle, for example, what he says in the poem “Symbolum”:

From the other side
the voices of the spirits are calling you,
the voices of the masters
Do not neglect to practise
the forces of good.

He speaks openly of the masters when he speaks intimately to his fellow masons.

But it is the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily that most profoundly introduces us to his view. In it, we find a depiction of the three realms in which human beings live: the physical, the soul or astral world, and the spiritual world. The symbol for the astral or soul world is water. For Goethe, water always represents the soul. This is the case in his poem about the soul and fate:

Soul of man,
How like thou art to water!
Fate of man,
How like thou art to wind!

He also knew the mental realm that man experiences between two states of embodiment, between death and birth, the Devachan, the realm of the gods. Man strives unceasingly for this realm. He fights here on earth to reach this realm.

The alchemists regarded the chemical processes as a symbol for the striving for this spiritual realm. They call this realm: the realm of the lily. Man is called the lion who fights for this realm, and the lily is the bride of the lion. Goethe also hinted at this in “Faust”:

My father was a dark
man of honor who, in his own way, reflected on nature and its sacred circles
with sincerity, but in a whimsical way;
who, in the company of adepts,
locked himself in the black kitchen
and, according to endless recipes,
he poured together the adverse. Then a red lion, a bold suitor, was married to the lily in the lukewarm bath.

Here Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit (in the lukewarm bath is in the soul bath. The soul is the water, the red lion is the human being). In the “Fairytale”, Goethe also depicted the three realms: the sensual realm as the one bank; the soul realm as the river; the Devachan — spiritual realm — as the opposite bank, on which the garden of the beautiful lily is located, which symbolically represents the Devachan for the alchemists. Man's entire relationship to the three realms is brought into a symbolically beautiful presentation. We have come over from the spiritual realm and strive back to it. Goethe has a ferryman bring the will-o'-the-wisps from the spiritual realm to the sensual realm. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but not bring them back. We came over without our will, but we cannot go back the same way. We have to work our way back into the spiritual realm.

The will-o'-the-wisps live on gold. They absorb this gold. It penetrates their bodies. But they immediately throw it off in all directions. They want to throw the gold at the ferryman as a reward. But he says that the river cannot tolerate the gold; it would foam up wildly. Gold always represents wisdom. The will-o'-the-wisps are people who seek wisdom but do not unite with its essence, instead regurgitating it undigested. The river represents the soul's life, the sum of human instincts, drives, passions. If the gold of wisdom is carelessly thrown into the river of passions, the soul is disturbed, stirred up.

Goethe always pointed out that man must first undergo catharsis, purification, in order to become ripe for the reception of wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into unpurified passion, the passion becomes fanatical, and people then remain trapped in their lower ego. The ascent of Kama to Manas is dangerous if it is not connected with a sacrifice of the lower self. Regarding this, Goethe says in the “West-Eastern Divan”:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and Become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

The human being must be willing to sacrifice himself.

The will-o'-the-wisps are still caught in the Ahamkara, in the lower self. Wisdom cannot tolerate this. The soul life must slowly be purified and slowly ascend. In the meadow, the will-o'-the-wisps throw gold around. There they meet the snake. It consumes the pieces of gold. It makes them one with itself. It has the power not to make its ego proud and selfish, not to strive upwards in a vertical, arrogant way, but to move in a horizontal line in the crevices of the rocks and gradually to attain perfection. A temple is depicted, which is located in the crevices of the earth. The snake has already been roaming back and forth through it, groping and sensing that mysterious beings dwell there.

But now the old man comes with the lamp. The snake has become luminous because of the gold. The temple is illuminated by its radiance. The old man's lamp has the property that it only shines where there is already light. There it shines with a very special light. So on the one hand there is the snake that has become luminous because of the gold, and on the other hand there is the man with the lamp, which also shines. The light on both sides makes everything visible in the temple. In the corners are four kings, a golden, a silver, a bronze and a mixed king. The snake could only find these by touching them before, but now they have become visible to it through their own glow. They are the three higher principles of man and the four lower ones. The iron king is Atma, the divine Self; the silver king is Budhi, the love through which man can communicate with all men; and the golden king is Manas, the wisdom that radiates out into the world and that can absorb this radiant wisdom.

When man has acquired wisdom unselfishly, he can see things in their true essence without the veil of Maya. The snake now clearly sees the three higher principles of man. The golden king is Manas, just as the gold everywhere signifies Manas. The four lower principles are represented, symbolized, by the mixed king. In the lower principles, too, Atma, Budhi and Manas have moved into the sphere of appearance, but disharmoniously. Only when it is purified does something develop that cannot exist in disharmony. The temple is the place of initiation, the secret school that only those who bring the light themselves, who are as selfless as the snake, can enter. The temple is to be revealed one day, rising above the river. It is the realm of the future, towards which we are all striving. The secret places of learning shall be led up. Everything that man is shall strive upwards, dissolve in harmony, strive towards the higher principles. What was once taught in the mysteries shall become an obvious secret. The wanderers shall go over and across the river, from the sensual to the supersensible world and back again. All people will be united in harmony.

The old man with the lamp represents where man can already gain knowledge today without having reached the summit of wisdom, namely through the powers of piety, of the mind, the powers of faith. Faith needs light from outside if it is to truly lead to the higher mysteries. The serpent and the old man with the lamp have the powers of the spirit, which already guide [the soul] today and lead into the future. He who already feels these powers today knows this from certain secrets. The old man therefore says that he knows three secrets. But the fourth secret is spoken of in the strangest way. The serpent hisses something in his ear. Then the old man calls out:

The time has come!

The time has come when a great multitude of people will have grasped which is the way. The serpent has said that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point where it has recognized that the human being must first die in order to become:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

To be in the full sense of the word, man can only through love, devotion, sacrifice. The snake is ready for that. This will be revealed when man is ready for this sacrifice. Then the temple will stand by the river. The will-o'-the wisp have not been able to pay off their debt; they had to promise the ferryman to pay it later. The river only takes the fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. The will-o'-the wisp come to the old man's wife and behave very strangely there. They have licked up the gold from the walls. They want to stuff themselves full of wisdom and give it back. The pug dog eats some of the gold and dies, as all living things must perish from it. It cannot absorb the wisdom as the snake absorbs and transforms it, so it has a killing effect. The old woman has to promise the will-o'-the-wisps to pay off her debt to the ferryman.

When the old man comes home with the lamp, he sees what has happened. He tells the old woman to keep her promise, but also to take the dead pug to the beautiful lily because she brings everything dead back to life. The old woman goes to the ferryman with the basket. There she encounters two strange things. She finds the great giant on the way, who has the peculiarity of letting his shadow cross the river in the evening, so that the traveler can then cross the river on his shadow. In addition, the path over is conveyed when the snake arches over at midday. The giant can mediate the transition, but so can the snake when the sun is at its highest, when man elevates his ego to the divine through the shining sun of knowledge. In the solemn moments of life, in the moments of complete selflessness, man unites with the deity.

The giant is the rough physical development that man must go through. He also comes into the realm of the beyond through this; but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is extinguished. But this is a dangerous path, taken by those who develop psychic powers within themselves, who put themselves into a trance state. This transition happens in the twilight of the trance state. Schiller also once wrote about the shadow of the giant. These are the dark forces that lead man over.

When the old woman passes the giant, the giant steals a cabbage head, an onion and an artichoke, so that the old woman only has part of them, which she wants to use to pay off the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The number three is therefore no longer complete. What we need and have to weave into our soul life is taken away from us by the twilight forces. There is something dangerous in giving oneself to these. The lower forces must be purified by the soul. Only then can the body ascend when the soul fully absorbs it. Everything that surrounds an inner core in the form of shells is a symbol for the human being's shells. Indian allegory refers to these shells as the leaves of the lotus flower. The human physical nature must be purified in the soul. We have to pay off, surrender the lower principles to the soul life. We have expressed the paying off of the debt in the fact that the river has to be paid off. That is the whole process of karma.

Since the river is not satisfied with the payment of the old woman, she has to dip her hand into the river. After that, she can only feel the hand, but no longer see it. That which is external and sensual to us humans, what is visible about a person, is the body; it must be purified by the soul life. This symbolizes that if a person cannot atone for it in the nature of the plant, he must commit a guilt. Then the actual physical nature of the person becomes invisible. Because the old woman cannot atone for her guilt, she becomes invisible. The I can only be seen in the splendor of the day when it is purified by the soul life. The old woman says: Oh, my hand, which is the most beautiful thing about me. It is precisely that which distinguishes man from the animal, that which shines through him as spirit, becomes invisible if he has not purified it through karma.

The beautiful youth had aspired to the realm of the lily – spirituality – and the beautiful lily had paralyzed him. By this, Goethe means the ancient truth that man must first be purified, must first have undergone catharsis, so that he no longer reaches wisdom through guilt, so that he can absorb the splendor of higher spirituality within himself. The youth had not yet been prepared by the purification. All living things that are not yet ripe are killed by the lily. All dead things that have gone through the “Stirb und Werde” are revived by the lily. Goethe now says that one is ripe for freedom who has first freed himself within. Jakob Böhme also says that man must develop out of the lower principles.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish if he dies.

Man must first mature, must first be purified before he can enter the realm of the spirit, the lily. In the ancient mysteries, man had to pass through stages of purification before he could become a mystic. The youth must first pass through these stages. They lead him to the lily.

The snake signifies development. We see those who are seeking the new path, all those who are striving towards spirituality, gathered around the lily. But first the temple must rise above the river. All move towards the river, the will-o'-the-wisps in front; they unlock the gate. Selfish wisdom is the bridge to selfless wisdom. Through the self, wisdom leads to selflessness. The snake has sacrificed itself. Now one understands what love is, a sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, full brotherhood.

The entire assembly moves towards the temple. The temple rises above the river. The youth is resurrected. He is endowed with Atma, Budhi and Manas. Atma, in the form of the brazen king, steps before the youth and hands him the sword. It is the highest will, not mixed with the others. Atma should work in man so that the sword is on the left and the right is free. Before that, man works in particularity, the war of all against all. But now, when man is purified, peace will take the place of struggle, the sword on the left for protection, the right free to do good.

The second king represents what is known to us as the second principle, as the Budhi – piety, mind, through which man turns to the Highest in faith. Silver is the symbol of piety. The second king says:

Feed the sheep,

because we are dealing here with the power of the mind. The appearance here is the appearance of beauty. Goethe associated a religious reverence with art. He saw in art the revelation of the divine, the realm of beautiful appearance is the realm of piety. The brazen king signifies – without the lower principles – power, the silver king peace, the golden king wisdom. He says:

Recognize the Supreme.

The youth is the four-principled man who develops into the higher principles. The four principles are paralyzed by the spirit before they have undergone the purifying development. Then the three higher principles work in harmony in man. Then he will be strong and powerful; then he may marry the lily. This is the marriage between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul has always been represented as something feminine; the mystery of the eternal, the immortal, is presented here.

The eternal feminine draws us up.

Goethe used the same image here in the “Fairytale”, when the young man marries the beautiful lily.

Now all that is alive passes over the vaulting bridge from the sacrificed human self. Wayfarers pass over and across. All the kingdoms are now connected in beautiful harmony. The old woman is rejuvenated, as is the old man with the lamp; the old has passed away and everything has become new. The ferryman's small hut is now included in the temple in a silver-plated state as a kind of altar. What unconsciously took man across before now takes him across in the conscious state. The composite king has collapsed. The jack-o'-lanterns licked out the gold, for they are still directed towards the low. The giant now indicates the time. What used to be the sensual principle, what led across in the twilight hour, what is sensual, what belongs to the state of nature, now indicates the evenly passing time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant can then only work in an inharmonious way. Now time has become something harmonious in this ideal state.

The thought fastens that which fluctuates in a lasting way, which is expressed in the following words:

And that which floats in fluctuating appearance
is fastened with lasting thoughts.

What is seen in the Pythagorean school as the rhythm of the universe, the music of the spheres, the sounding of the planets that move rhythmically around the sun, arises through the realization of the divine thought. For the mystic, a planet was a being of a higher order. This is why Goethe also says:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the singing of the spheres,
And completes its prescribed journey
With a thunderclap.

That man has the ability within himself to develop to the highest divine, he says in the words:

If the eye were not like the sun,
It could never behold the sun;
If the power of God were not in us,
How could we, being divine, be enraptured?

We have over and over again laid stress on the fact that Anthroposophy is no new thing brought to humanity only in our own times. It is particularly interesting that certain individuals not far behind us in time may be reckoned among those who may be described as Anthroposophists. Besides Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing—Goethe steps forth as one of the most prominent. Many will object to this statement, because not much Anthroposophy can be traced in his well-known works. At the time of Goethe it was not possible to give out esoteric truths to all the world. Only in small circles, such for instance as that of the Rosicrucians, could the higher truths be promulgated. Nobody was admitted into this society without proper preparation: but those who belonged to it gave various hints as to its existence, and this Goethe did in many different parts of his works. Only a man filled with the wisdom of Anthroposophy can read Goethe aright. It is impossible for instance rightly to understand “Faust” without this help. The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's Apocalypse, his Revelations and in its symbolical presentation the profoundest secrets are concealed. We can only understand when we have the key to it, that in this Fairy Tale Goethe revealed his Anthroposophical conception of the world. Schiller asked Goethe to work with him on a magazine called “die Horen” to which Schiller had contributed an article “On the aesthetic education of the human race”. In this the question was put:—“How can a man living in the every-day world preach the highest ideals, and establish communion between the super-sensible and that which belongs to the world of sense?” In a wonderfully impressive way he found words to point out that which to him seemed the bridge leading from the world of sense to the super-sensible world.

Goethe, however, declared that it would be impossible to him to speak of the highest questions of existence in philosophical terms, but that he would do so in a great picture. He then contributed the Fairy Tale, in which he tried to answer his question in his own way, and sent it to the Magazine, “Die Horen”.

Elsewhere too Goethe expressed himself in an absolutely Anthroposophical sense. In his earlier youth he had already concealed his conceptions in Faust. Between his student years in Leipzig and his stay in Strassburg, Goethe received an Initiation at the hands of a man who was himself deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, Goethe spoke a mystical Anthroposophical language.

In the first part of Faust there is a remarkable sentence which comes under the introductory notices. It is: “The Sage speaks”. At this time Goethe already had the Anthroposophical idea that there are beings among us to-day who are further on in evolution than man, and form a ladder between him and the super-earthly spheres, although they too are incarnated in bodies.

They have attained to a knowledge reaching far beyond what can be understood by the senses. The passage is as follows:

“The Spirit world is not locked;
Thy mind is closed.
Thy heart is dead!
Up, Disciple, bathe, and cleanse.
Thy earthly breast in Morning-Redness.”

When you become acquainted with Jacob Boehme you find one of the sources (Dawn of the moving Redness, the astral world) from which Goethe created his world of Theosophy. There is much in Goethe which we can only understand when we take it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law which we call Karma, and also speaks of exalted beings:

“Nach ewigen ehern'n
Grossen Gesetzen
Müssen wir alle
Unser's Daseins
Kreise Vollenden.
Heil den unbekannten
Höheren Wesen
Die wir ahnen.”

In accordance with mighty iron laws
We must all accomplish the cycles of our being—
Hail to the unknown higher Beings
Whom we divine!

Volume 2, Page 67 – 68.

Anyone who wants a verbal proof of Goethe's Anthroposophical line of thought, need only read the poem which, under the title “God and the World” is called “Howard's memory”.

When Goethe spoke intimately to those who were in the same Lodge, he spoke of the ideal Divine Beings, which are ahead of man and shone forth to him as a prototype. What he wrote in the poem “Symbolum” for instance was intended for a small circle:

“Doch rufen von drüben
Die Stimmen der Geister
Die Stimmen der Meister.”

The voices of spirits,
The voice of the Masters,
Call from above.

He here speaks openly of the Masters, for he is speaking intimately to his brethren of the Lodge. But he leads us furthest of all in his Fairy Tale of the “Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily”. Therein we find represented the three kingdoms in which man lives, the physical, the soul-world or Astral world, and the Spirit-world. The symbol of the astral or soul-world is the water. By water Goethe always symbolised the soul, as in his poem “Fate and the Soul”. Book 11, Page 46.

He was also acquainted with the Spiritual realms in which man lives between two incarnations, between death and re-birth; that is Devachan, the Kingdom of the Gods. Man is ceaselessly striving to reach this kingdom. The Alchemists took the chemical processes as the striving after this Spiritual kingdom. They called it “the Lily”, “the realm of the Lily”. And man they called “the Lion” who fights for the kingdom, and the Lily is the bride of the Lion. Goethe indicated this in his Faust, when he says:

“Then a red Lion with the Lily wedded,
A wooer bold.”

Therein Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit. (“in tepid bath”, the bath of the soul. The soul, the water, the red Lion, man) In the Fairy Tale Goethe also represents the three kingdoms. The kingdom of the senses—as the one shore; the kingdom of the soul—as the river, and Devachan (the Spiritual Realm) as that shore on which is to be found the garden of the beautiful Lily, which to the Alchemists is the symbol of Devachan. The whole relation of man to the three kingdoms is symbolised in this beautiful story. We came across from the kingdom of the Spirit and are striving, to get back there.

Goethe had the Will of the Wisps brought across by the Ferryman from the kingdom of the spirit to that of sense. The Ferryman can bring anyone across, but he may not take them back. We come across by no will of our own, but we cannot get back again in that way. We must ourselves find the way back into the Spiritual realm.

The Will of the Wisps take gold as nourishment, they eat it, and it permeates their bodies. But at the same time they throw it from them on all sides. They wish to throw it to the Ferryman as payment, he says however, that a River cannot bear gold, it would make it surge up wildly. Gold always signifies wisdom. The Will of the Wisps are those who seek after wisdom, yet do not mingle it with their nature, but give it away again undigested. The River is the Soul-life; the totality of human instincts, desires and passions. When wisdom is introduced into that, the soul is thrown out into a state of disturbance. Goethe always pointed out that a man must first undergo Catharsis (purification) before he can take in wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into the uncleansed passions, they become fanatical; and a man then remains the slave of his lower ego. The ascent from Kama to Mana is dangerous, unless at the same time the lower ego is sacrificed. With reference to this Goethe says in his “Westöstlichen Divan”, Book 4, Page 17

A man must be prepared to sacrifice himself. The Will of the Wisps are still in Ahamkara, the slaves of the lower Ego. This wisdom cannot endure. The soul-life must be purified slowly and must ascend slowly.

The Will of the Wisps scatter their gold about in the meadow. There they meet with the Serpent who devours it and unites itself with it. The Serpent has the strength not to fill its Ego with pride, not to allow it to become self-seeking, not to raise itself up in pride to an upright position, but to pursue its way in a horizontal position and to move into the clefts of the Earth and there attain perfection gradually.

A Temple is represented, which is to be found in the clefts of the earth.

The Serpent had already passed in and out of this, and had sensed that mysterious beings are to be found therein. And now comes the Old Man with the Lamp. The Serpent, through the gold it had swallowed, has become luminous, and the Temple is illuminated by its radiance. The lamp of the Old Man has the property of only shining where light is, and it then shines with a very peculiar light. Thus, on the one hand there is the Serpent, luminous through the gold, and on the other the Old Man with the Lamp, which is also a light. Through this two-fold illumination every thing in the Temple becomes visible. In the four corners are four kings; a golden, a silver, a bronze king and one composed of a mixture of them all. Till now they could not be seen by the Serpent, he could only find them by the sense of touch; but they now become visible through their own light. They are the three higher principles of man, and the four lower principles. The bronze king is Atma—the divine Ego; the silver king is Buddhi—the love whereby all men can understand one another, and the golden king is Manas, the Wisdom that radiates out into the world and can take in the radiating Wisdom. When man has acquired Wisdom in a selfless way, he can then see things in their true nature, without the veil of Maya. The three higher principles of man now become visible to the Serpent. The golden king is Manas, for gold always signifies Manas. The four lower principles of man are symbolically represented by the fourth king, who is composed of mixtures. Atma, Buddhi and Manas are drawn into the spheres of Phenomena, but in a state of disharmony. Only when this is purified can something develop which could not live where there was a lack of harmony.

The Temple is the Sanctuary of Initiation, the Mystery school which can only be entered by those who themselves bring light, when they also are selfless like the Serpent. The Temple was one day to be revealed, and to raise itself above the river. That is the kingdom of the future, towards which we are striving, the secret places of learning must be brought up into the light of day. Everything which is man must struggle upwards, must become harmonious, must strive after the higher principles. That which was formerly taught in the Mysteries must become an open secret. The wanderers are to cross the river, must pass from the world of sense to the super-sensible world and vice versa. All mankind shall be united in harmony. The Old Man with the Lamp represents man who can today attain knowledge without climbing to the apex of wisdom, namely to the forces of piety of mind and of faith. Faith requires light from without, if it is really to lead to the higher Mysteries. The Serpent and the Old Man with the Lamp have the forces of the Spirit, which already shines in those who are to lead in the future. Even to-day anyone who feels these forces is aware of this, through certain secrets. The Old Man says he knows three secrets. But the strangest thing is said of the fourth secret. The Serpent whimpers something into his ear, whereupon the Old Man calls out, “The time has come when a great number of people shall understand which is the right road. The Serpent has proclaimed that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point of recognising that man must die, in order to become.” (‘Denn so lang du das nicht hast, dieses stirb and werde’) (As long as thou hast not, this ‘dying and becoming’!)

To become”, in order in the fullest sense of the word “to be”; that man can only accomplish through love, devotion and sacrifice. The Serpent is ready for this. This will be made manifest, when man is ready for this sacrifice, then the Temple will be raised above the river.

The Will of the Wisps were not able to pay their debt; they had to promise the Ferryman to settle it later. The river received three of the fruits of the Earth; three cabbages, three onions and three artichokes. The Will of the Wisps go to the Wife of the Old Man and there they behave in a very curious manner; they licked the gold off the walls. They wanted to stuff themselves with wisdom in order to be able to give it forth again. Mops eats the gold and dies; for everything living must die of it; he cannot take in the truth and transmute it as does the Serpent, and therefore it is death-giving. The Old Woman had to promise the Will of the Wisps to settle their debts with the Ferryman. When the Old Man with the Lamp comes home he sees what has occurred. He tells the Old Woman she must keep her promise, but must also carry the dead Mops to the beautiful Lily, for she can bring all dead things to life. The Old Woman goes with her basket to the Ferryman:—on the way she has two remarkable experiences. She meets the great Giant, whose peculiarity is that in the evening he throws his shadow across the River so that the wanderer can pass over on it. Besides this the way is also passable when at the noonday hour the Serpent ramps across the river. The Giant can make a bridge across, but when the Sun is at its highest point, the Serpent can do so too; when through the radiant Sun of knowledge man raises his Ego to the Divine. In the sacred moments of life, at the moments of the complete blotting out of self, man unites himself with the Godhead.

The Giant is the rude physical development along which man must necessarily pass. In so doing he also reaches the yonder realm, but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is blotted out. That however is a dangerous path, which is followed by those who develop psychic forces and go into states of trance. This crossing of the bridge is accomplished in the twilight of trance. Schiller also wrote on one occasion about the Shadow of the Giant: “These are the dark powers which lead man across the Threshold.”

When the Old Woman passes him by, the giant takes from her one cabbage, one onion, and one artichoke, so that she only retained a part of that with which she was to pay the debt of the Will of the Wisps. The three-fold number is thus no longer complete. That which we require and which we must weave into our soul-life is taken from us by the twilight forces. There is danger in yielding oneself to such forces. The lower forces must be purified by the soul-forces, the body itself can only ascend when the soul completely absorbs it. Everything which encloses an inner kernel as in a shell, is a symbol for the sheaths of man. Indian allegory describes these sheaths as the petals of the lotus flower. The physical nature of man must be purified in its shell. We must pay our debts, and yield our lower principle to the soul-life. We have expressed the paying of this debt by saying that payment must be made to the river. That is the whole course of Karma. As the payment of the Old Woman was insufficient, she had to plunge her hand into the river; after that she could only feel her hand, but could no longer see it. That which in man's external, physical appearance, that which is visible in him, is the body. That must be purified by the Soul-life. This means that if man cannot pay with the plant-nature, he remains in debt. Then the actual bodily nature of man becomes invisible; because the Old Woman was not able to pay her debt she becomes invisible. The Ego can only be seen in the light of day, when purified by the soul-life;—“Oh, my hand, the loveliest part of me” The very part of man which distinguishes him from the animals. That which as spirit shines through him—becomes invisible if it is not purified by his Karma.

The beautiful youth who strove after the kingdom of the Lily (Spirituality) was crippled by her.

Goethe by this meant the ancient Wisdom, for which man must be prepared and purified and have undergone Katharsis, so that he should no longer reach Wisdom through sin but might take into himself the higher Spirituality. The youth had not been prepared by Katharsis. Every living thing which is not yet mature, is killed by the Lily. All the dead that have passed through “Stirb und Werde”, “Dying and Becoming”, are brought to life again by the Lily. Now Goethe says that one who has attained freedom within himself, is ripe for freedom. Jacob Boehme too says that man must develop himself out of his lower principle. He who does not do this before he dies, is destroyed at death. Man must first mature and be purified, before he can enter the kingdom of the Spirit (The Lily). In the old Mysteries a man had to go through various stages of purification before he could become a Mystic. The Youth too had first to pass through these stages, and he is guided through them by the Lily. The Serpent signifies development. We see the Lily gathering those together who are seeking the new way, all those who are striving after the Spiritual. But the Temple must first be lifted up above the river. They all move towards the River, the Will of the Wisps are in front and they open the door. The self-seeking Wisdom is the bridge to the selfless Wisdom. Wisdom leads a man through self to selflessness. The Serpent sacrificed itself. And now we understand the meaning of love, it is a Sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, of complete brotherhood. The whole company moves towards the Temple, which rises above the river. The youth is brought to life again. He is furnished with Atma, Buddhi, Manas; Atma, in the form of the Bronze King, appears before him and gives him a sword. This represents the higher will, and is not connected with the lower will. Atma is so to work in man that the sword shall be on his left and the right hand free, till then man works separately;—the War of all against all. But when man is purified, peace comes instead of war. Only when man is purified will peace take the place of War; the sword will then be worn on the left side, for defence only, leaving the right hand free for well-doing.

The second King signifies that which at one time was known as the second principle. Buddhi (Piety, the mood in which a man turns in faith to the highest). Silver in the symbol of piety. The second King says “Feed my sheep”, for here we are concerned with the force of the spirit. The radiance here is that of Beauty. Goethe connected with art a feeling of religious reverence. He saw in it the manifestation of the Divine of the kingdom; the beautiful radiance, the realm of piety. The Bronze King signifies strength without the lower principles, the Silver King signifies peace, and the Golden King Wisdom. He says “Recognise the highest” The youth is the four principled man, who is developing his higher principles. The four lower ones are crippled by the spirit until they have undergone the purifying development; after that the three higher principles work together harmoniously in Man. He then becomes strong and able, and may mate with the Lily. That is the union between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul is always represented as something feminine in man. The Mystery of the eternal and immortal is here represented. “The eternal feminine draws us along”. Goethe makes use of the same image in his story, in the union of the Youth with the beautiful Lily. Now the sacrificed human self and all living, pass over the bridge that arches across the river. Wanderers go to and fro and all the kingdoms are now united in beautiful harmony. The Old Woman grows young, and the Old Man with the Lamp is rejuvenated; old age has passed away and everything has become new.

The Ferryman's little hut has been gilded over, and is now preserved as a sort of Altar in the Temple. What man formerly took over unconsciously, he now takes over in full consciousness. The king of many parts has collapsed. The Will of the Wisps lick the gold out of him, for that is still connected with the lower. The Giant now indicates the time. What formerly were the sense-principles (which can only lead into the shadows) which lead man across in the hour of twilight and belong to the things of sense, to nature-conditions, now points to the even and regular course of time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant then works inharmoniously. Now, through these ideal conditions, time is in harmony. Thought permanently strengthens that which was wavering, and makes it steady.

“Was im schwankende Erscheinung lebt
Befestigt mil dauernden Gedanken”.

What lives in transient phenomena
Is justified by lasting thoughts.

Faust, Prologue in Heaven.

That which in the Pythagorean schools was called the “Rhythm of the Universe”, “The Music of the Spheres”, of the planets, rhythmically revolving around the Sun, is brought about by the accomplishment of Divine Thought. To the mystic a planet was a Being of a higher order. Thus Goethe too says:

Die Sonne tönt nach Alter Weise,
In Bruder-Sphären Wettgesand,
Und ihre vorgeschriebene Reise
Vollendet sie mit Donnergang.

The sun rings forth in ancient fashion
In the spheres of his brother-singers.
He accomplishes his allotted journey
‘Midst resounding claps of thunder.

That man indeed has the capacity of developing to the highest Divine, Goethe says in the words; “Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Die Sonne könnt es nicht erblicken; wohnt nicht in uns des Gottes eigene Kraft, Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?”

If the eye were not fashioned for the sunlight
It could not gaze upon the Sun!
If there were not in us the very force of God
How could we be charmed by the Divine?

With the Apocalypse we enter into the deepest depths of the Christian world view. Every great religion has had its secret teachers, and so has Christianity. Above all, we must be clear about the nature of the secret teaching. The Apocalypse is nothing other than the Christian secret teaching. We only have to understand the key words: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” This is the core of Christianity. Believing and seeing are two opposites. Christianity should also bring bliss to those who believe even if they do not see. The great mystery at Golgotha had its harbingers in the earlier human races. Even in the ancient mysteries, as long as our root race is on earth, something was celebrated in secret temple sites, something was shown to people that was nothing other than the mystery of God's deeds in the world.

We accompany our ancestors to the places that were most sacred to them. There they were shown how the God Himself descends to Earth, how He merges with material existence. This is called the crucifixion of the deity in the earthly. This was depicted in such a way that a human form was placed in a kind of coffin; this meant that the deity entered matter. It was then shown that the human being must perfect himself; then he would find God within himself. This is the same power that is crucified in matter and can therefore be reborn out of matter.

Everything that has become religion, art and science has emerged from the mysteries. The mysteries were a pictorial representation of what later took place at Golgotha. The drama of God developed more and more in its details. If one could follow what the temple priest said to the temple student, one would hear roughly the same thing that is written in the Gospel of John. It had condensed into a canon. The Christian gospels are ancient temple records. The teaching was taken from the depths of the temples. It is nothing new. This is hinted at in the gospels, especially in John. What the disciple saw in the temple was intended to depict what had happened in the world. This was depicted in this one testament. What was depicted in the temple site is expressed by John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

The student who was admitted to the mysteries could see in them an image of the great mystery of the world. What had been presented in the mysteries had actually taken place in Palestine. Christianity is a fulfillment. It has emerged onto the historical stage; the temple documents were kept secret. Those who were admitted to the mysteries had to take a sacred oath not to reveal any of it to the uninitiated. Today, any science can appropriate knowledge, but the ancients said: Only a pure heart may know, in an impure heart knowledge becomes an evil power. Only those who could communicate the word of knowledge from a worthy heart and feeling to others were allowed to know. Only the word of knowledge that was warmed through by good, pure and noble feeling was respected. The temple records were the secret revelation for the disciples of the mysteries.

Now Christ had truly been revealed. Through this, Christianity was brought out of the temples and onto the world stage for the whole world. Those who believed without looking into the temples were also to be blessed. For thousands of years, a secret teaching was proclaimed in the temples; this was revealed through the appearance of Christ.

The initiates were to work in such a way that people would be prepared for the future. The prophets were initiated into the mysteries. Every content of initiation is revealed later. At that same moment, new content is given for a new future. Christ himself performed such an initiation in the miracle of Lazarus. The Gospel had been revealed through Christianity, it had become a message. A new secret teaching now developed in early Christianity. Outside, the content of the Gospels was proclaimed, the suffering, the resurrection. But in the mysteries, events of the future were presented. Even today there are still Christian mysteries. They depict what is to happen in the distant future.

Christ is what is called in Theosophy the second entity of the divine Trinity. This consists of the three entities: God the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Father is that towards which everything strives, the entity towards which the whole unknown universe is moving. The Word is the guide to the Father. It was seen in all worlds as that which leads to the Father. 'Veda' means 'the Word'. The most ancient records of the Indians were called the 'Vedas'. The Indian knew that his Rishis - his teachers - were inspired; they imparted the 'Vedas', the 'Word', which was inspired by the Deity, the Word from which the world originated. In ancient India the Word was not something external. It reflected the essence of the object.

The ancient Germans had a runic writing system; in ancient times, when a person pronounced the name of a thing, he knew that the thing had come into being from the word. That is why we find the unpronounceable name of God among the Jews, because it was the essence itself. That is why the actual name of God - Yahweh - was only used on the most solemn occasions and for the most solemn actions.

The ancient peoples said to themselves: The world was created by the word, the Logos. The word once excited world vibrations, rhythmic movements from which the world emerged. The third divine essence is that which the word can grasp, which gives strength to strive up to the Father. The Word, the divine power of creation, the second link in the divine trinity, has taken on human form.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Man will not always appear in this coarse material form; the development of man in the flesh is the fourth round or cycle. Before that, man was in a freer material form and remained in a completely different kind of existence for three cycles. But the abilities he now has, he could only acquire in the flesh. He must now develop upwards again through finer materials.

The sixth cycle will be special. He will then be in a more refined matter. Today we can only embody the word in physical air vibrations. Only insofar as I express my being in the word does it come to another. But in the sixth cycle we will consist of a finer substance, so that we will reproduce our whole being outwardly in vibrations and reveal our whole being to all people. Today, the human being can hide much through gross materiality. But then, in the sixth round, we will be entirely vibration, entirely sound, beings that communicate with the environment in rhythmic or non-rhythmic waves. Then the word, the name of the human being, is external physicality. Now the human being cannot communicate his entire being to the outside world. But there have always been beings who are superhuman, like the word itself; these can be in the flesh in the fourth cycle, which the others will be in the sixth cycle. The word has already become flesh in Christ. What can take place for human beings in the sixth cycle has been realized in the fourth cycle through Christ in humanity. This is the mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos.

The goal of man is: You shall develop to such an extent that you can turn your whole being outwards. That is the following of Christ. In the sixth cycle, man is to become what Christ exemplified in the fourth cycle. Clement Alexandrinus, Origen, were Christian initiates and imbued with the full significance of the goal, that a millennium, a cycle, must come when man will have the opportunity to be an outward seal imprint of Christ living in the flesh. Thus, a dormant Christ principle is hidden in man. In order for this to become manifest, the human being must pass through various states. This was presented in the first Christian mysteries. We find this in the first chapters of the Apocalypse. The “firstborn from the dead” means that he was the model in the fourth round of what it means to live the whole word in such a way that it will be revealed.

Human development is much older than history. Our present root race - [the Aryan,] the fifth - developed in its first sub-race in present-day India. The Indian religious books were written only in much later times. In the beginning, nothing external about the development of humanity was entrusted to man. This was guided by the old Rishis to a religious belief that was wonderfully monotheistic. The second sub-race - the Persians - developed a religion based on the principle of duality; however, this was not written down until much later. In the third sub-race, a three-part deity was recognized, especially in Egypt. This had an effect on the preceding races. Only now were the Vedas written down. The mysteries were shown in the Egyptian pyramid temples, and the gospels were taken from there. The flight to Egypt indicates this.

The third sub-race is followed by the fourth, the Greco-Roman sub-race, in which Christianity developed; then the scientific world view developed in place of the religious one; the culture of the intellect developed from the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Like a swan song, something of the old world view still lies in that time, with which the new world view was linked at that time.

The emergence of the innermost being of man before other people is what the creed of Christ must become. Those who can fully understand that Christ belongs to the world will be the twenty-four elders who worship the Lamb, Christ. In the future, in the sixth root race, some will be able to worship the Lamb in all its significance. Then man can mingle with those who worship the Lamb. This is represented by the symbol of the four beasts – lion, cow, man and eagle – who worship among the elders.

In addition to the physical body, man also has an astral body. This is not as developed as the physical body. In relation to the physical body, man is similar to God; the human race will only become more beautiful. The further perfection will be that he will perfect the astral body. Sensation, feeling and the like will become more perfect. This happens in the fifth cycle. We are still facing this cycle. Now the human being's astral body is not yet so far developed. Only the physical body is developed now. In the astral body, he only becomes a human being in the fifth cycle. There, where the human being lies before the Lamb, adoring, he does not yet stand as a complete human being. There he has one of the forms of animality. He has gained this astral form of man through earlier stages of development. Certain qualities of animality are expressed in the races. Courage is represented by the lion, sensual creativity by the ox, the cow; man represents the lower man, the Kama-Manas man, who rises above the earthly. These are not yet god-like. Men mingle with the god-like and are symbolized by the four animals; that is the point at which man will have arrived in the sixth root race, after a destruction has once more swept over the earth.

Now John describes more distant, later conditions. The messages are sent to the seven churches. The races not only live one after the other, but also next to each other. They also all have leading personalities, of whom history tells nothing.

The various schools that have fulfilled their task and now still rigidly and conservatively adhere to their task, but which must hand over their mission to humanity, are the seven communities. These receive the seven letters. The apocalypticism first clears away the old secret teachings to make way for the new secret teaching. The message to the seven churches is: You can no longer be guides, now a new revelation must come, a new church.

The apocalyptic also described the three subsequent rounds. These rounds cannot be seen with astral clairvoyance, but only when a person enters the world of Devachan, the mental world. When a person has reached that stage, he sees in spirit. When a person enters this world of Devachan, he does not see, but he hears. He is clairaudient there. 'Clairaudient' is the term we use for the spiritual world. There he hears the music of the spheres, which was spoken of in the schools of the Pythagoreans. Goethe also alludes to the sounds when he speaks of the spirit. 'The sun resounds', says Goethe. This indicates the audible state, as it is in Devachan. “The sight of it gives strength to the angels.” The angels are the spiritual beings who preside over the planets. If you want to see how a cycle unfolds, you have to recognize in the world that which resounds; the apocalypticist indicates these world cycles in the trumpets of the angels.

In the sixth round, the whole being will now be clearly revealed before everyone. But even before the sixth round begins, man can develop the Christ principle out of himself. What used to be external has become an ability in man through internalization, involution. Externalization, the evolution in the great world laws, and internalization, involution, are related to each other as exhalation and inhalation. As man passes through the races, he assimilates that which lives around him. All have passed through the ancient Indian period, then through all the other sub-races, and so they will live in the time when they will lie in adoration at the feet of the Lamb. The seven seals will be broken when man has come to the knowledge of himself, to the worship of Christ. Then the book will be unsealed. Because John indicates that this is still before the seventh race, he first has six seals opened; only later the seventh seal, when man has progressed even further in his development.

Initially, people became acquainted with their religion through the scriptures, which they understood literally. Today, it is considered enlightened to have outgrown religious documents. Regarding the Old Testament, it has always been said that it is impossible to reconcile the biblical concepts with an enlightened consciousness. People started to understand the scriptures figuratively; they still held on to the symbols. This understanding of biblical symbolism then led people to still take the biblical spirit with a certain seriousness. But even theologians today can hardly decide on anything other than to take the first chapters of the Old Testament only as a figurative representation. A rather cozy view can arise from it, but as man progresses, he cannot remain with this view. It is a kind of path of development: first to move away from the orthodox view, then from the figurative view and to move on to another, again in a sense literal view.

But for this we must learn to understand the language of the old wisdom teachings and recognize that the old teachers did not invent stories, did not create fantasies, but that they had a different conception of the truth than we have today. They wrote down the eternal truth in their teachings. This cannot be brought directly to every person, while the sensual truth can be brought to everyone.

The great teachers of old had themselves undergone an inner development. Their vision was a spiritual one. They knew that what they saw in the spirit could not be seen by everyone around them. The nations were still childlike in their perception. Accordingly, the great truths had to be given to them in a special form suitable for their understanding. Now all great teachers approached people with the awareness that the soul is immortal. It must be developed towards the truth. Moses, for example, knew that when he linked to the ideas of the people, he was planting something lasting in the soul, in the causal body. The materialistic thinker believes that the soul perishes at death. But Moses said to himself: If I communicate the truth to man today in a certain form, it will have an effect in his soul. Later he will be ripe to recognize the truth in its true form. Moses knew that later others would come who would interpret what he taught. He prepared the form. That which he prepared has gone through the incarnations of the souls. He did not consider it right to tell people the final form of the truth right away.

He himself had the truth in the background. He expressed this in the seven days of creation. He brought the truth into the form that corresponded to people's childlike understanding at the time. If he had spoken of the “round” days, he would not have been understood. He therefore spoke of days, as in ancient India one speaks of the days and nights of Brahma.

On the moon, man had a dream-like consciousness. There he had developed dream consciousness to its highest level. Each of us had come there in a kind of germinal state; there he had perceived in a dream-like way, absorbed it and developed it into a germ. These germs slept over from the moon to the earth. A spiritual germ was the human being who came to earth. He had slept through a [pralaya] into the earthly state.

Now his destiny is to come to clear consciousness. He has to go through a long series of states. In the first three rounds, what he had gone through on earlier planets was repeated. Moses speaks of the rounds. During the first round, man is in the first elementary realm. The dream state gently transitions into a state that man has now reached. The moon man did not distinguish between himself and the other objects. For him there was a dream-like pictorial reality in the way the external world is there for us in a dream. He did not perceive through the senses. The contrast between himself and his world was to be developed by man in the first round on earth. Moses calls it the difference between heaven and earth. He was to recognize himself as an earthling next to heaven. That is what happens in the first cycle of development.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Man did not distinguish between himself and the individual objects. It was all still chaos. Then, after the first round, man went through an intermediate state again and then came to the second round. There the objects already got more definite boundaries. He can already distinguish what is around him. It is no longer desolate and confused. He can distinguish between what is spiritual and what is an external object. Before that it was dark on the face of the deep; the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. All that was human was water. The human germs together formed the waters. The Spirit of God brooded over the human germs, which He called forth into forms. There was light.

As soon as we see the outside world, when the entities confront us, only then can they reveal themselves to us. There was light.

God divided the light from the darkness; he made day and night. [Genesis 1:5]

Man perceived the objects. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now followed the Rupic round, the formative round, in which one could perceive existence. There shall be a difference between the waters; each should have its own Kama. Every single human being was set apart by God setting a boundary and dividing the waters above and below the firmament. He implanted in the individual human germ the ability to distinguish between the spiritual and the physical. The two souls were laid in the human being; the soul that looks up and the soul that looks into the earthly, that lives in the earthly.

In the third round, man enters the third elementary realm. The individual astral bodies of human beings became more and more distinct. Now man becomes independent. He steps out of the mother soil of the earth. He reaches the plant existence. These are not our present plants. Man was in the plant existence himself. All the separated astral bodies gained the ability to bring forth astral beings like the plant. During the third round, man was called to the animal existence, but in a plant-like nature, because the animal had not yet developed the body of passion. He had no warm blood yet. This was formed in the third round of the third elementary realm. The insemination indicates that fertilization has not yet taken place.

God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear.

In the beginning, the astral body was not visible. Now it is becoming distinct. The dry land is only the special, more solid form that forms a boundary around itself. The gathering of the waters signifies the general astral world in its entirety.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass and herbs.” [Genesis 1:11]

This was man. The ancient Germans also believed that man emerged from ash and elm, and the ancient Persians also believed that man emerged from a tree.

And have his own seed with himself [...] [Genesis 1:11]

means that each species carried its own seeds within itself and that there was no sexual reproduction.

The fourth round is the one in which the physical human being prepares himself as he is now. Man entered the mineral kingdom, he took on a body that was subject to chemical and physical laws. In the next round, he will no longer have that, but will then control his astral body just as he now controls his physical body. He will then have astral organs, he will be able to develop his organs himself when he needs them, when the astral body will control everything physical. But now, in the fourth round, man can only act with regard to the laws of the mineral world. In the physical, mineral body we are enclosed as in a house. It was only through our becoming physical ourselves that the whole world became physical. Previously, he gained knowledge of the world around him through a kind of clairvoyance. With the fourth round, the whole world of sensual objects has emerged around him. Moses could therefore say:

There are lights in the firmament of the heaven, which divide the day and the night, and give signs, times, days, and years. [Genesis 1:14]

Kant says that space and time come from man himself. Moses said that even then. Everything that can be perceived by the senses only came into being when man became physical, mineral. Through the physical round, we make the mineral body more and more perfect and also develop our astral body. In the next round, it will be developed in the same way as the physical body is today. Man will then float as if in an airy realm. Then man will have become a free being, then he will truly have become an animal being. Only then will animality be expressed in man. The astral body of man is meant here in the image of animals because the astral man moves freely in the astral world, like whales in the water, birds in the air and so on. - That is the fifth round or the fifth day.

In the sixth round, the human Kama-Manas body is formed, the lower mind body, which we now wear hidden in the physical shell. In the sixth round, man will stand as a human being in the true sense of the word, no longer enclosed in a shell. At the same time, the higher animals are formed with man. The Kama-Manas body then reaches the higher level of animal life.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Only then will man become what he is meant to become.

So God created man in his own image, in the likeness of himself; male and female he created them.

Through sexuality, the human being develops into a being that will be male and female. The original text reads: He created man male-female. Only now does man truly gain dominion over the animals. He only acquires power, magic, when the actual human being is liberated on the sixth day. - On the seventh day, man had become God-like. In the seventh round, man is in the aupa state again; he has become creative himself, has become God himself, hence it says:

God rested on the seventh day. [Genesis 2:2]

The fourth round is the most important for human life. Man used to be less dense. Moses says:

He took the solid substances of the earth. [corresponds to Genesis 2:7]

He was surrounded by dust. He adopted the mineral laws. He was formed from the dust of the earth, and the living soul was formed in him. When the human being in the Lemurian race acquired solid forms — a skeleton — sexuality also arose. The solidification went hand in hand with the division into the sexes. In the second chapter, Moses describes the human being who later emerged in the Lemurian race, in the two-sexedness. This was taught in all mysteries. It was only in the fourth round that the plant and animal forms emerged as they are today. During the development of man, the plants and animals split off from him. The lower animals had arisen before. Warm-blooded animals only arose with humans. The animals developed as a result of retarded humans splitting off. The animals are the decadent human nature. They no longer fit into today's conditions. They are creatures that have remained at earlier stages. The original animal forms split off first, only then did the two sexes of humans arise.

In the beginning, man used his entire productive power externally. In the beginning, man reproduced from within himself. When he had lost the ability to penetrate dense matter, he used half of his productive power as a thinking organ.

On the one hand, man became a sexual being, while on the other, he developed half of his productive power internally into a thinking organ. He now acquired the ability to process the spirit with his brain. The spirit now fertilized him. At the same time as the division into two sexes, the thinking human being emerged. He recognized good and evil. During this period, the spinal cord and the brain also developed.

This is the snake that originated in man himself. He went through the amphibian stage. This being was his own seducer. It began to develop with the beginning of its passage through sexuality. Spinal cord and brain first developed in amphibians, and in man in the amphibious state.

Anyone who wants to know the origin of the Catholic Mass must trace it back historically to the mysteries. Mysteries are places of worship in which higher knowledge is not only taught and acquired, but in which the phenomena in question are also demonstrated. The mysteries have taken on a particularly popular form in the currents of worship that came from Persia and Egypt. It is from these that the mass has emerged.

Anyone who wanted to gain knowledge of higher worlds before the appearance of Christ had to be accepted as a student in a secret school. He first had to learn how the world and man came into being. He was introduced to an examination of the origin of the world and the significance of man within the world. He was taught how the divine world spirit has taken shape everywhere. Minerals, plants, animals and so on were seen as formations of the world spirit. Man is a confluence of all that is in the world. Paracelsus once said: All entities of the world are letters, and man is the word in which all these are found. Man is the microcosm in the macrocosm.

The disciple was taught how the Divine Being splits into many details, only to be reunited in man. The disciple was allowed to experience this splitting of the Divine and the return to man.

Man has brought low desires, passions and instincts into the world. The lower animal forms are decadent products of man. Everything that is expressed in animals by lower passions has been brought into the world by man. An original state of the world was as we now see it realized in the mineral world. The gem has no desire, no craving, no wish; the gem is chaste and undemanding. If you imagine the other entities with the same chaste and undemanding nature, you have the ideal of the secret disciple. He had to awaken in him the feeling: You must become again as pure, desireless creation, which has emerged so chaste from the hand of the Creator. He sacrificed everything lower - that was the “catharsis”, the purification of instincts, desires, passions - this corresponds to the “sacrifice” or “oblatio” in the Mass, the second part of the Mass.

The first part is the proclamation or the “Gospel”, where the message of the dissolution of the world spirit in nature is imparted, the intellectual insight into how the world has come into being. This is followed by the second part, the sacrifice. The secret disciple had to have the will to retrace the path to the original chaste form of creation. When he was ready for this, he was admitted to the actual mysteries. In the Egyptian mysteries, he then had to spend three days alone in a locked room and was placed in a state of consciousness in which he could have higher types of perception. He now experienced the descent of the god into the world and the distribution in the world of souls or the astral world, after he himself was ready to sacrifice himself in a similar way.

He first experienced an image that was clear to him through a sure realization: This was once you, in the time when you were still without drives and passions, when you were still without desire. He saw his own image in the distant past, a human image on a higher level. The second was that he saw how this human image on a higher level gave rise to a male human image, whose face shone like the sun. This was Osiris. He saw the emergence of Osiris from the primeval man, surrounded by a radiant aura. From the second image, the present form was then created after a second entity had been separated - Isis - and Horus, the present human being, was born. Now he was an awakened soul.

In the present human being, when he lies asleep, one has first the physical body, then the etheric body and further on the actual aura that lifts out of the sleeping person. The person is in his aura; he has then left his physical body. In the depths of the temple mysteries, the secret disciple consciously experienced the described states in the astral body. He was then a “transformed, a ”consecrated one. He who is transformed in this way perceives the light phenomena of the lower beings.

This process was the third step of the mysteries, the ‹transformation› of man into his astral form. Then the secret student had realized: Just as you have seen the Osiris, you were once like that too; you were astral and then became physical; a second time you should plan to become embodied. By free decision the soul should return to the physical body. When he came out of the mysteries again, he should consciously carry the physical body with him. Now he also received a new name. He felt that this was his eternal name. Each of us has such a name, which he carries in all his incarnations. The initiate carried this eternal name. He had voluntarily incarnated in his body. The human being now speaks “I” to his own body. But the initiate knew that he is not the same as his body. He carries his body on his back. Such a one is crucified in his body; he is the one crucified in matter. Now he steps out and consciously does all the things he used to do unconsciously. This union with the body was called 'communion', the fourth process in the mysteries. He who is thus transformed and reunited with his body is a true initiate.

Now Christ appeared on earth. This appearance of Christ on earth meant that what had previously taken place in the mysteries now took place before the world in physical space. In the past, individuals had gone through the mysteries. All this had now become a historical event, a real historical event in the sacrificial death of Christ Jesus. Now Christ Jesus has established a memorial in remembrance of these mysteries. Those who joined Christ no longer needed to look. To look means to “look into a mystery”. Those who were to come to inner knowledge no longer had to learn to look through the mysteries. They could remain with the external sign. This external sign has a deeper meaning.

The three highest members of the human being are Atma, Budhi and Manas. In the past, when one spoke of “man”, one spoke of Atma, Budhi and Manas. At that time everyone believed that each life was only one in a long series among many, and that it was a life earned. Man was steeped in this. At the same time, there was something about the personal life that man basically looked beyond. He did not attach great value to it.

The task of the first two millennia after Christ was to educate humanity for the higher self through KamaManas. The personal life should be taken seriously and with grandeur. Man spends about two millennia in Devachan. During this period, all of humanity will pass through an incarnation in which value is placed on the personal.

Christ went with Peter, James and John to the mountain - that is, to the sanctuary. This was the introduction to devachanic vision. There they saw Moses and Elijah beside Jesus. 'El' - in 'Elijah' - means 'the way', Moses is called 'the truth' - the moral truth - and Jesus is 'life'. Jesus says to his disciples: 'Elijah has appeared again. John was this Elijah. He told them further: But do not tell until I reappear. They should not speak of the doctrine of reincarnation until he would come back in a new world cycle. For two millennia, the world should get to know the value of the personal. That which runs through from one incarnation of man to another is the finer matter of man, the water, the spiritual. This is also referred to in: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters,” the waters - the people. The impersonal man is symbolized by the water.

Wine is the symbol for the personal man. Christ transforms the water into wine. He transformed an impersonal religion into a religion of the personality. Just as water turns into wine, so does the impersonal nature of man turn into the personal. He who can grasp the teaching of reincarnation and wants to rise above personality must abstain from wine. He who enjoys wine will never arrive at an understanding of what is impersonal in man.

The lower body should be ennobled and glorified, which is why Christianity should live without the doctrine of reincarnation for two millennia. Christ had appeared to sanctify the personality. As a sign that Christ had taken upon himself the entire sacrifice that used to take place in the mysteries, Christ instituted the sacrifice of the Mass. In it, the mystery act was repeated in an outward sign.

The external action of the Mass is as follows: the priest goes to the altar with the altar boy. First there is a preparatory act, the 'relay prayer' and the 'Kyrie Eleison'. The deeper Mass consists of four parts: 'Gospel', 'Sacrifice' - Oblatio, 'Transformation' and 'Communion'.

During the “Gospel”, a passage from the Gospels is read. This takes place on the right side of the altar. The actual altar is built so that it faces east. The priest stands on the north side. Here he reads the message. This refers to the fact that the human being in the first root race, the polaric one, was also in the north, from where he descended more and more into matter.

The second part of the mass is the 'oblatio' or 'sacrifice'. The priest sacrifices what represents the higher man, just as man used to sacrifice himself. The chalice is the outer symbol for the human heart. What we have in our hearts represents something future; it is less developed now, but contains the spiritual. When man no longer thinks in matter but in the spiritual, then the heart will be the organ of thought. Today the heart is still personal. The wine in the chalice represents the personal. The wafer signifies the brain. Bread and wine are now transformed into the higher nature, into Christ Himself.

The sacrifice brings about the transformation of man. This act is spoken softly so that only the priest himself can hear it. This is an allegorical indication that the truly divine in man is something that he only speaks to himself. Every human being can only say “I” to himself. This is why the Jewish secret doctrine could only let the name be pronounced with particular shyness, the name Yahweh, which is the actual “I” within. That is why the words in the offertory are spoken half in silence and half murmured. That is why the third part, the consecration, is the sacrifice of the Mass.

All this shows that something in the external nature stands as a symbol for what the divinity itself is. In the coarser matter and in the finer matter, the divinity is represented. The bread and the wine, body and blood. At the moment when the consciousness is fully awakened that we are dealing with transformed matter, then on the altar we have in the host a matter such as it is in our brain, and in the wine a matter such as it is in our heart - in the blood.

The priest breaks the host in a certain way, into a certain number of pieces, namely nine:

1. Corporatio = embodiment
2. Nativitas = birth
3. Circumeisio = circumcision
4. Apparitio = appearance
5. Passio = suffering
6. Mors = death
8. Gloria = glory
9. Regnum = kingdom

These nine parts represent the transformed human being, who participates in the higher. These are the nine parts of the human being. The parts that the human being experiences within his personality are 1 to 7, and 8 and 9 extend beyond the personality, which is why they are placed next to it.

Thus, in communion, man unites with his seven-part nature and strives for 8 and 9: 'Gloria' and 'Regnum'. This is accompanied by the Lord's Prayer. First, the Paternoster refers to the existing God of heaven, then to “Thy name”, the name of God, the Logos, who became flesh in Christ, and then to “Thy kingdom”. The whole thing is a parable for the existing world. Man should understand his communion with the existing world. Only the human being who came out of the mysteries understood the world. This is expressed in the Paternoster.

On particularly festive occasions, the procession also includes the 'Sanctissimum', that is the consecrated monstrance containing the Holy Body. At the top of the monstrance is a sun-like rounding with rays, the rounding rests in a half-moon shaped cover. This is also how Osiris and Isis were depicted. The union of Isis and Osiris is represented by the words 'Sanctissimum' above the altar, a symbol of the time when the sun still enveloped the moon.

No priest who is not ordained or authorized to wear the stole may read the sacrifice of the Mass. The stole is the actual priestly garment. The priest first wears a skirt, then the “alba, a shirt-like garment with a belt, then a symbolic garment, then the stole, which is crossed over the chest, and over that the casul.

The stole is the actual insignia of priestly dignity. Therefore, when he wears the stole, he feels like a servant of the church. He is no longer allowed to proclaim his own opinion. He keeps his personal opinion to himself; he says to himself that it could be wrong, and he proclaims what has been believed for thousands of years.

The new era led everything spiritual into the material in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. People learned to judge the world according to material conditions. After Galileo and Copernicus, all attention was drawn down to the physical plane. Everything was conditioned by karma. As a later religion, Protestantism no longer had any understanding for the sacrifice of the Mass. When we see and hear the Mass celebrated with full understanding, we have before us the last reflection of the consecration performed in the ancient Egyptian pyramids.

The physical man emerged from the solar man Osiris; he shall become the solar man again. He has unconsciously descended from the height of the sun; consciously he shall ascend to it again. Solar heroes are those who walk with such certainty on their spiritual path as the sun on its orbit. These solar heroes have reached the sixth degree of initiation. The degrees of initiation for the Persians were: first a raven, second a secret, third a warrior, fourth a lion, fifth a Persian, sixth a solar hero - solar runner -, seventh a father.

I. Report in the “Mühlheimer Zeitung” of March 20, 1905

On Saturday evening, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, spoke on 'Goethe's Faust in the Light of the Theosophical World View'. The speaker explained that Goethe cannot be grasped in the full depth of his life's work if Faust is seen only as the poetic expression of the outer life around us and of the soul life in its outer phenomena. Faust offers infinitely more; it aims to provide a picture of the development of man and his place in the world and the universe. Goethe had insight into the teachings of mysticism, which coincide with those of theosophy; in the sense of mysticism, he had given in his Faust a picture of the human being, his development and ascent. He had reproduced the ancient teachings as only a poet could reproduce them, namely in the representation of a poet, and in doing so, he had made use of mystical terminology. Goethe was familiar with the ancient division of the universe into a physical, a mental and a spiritual world, and it was clear to him that man is also composed of three parts: a physical, a mental and a spiritual one. He therefore understood the human being as a microcosm in which the image of the universe, the macrocosm, was reflected. The ancient wisdom teachings of the Indians, Egyptians, Persians and Greeks understood the development of the human being in the same way as Goethe. He paid homage to the view that the human soul was there from the very beginning, that it had developed through all the realms of nature and become the creator of these realms, that on this journey of development through the most diverse states, it had created man in his present form and was now striving to spiritualize him further. To make clear this view of the work of Goethe, the speaker pointed to the many expressions of mystical terminology scattered throughout Faust, such as the passage in the prologue in heaven, which cannot be understood in any other way than in a mystical sense:

The sun resounds according to ancient custom
In the song-contests of the spheres of the brothers,
And its ordained journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

These processes, which can only be perceived in the world of the spirit, where the ear of the spirit listens and the eye of the seer can no longer follow, not to mention the physical eye – they are referred to in mysticism as sounding or resounding. In the first act of the second part, Ariel calls the organ that is to be understood as the organ of perception in these worlds the “ear of the spirit”. Ariel speaks:

Hark! Hark! The hoar-hounds howl!
The new-born day is breaking
For the ears of spirits.
The gates of rocks are creaking and cracking;
The wheels of Phoebus are rolling and clattering;
What a tumult the light brings!
It trumpets, it trombone;
Eye blinks and ear astonishes,
Unheard of does not listen.

The first part of the tragedy, as Dr. Steiner explained, presents man to us in the struggle with the lower physical passions. In the second part, we are shown the development of his soul and his ascent into the purely spiritual. Mephisto is the principle of desire and longing until the soul incites to higher life. The realm of the mothers is understood to mean the spiritual realm, to which Faust descends to attain the spiritual archetypes of things (Helena as a symbol of beauty). In Homunculus, the soul's journey of development is shown through the realms of nature; in Euphorion, the moment of higher enlightenment, which comes to us in happy hours and suddenly disappears again, etc. The captivating explanations, of which we have only been able to reproduce a few here, were met with much applause.

II. Report in the “Kölnische Zeitung” of March 22, 1905

On Saturday evening in the Isabellensaal of the Gürzenich, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin gave a lecture on “Goethe's Faust, a Picture of His World View from a Theosophical Point of View”. The speaker often uses a mystically opaque mode of expression; in the course of his hour-long speech, he wove into his inwardly spiritualized presentation, which developed in broad strokes into a journey through Goethe's life's work, viewed from a theosophical perspective, reflections on the history and essence of Theosophy. Even though the Theosophical Society as such has existed only for 30 years, the spirit of the world view had already been active first in esoteric Buddhism and later in the most important minds of the Orient and the Occident at all times. From individual basic ideas of the theosophical doctrine, Redrier spread, as in earlier lectures, over the three worlds of theosophy, life, soul and spirit. Regarding the subject itself, he said that Goethe's poem of life could only be understood if one illuminated it with what the theosophical world view meant, which he had expressed in a special way in the secrets and fairy tales of the green snake and the beautiful lily. With advancing age, he had become more and more absorbed in this world and realized that when we know the world, we also know the fragmented details of our being; there is no end to knowledge, only degrees. That is why Goethe had to end Faust as a mystic, after saying in his youth, “A good man in his dark urges is well aware of the right path.” After the speaker had considered the prologue from the mystic's point of view, he described Faust in the first part as tired of the sensual world; all the sciences of the mind did not satisfy him, in his innermost being there was a yearning for a spiritual world in the sense of mysticism. That is why Goethe lets Faust reach the earth spirit in the flame and recognize at the end of the first part that true self-knowledge is knowledge of the world. In the second part, he lets Faust get to know the three worlds of the theosophist. The imperial court embodies the great sensual world – Mephisto, “the impulse of development,” repeatedly draws him back into it – the mothers are the soul principle that is fertilized so that the higher human being may be born in the human being. The mystic also said to the materialist: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All.” The homunculus, which can also only be understood mystically, is the representative of mystical clairvoyance, the birth and downfall of Euphorion are the mystical moments of celebration that quickly fade away. Finally, it was explained how Faust becomes completely independent of the sensual world, how he goes blind, how darkness is around him, but there is bright light within him. The “Chorus mysticus” is a Goethean creed. The lecture was very well received and was followed by a stimulating discussion.

First of all, one must consider the various states of consciousness through which man has passed. He is now in the state of bright day-consciousness. Before that, he has passed through three other states of consciousness. The first consciousness was a kind of dull all-consciousness, such as the stone that lives in space has today, but brooding in a dull state of consciousness. This condition can still be caused pathologically even now. In a deep trance, people often begin to draw world systems; but they have no control over their consciousness.

In the second state of consciousness, that of dreamless sleep, man can perceive everything alive. Every night, man undergoes this state. He is then in a kind of plant trance; he carries out the [vegetative] functions quite well during this time. The state of consciousness is that of dream sleep, which is much lighter than the previous one; but even then, man does not receive any sensory impressions as he does in the waking state. Then people did not see things, but an image of the soul arose in them.

Now we find ourselves in the fourth state of consciousness. The previous states of consciousness were linked to other planets just as our waking consciousness is linked to the earth. Man is a product, born out of the circumstances in which he moves. Esoterically, the first planet is Saturn, the second the Sun, the third the Moon and the fourth is the Earth. On Saturn, man has already gone through the various states of form. In the middle of the first round - that is, of the first elementary realm - Saturn became physical. With Saturn, it depends on the first round. The following six rounds on Saturn are not of particular importance for humans. Other beings from earlier world cycles have completed their development there. During the seventh round on Saturn, humans had reached the point of becoming physical, but they had a body that was merely oval-shaped, spherical. This state was subject to neither birth nor death. This physical body went through the entire Saturn development.

One could imagine that the whole of Saturn is composed of individual human spheres, a mulberry; a morula stage was Saturn. The whole thing slept from one pralaya to another manvantara, the solar condition. There the human being was in a kind of plant trance. It was only during the second round of the sun that man attained the new. There his consciousness developed into a kind of human plant trance. There, man no longer had an immortal physical body. The whole was an all-life, a living organism that secreted new human spheres from itself. The third to seventh rounds on the sun are not important for humans, but only for other beings. On the sun, a second realm is emerging alongside the human realm, namely a special mineral realm. The minerals there are still growing, they are still more plant-like. They are still so similar to the human kingdom and not yet as separate as they are now.

After a pralaya, the moon manvantara begins. This is when the image consciousness of dream sleep develops. In the third moon round, this actual moon stage is developed. Man then becomes an image-conscious being, outwardly like a kind of animal state. In the first round on the moon, he has repeated Saturn; in the second round, the sun. In the third round of the moon, he develops the new, the actual moon state. The fourth to seventh rounds on the moon are not of great importance to him. They are a descent on the moon.

Now the development of the earth begins. In the first round, there is a repetition of the Saturn condition, in the second round a repetition of the sun condition, and in the third round there is a repetition of the moon condition. In the fourth round, the actual earth condition occurs, the state of waking consciousness. In the fourth round, the human being passes through the state of the unmanifest form, then through the astral state, and finally through the physical. Now, in the first round on earth, he has gone through the stage of Saturn, the mineral kingdom; in the second round, the stage of the sun, the plant kingdom; in the third round, the stage of the moon, the animal kingdom. In the fourth round, the human being proper emerges.

The external differences between the four stages are as follows: On Saturn, there is a silent, dark existence. One would not have seen anything at that time, not even clairvoyantly. On the sun, everything begins to shine. There, the spiritual resounding begins. This resounding of the sun is transferred to the human being in the solar round - the second round on earth. In the second round, the human being is a resounding being. Everyone received their own tone. Every person has their own special tone, which signifies them in the world. They still have this tone, it resounds within.

On the moon, he was physically a luminous being. What he is today only in the astral, that was the physical of the human being then, namely, luminous. He was a star, a luminous being on the moon. This state was repeated on earth in the third round. In the fourth round, the new was added on earth.

After passing through the arupa state, the rupa-mental state and the astral state, in the fourth round man became physical. It was only in the finest physical etheric matter that man developed, in the polaric race, at the beginning of our physical development. The polaric people were ether people. They repeated the Saturn stage once more. They were spheres at the beginning of the physical formation of the earth and immortal. An immortal race inhabited the pole at that time. Then man passed into the sun stage. Before that, everything was still dissolved, ethereal. Then man separated himself as an air being in the Hyperborean period. He formed a kind of sphere that sounded, vibrated, trembled and reacted to impact and pressure internally. This is how he perceived the changes in the outside world. The solar stage of the Hyperborean period came to an end when the finest substances withdrew, leaving only coarser substances that began to glow.

At the beginning of the Hyperborean Age, the present physical sun emerged from the earth. This caused a tremendous catastrophe on the earth. All life was drawn out.

Now man begins to reproduce in two sexes. At the beginning of the Lemurian period, that is, during the third root race, the coarser substances emerged from the earth that the earth could no longer use. That is the physical moon that was then separated from the earth. Again, a great catastrophe took place on the earth. Now all beings had their own warmth. Until then, all humans were in a kind of light state. In the Lemurian period, the fourth stage was that of intrinsic warmth.

Man was a sounding being on the sun, a luminous being on the moon, and became an intrinsically warm being on the earth. All animals that have intrinsic warmth only split off from humans after that. It was only through intrinsic warmth that Kama could move into humans. Only humans and animals with their own warmth have Kama. The fish is still a sleeper today, dispassionate. From the middle of the Lemurian period, man himself becomes inwardly warm, kamic, passionate. In the past, the maturing of man was brought about from the outside. At that time, the general warmth incubated man, the warmth that surrounded the earth. Man then absorbed this warmth within himself.

This is what the Prometheus myth points to. The warmth was brought into man from heaven. Man became a fire being. In this way he acquired passion; before that he had no passion, no inner warmth of his own. That is why it is said of the earlier time: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters - human souls.” This was the warmth that brings everything to maturity.

Now, on the other hand, man is a creature with its own warmth. These conditions had not existed before. Man had learned the earlier conditions on earlier planets. He learned this new condition on earth. Now the earth was left to its own devices after it had acquired its own warmth.

But there were great leaders who could give humanity a jolt. Such beings studied the conditions that were beyond the conditions of the earth. These were the Manus, leaders, divine beings. They had to study a planet from which one could learn what the earth still needed. The planet was Mars. Mars looks to the clairvoyant as if people had already lived on it. The discarded Kama shells can be found on Mars. These Kama shells look like a kind of snake skin that has been left behind. It is Kama that is capable of being fertilized with the spirit. Such a stage had to be studied on another planet, where the beings had just reached the point of having left this stage behind.

Another stage was found by the Manus on Mercury; the Kama-Manas stage. This was necessary for the Earth. The Kama stage of Mars had to be fertilized with the Manas stage of Mercury. Repetitions for the Earth were the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages. The Mars and Mercury stages were added. The influx of Mercury forces is represented by Mercury's snake staff. The Hermes staff represents the impact of the spirit's monad.

The clairvoyant does not count the Earth itself in the planetary development. He says it is Mars and Mercury together. The Earth still has three rounds to go through. These are important for the following planetary stages. In the fifth round, it enters the plant kingdom. It then lives in a kind of paradise, in the Garden of Eden. There the lowest realm will be the plant kingdom. Everything that man produces there will be a plant. In this way, man prepares what will be on the next planet. This next planet is esoterically called Jupiter. It is the Jupiter that will arise from the earth. The sixth round, the animal kingdom, is a preparation for the sixth planet, Venus - so-called because of its similarity to Venus. On the seventh planet, Vulcan, completion follows. No mere physical brain can conceive the state of the last planet. Only for the clairvoyant arises the possibility of knowing something about Vulcan.

The great sages have written down this planetary development, and everyone can read it in the days of the week. You start with Saturday: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Mars day, Mercury day, Jupiter day, Venus day and Saturday again - Vulcan. Mars day and Mercury day stand together for the earth. Mars corresponds to the god Tin and Mercury to the Wotan of the Germans - see Tacitus' Germania. In all nations, the days of the week have names that reflect occult development. Thursday, Jupiter Day, represents the future; therefore, it is especially sacred to occultists. For the occultist, the next Saturday would always be Volcano Day, which coincides with Saturday. The periods of time that are traversed on the planets cover many millions of years. On Earth, everything that has already occurred is repeated. Every idea is a repetition, every work of art is a repetition. The outer, bright consciousness of the day is repetitive. On the next planet, a psychic state of consciousness occurs. It differs from the present state in that the human being enters a luminous state from the state of his own warmth, developing his own light. There he consciously becomes a luminous being. There he can consciously produce glowing colors. There he can transform the light into a glowing imagination.

In the fifth round of the fifth planet, the human being will have become a luminous form, an apparition. Today, the clairvoyant can produce glowing forms in the astral realm; in doing so, he anticipates the state of the fifth round of the fifth planet. But he must work with earthly powers. [...]

On the sixth planet, super-physical consciousness sets in. This is magical. The created being of light remains. There, the human being has a magical consciousness. On Vulcan, he will have reached the consciousness of the seventh stage; he will be spiritual. This can only be expressed in a symbolic language, but not in an ordinary language. From Earth onwards, the last rounds are preparations for the following planets. The deeper essence in man goes through this whole development. In the spherical being of Saturn, man was already present as a point. A thread runs through all states of consciousness. Man goes through all stages.

Since the Martian stage, since man has warm blood, his own warmth, conflict has also arisen. Before that, he was a peaceful being, had no passion. In the lower animal species with cold blood, there is no conflict - Kessler, a Russian naturalist, has confirmed this. The thread that was already found on Saturn and that extends to Vulcan is called the Pitri being.

The smallest expresses the greatest. When man got blood, his astral body began to take on the form that it now has. It developed through five races in the Lemurian period, then through seven in the Atlantean period, and finally through five in the Aryan period. In the races, there is a repetition of the earlier conditions. The religious consciousness of the ancient Indian people recognized the One God; this is the germ of all later religions. This was a repetition of the polar stage of the earth. In the Persian race we find a repetition of the Hyperborean stage, and in the Chaldeans and Egyptians the trinity, a repetition of the Lemurian time with the impact of Kama in the fourth sub-race of the fourth stage of the earth. Kama-Manas joins them.