The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today the only connection many people still have to Christmas is to light the candles on the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree is, however, the most recent symbol of Christmas.⁸¹ Even in the regions where it first appeared, people have only known it for about a hundred years. It is not the ancient pagan tradition many people believe it to be. But whilst the Christmas tree is a recent development, the great festival for humanity that is about to come is old, indeed ancient. For as long as people on earth felt, had a sense of what it means to be human, and also knew of the principle that takes us beyond being human to being divinely human, taking us beyond ourselves, they have known this sublime Christmas festival. In John's gospel we find words that may be a leitmotiv for the idea of Christmas. ‘He must wax, but I must wane.’⁸² This points to the relationship between two important annual festivals. John bears witness that he himself must wane, whilst the other one, the Christ, waxes. When the length of day is greatest, it is St John's tide. But behind the external material and ephemeral phenomenon something arises which John put most beautifully into words: ‘And the light shone into the darkness’⁸³ into the days which at St John's tide begin to get shorter. Within the darkness lives the light that is more luminous, more alive than all physical light phenomena—the light of the spirit. And the content of the Christian Christmas is the life of the great light in the darkness. When the festival was celebrated in all religions in ancient times, it pointed prophetically to Christ Jesus, the great spirit and Sun hero.

Today the science of the spirit helps us to understand Christmas, which for two millennia has been felt to be the feast of great idealism. When the service begins in that holy night, in the midnight darkness, and the candles are lit, they shine out into the darkness. It means that when the time comes and everything on earth is destined to die—everything that is purely human, too, will be subject to death—the soul triumphant lives in the body, as made to come true by the Christ, and rises from the shell of the body to live in the light, even if the earth, being physical matter, will shatter into countless atoms. Out of this darkness, this death of the earth, the soul of the whole earth will rise with all the human souls that will have been received into this earth soul. And Christ Jesus was the example, the ideal, to show that not only will the earth soul achieve this but all human beings on earth shall have the same certainty.

And so it is not only the physical sun which is a reflection of the Christ spirit but indeed the waxing sun of the spirit. When all energies will be transformed and love is aglow everywhere in the earth's body, the Christ principle will flow through every part of the earth. The light of Christmas is the symbol of this.

The three kings are symbols, as are their gifts, with gold the symbol of wisdom and kingly power, myrrh the symbol for overcoming death, incense the symbol for ether substances made spiritual in which the god enters into reality who has overcome death. With the three symbols we have Christ the king, the vanquisher of death, the fulfilment of all earthly evolution. That was the experience of the birth of the God child for every esoteric initiate, foreseen in the mysteries even before the Christ came and also experienced afterwards. The mysteries were not church establishments or schools in the ordinary sense but places of training where rites were also observed, where people learned wisdom, surrender and a faith that is both knowledge and insight. There were greater and lesser mysteries. In the lesser mysteries, people admitted after going through many trials would see dramatic presentations of the eternal truths which higher initiates experience in their own hearts. The greatest elements of human evolution may be compared, on a small scale, with the experiences someone who was born blind has after an operation. A completely new world opens up. An initiate has the eyes of the spirit opened. A world of the spirit opens up in light and colour, completely new and much wider than the physical world with all its spirits and inhabitants. All things seem full of life to him. This is the moment when initiates experience the birth of their higher self. It was known as the inner Christ festival. The experiences of those chosen people, experiences that can still be had by initiates today, were an ideal for those in the lesser mysteries, something they might hope to achieve, some sooner and some later. Anyone who knows that everyone has to go through many lives may be certain that for him, too, this awakening, this initiation will be reality one day; that the awakening of the Christ will be achieved in him, the holy night when the light will shine within him. Then the words of John will be reversed: ‘And the light shall be comprehended in the darkness.’

This was also presented in the mysteries. The great Christian event was a physical recapitulation of events every initiate had known in the mysteries, as images presented in the lesser mysteries and inside the human being in the greater mysteries. In the lesser mysteries the important experience of the inner Christ was shown at a particular time of the year, when the sun gives least light to the earth, in the longest night of winter—as is still done today at Christmas. Let us consider the image which symbolized the meaning of human inner development in the lesser mysteries. The people who were about to see it would be in a solemn mood, gathering in holy night, in the utter darkness of the midnight hour. Then a strangely booming, thundering sound would be heard, gradually changing into a wonderful rhythmic harmony—the music of the spheres. A faintly illumined body, a sphere shining dimly in the darkness would appear. This was meant to symbolize the earth. Gradually rainbow-coloured rings, one merging into the other, would arise from the dimly lit earth disk, spreading in all directions—the divine iris. That is how the sun would be seen to shine in ancient Atlantis, in the Niflheim of Norse mythology. The colours would gradually grow brighter, with the seven colours slowly turning into a faint gold and a faint violet. And the form would shine more and more brightly, with the light getting stronger, until it was transformed into the most luminous of the heavenly bodies, into the sun. In the middle of this sun the name of Christ would appear, written in the language of the people who were there. It was then true to say of those who had been present that they had seen the sun at midnight. This means that a symbol of spiritual vision had appeared to them. When their spiritual eyes had been opened they found that all matter became transparent, they saw through the earth, truly seeing the sun at midnight, having overcome matter. The sun at midnight would appear in reversed colour, a violet, reddish colour. For Christians, translated into human terms, the great cosmic symbol thus seen is Christ Jesus coming to the earth. We shall all of us see the sun at midnight. This also does not contradict the New Testament.

Christ is thus the spirit who will transfigure the elements that are still connected with the lower aspect, deify anything which is still connected with worldly aspects. He is the Sun in the realm of the spirit. That is how the Christian esoteric or theosophical Christian inwardly knows him to be. Spiritual awakening comes at the time when cold and darkness are greatest on earth because initiates know that it is the time when certain powers are present in cosmic space and the constellation is most favourable for the awakening. The pupils were taught that they should not be satisfied with ordinary human knowledge but must gain an overview over the whole of humanity, the whole of earth history. Consider the time—they would be told—when the earth was still united with sun and moon. Humanity then lived in the light of the Sun. The body that was later to become the earth was filled with a power of the spirit that also shone forth in every entity. Then the time would come when the sun separated from the earth, when the light shone down on the earth from outside and human beings were in inner darkness. This marked the beginning of their evolution towards a far distant future when they would have the light of the Sun in them again. The higher human being, Sun man, would then develop in them who bears light in him and has power to illumine.

The earth thus arose out of the light, is going through darkness and will come to have the light of the Sun again. Just as the power of the sun's rays decreases as autumn comes and in winter, so does the spiritual principle recede completely during the time when human beings must learn to perceive the external things on earth, perceive matter. But the power of the spirit waxes again, and at Christmas something happens which Paul described by using the parable of the grain of wheat. If the seed that is sown does not perish there can be no new fruit.⁸⁴

At Christmas time the old life passes away, with new life arising in its womb. The sap rises in the trees from this day on, new life wells up, light begins to wax again in the darkness that has been increasing until then. A Christian thinks of this translated into terms of the spirit. Everything that draws us down in the material world must perish to make room for new growth. The Christ came into the world so that from the depths of lowness the principle could be born that will take us to the highest. The stable in the gospel tale is a transformation, a variant of what most ancient wisdom knew as a cave. The feast would be celebrated in hollowed out rock, in different ways, depending on the nation. On the next day there would be a second feast, when it would be shown how sprouting life comes from the rock. This, too, was to show how the spiritual arises from the earthly when it dies.

In all the inner sanctuaries of Egypt, in the Eleusinian mysteries and in the Orphic cult of ancient Greece, in Asia minor, among the Babylonians and Chaldeans, in the Mythraic cult of the Persians and in the mysteries of the Indians—in all of these Christmas would be celebrated in the same way. Those who took part in the lesser mysteries would have presented to them in visible form what the initiates lived through inwardly. They would be shown a prophetic vision of the birth of the Christ in man. Initiates who had already reached that level were said to have reached the sixth stage. There were seven such stages. Stage one was the raven who mediated between the spiritual and the outside world. In the Bible we read of the raven of Elijah,⁸⁵ legend tells of Wotan's raven or the ravens of Barbarossa.⁸⁶

At the second stage the initiate would be an occult individual. He would be admitted to the sanctuary and be present within it.

The third grade was that of the warrior or fighter. Those who had reached this stage were permitted to stand up for spiritual truths before the outside world.

Someone who had reached the fourth grade would be called a lion. His conscious awareness had expanded beyond his own person and become awareness of the whole tribe. Think of the lion of the house of Judah, for instance.

An initiate of the fifth grade not only had awareness for the tribe but had taken in conscious awareness of the spirit of the nation. He would therefore be given the name of his nation, being called a ‘Persian’, for instance, among the Persians. Jesus called Nathanael ‘a true Israelite’,⁸⁷ recognizing him for an initiate of the fifth grade.

The name given to someone who had reached the sixth stage refers to an important quality. Looking at the world of nature around us, we see life forms develop from the lowest ones up to the human being, and from the average human being up to the one who let the Christ be born in him. Among the lower life forms we always see rhythm in life, a rhythm imposed by the sun. Plants always flower at the same time of the year, depending on the species, and open their flowers at the same time of day, depending on the species. Animals, too, show an annual rhythm in their most important vital functions. Only man is gradually losing this regularity. He is coming free of a rhythm that originally was also imposed on him. Yet when love for everything that is awakens in him, flows through him, a new rhythm is born that is his own. This is as regular as the sun's rhythm, which never deviates even the least bit from its orbit—one can hardly imagine what the consequences would be otherwise. An initiate of the sixth degree would be seen to reflect the movement of the sun as it pours its blessings into cosmic space, an image of the Christ in man and in the world of the spirit. The sixth degree initiate would therefore be called the sun hero.

Shivers would pass through the soul of a pupil when he saw such a sun hero in whom the Christ had been inwardly born. This was an event that was felt to be a birth on a physical plane. Initiates of the early centuries put the birth of the historical Jesus at the darkest time of the year, for the soul of the spirit had then risen. It is also why the midnight mass was introduced among the early Christians, a rite held at the dark midnight hour during which a sea of lights would be lit on the altar. The highest degree would then be that of father.⁸⁸

These things, which had happened so often in the individual mysteries, far removed from the affairs of the world, took place in the open, in world history, with Christ Jesus. There can be no more sublime experience for the human soul than the events that happened in the outer, physical world with the conqueror of death who brought the pledge of life everlasting for the soul. The new life fruit that grew from a dying world the initiates of old felt to be the birth of the Christ child in the world of the spirit. Anyone who does not think of the spiritual as separate from the physical world feels a deep connection between the sun at holy night and the life of the spirit that develops out of the world's life. In that holy night we have the birth of the greatest ideal that exists for this world and will come to realization when the earth reaches its goal. Now told in prophesy, it will one day be reality. Love conquering death shines in the lights on the Christmas tree, and in future it will come alive in all of humanity. Now it is the prospect before us.

We can thus sense that the meaning of Christmas is something that comes to us from far ahead but has also been celebrated in earliest times. Seen in the right way, the feast will again have much higher significance for us. The tree, too, will become more important to us as a symbol of that tree in paradise which you all know from the Book of Genesis. Paradise is a picture of man's higher nature, with no evil attached to it. Insight could only be gained at the price of life. A legend can show us how those who had the knowledge saw it.⁸⁹ When Seth wanted to return to paradise, the cherub with the fiery sword allowed him to enter. He found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge had intertwined. The cherub told him to take three seeds from this united tree. The tree shows what man will be one day, something which only initiates have so far achieved. When Adam died, Seth took the three seeds and put them in Adam's mouth. A flaming bush grew out of them, with the words ejeh asher ejeh appearing in it—I am he who is, was and shall be. The legend goes on to tell that Moses made his staff with magic powers of its wood. Later the gate to Solomon's temple is said to have been made of it. A piece of it is reputed to have dropped into the pool at Bethesda and given it special powers. Finally, it is said, the cross of Christ was made of it. It is an image for life that is dying, passing away in death, and has the power in it to produce new life.

A great symbol stands before us—life that has overcome death, the wood from the seed taken from paradise. This life, dying and rising again, is the Rose Cross. It was not without reason that Goethe, that great man, said:

So long as you don't have it,
this word: ‘Die and become!’
you're but a miserable guest
here on this earth.⁵¹

It is a wonderful thing to see the relationship between the tree of paradise, the wood of the cross and the new life that grows from it. To gain an inner feeling for the birth of the eternal human being in temporal life—let that be our Christ idea, our Christmas. Man must apply it to himself even now: ‘The light shines into the darkness’, and the darkness must gradually come to comprehend the light. All the souls in whom Christmas ignites the right spark will be alive to the principle that comes to birth in them at Christmas, the ability that will become a power in them to see, to feel and to will it that the gospel words are turned around to become: ‘The light shines into the darkness, and the darkness has gradually come to grasp the light.’

• 81. See also the lectures given in Berlin on 19 Dec. 1904 (GA 92) in The Supersensible in Man and World, tr. p. M. Allen, and 21 Dec. 1909 (GA 117) in Festivals of the Seasons
• 82. John 3: 30.
• 83. John 1: 5.
• 84. 1 Cor. 15:35-44.
• 85. 1 Kings 17: 4-6.
• 86. Frederick Barbarossa (redbeard) or Frederick I, Holy Roman emperor (1152–1190), king of Germany and Italy. Led the Third Crusade, during which he drowned. Legend has it that he sleeps in the Kyffhäuser mountain until the ravens come to wake him because he is needed again. Translator.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See also Steiner R. An Esoteric Cosmology (in GA 94), lecture of 30 May 1906. Tr. R. Querido. St George 1978.
• 89. See also Steiner R. The Temple Legend (GA93), especially the lecture given in Berlin on 29 May 1905. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985.
• 51. Goethe, West-östlicher Diwan, poem ‘Selige Sehnsuch’

When the theosophical movement was created three decades ago, the leaders' concern was not to introduce a new teaching that would meet a thirst for knowledge but above all to make a spiritual insight available to more people that would show how it is possible to solve important problems in practical life with the help of spiritual perceptions. One of the problem areas where we can see how the science of the spirit can play a role in practical life is the subject of this lecture, the question of education.

Proper consideration of this needs more intimate knowledge of essential human nature. Such knowledge also concerns the supersensible nature of man, yielding fundamental educational principles for anyone who takes the matter seriously. We must therefore first of all consider the essential nature of the human being. Such an enquiry will give us the basis we need for finding answers to the education problem.

In the science of the spirit, anything we perceive of the human being with the ordinary senses is but one part of the whole. This physical body, physical nature, is something man has in common with the rest of the natural world. Using the eye of the spirit, occult science perceives the ether or life body to be the second part of the human being. This organism is more subtle than the physical body, but all its organs and parts are the same as in the physical body. It would perhaps be better to see it as a sum of energy currents, as the architect of the physical body, with the latter crystallized out of the ether body, as it were. Just as ice develops when water cools down, so has the physical body developed out of the ether body. Man has his ether or life body in common with all forms of life.

The third part of the essential human being is the astral body, vehicle for all lower and higher soul qualities, of pleasure and pain, joys and sorrows, and all will impulses. Man has this third body, which may be perceived by those who have developed higher organs of perception, in common with the whole animal world. It surrounds the human being as a kind of cloud that passes through both the physical and the ether body. The astral body is in continual motion, reflecting everything that goes on in the human being. But just as the physical body is connected with and dependent on the whole earth through its physical substances, so is the astral body connected with the whole world of stars that surrounds the earth. All the forces which essentially determine the destiny and character of the human being are connected with that world.

A thinker of more recent times, Goethe, saw deeply into the connections between the natural world and the spiritual human being in his connection with the cosmos and wrote:

As on the day that gave you to this world
The sun stood to the salute of the planets,
So you have flourished then and ever after
According to the law that govern'd your beginning.
Thus you shall be, unable to escape your self,
As sibyls once have said and prophets;
And neither time nor power will break down
Form that was given and in life develops.²¹²

The third part of essential human nature is thus called the astral body because of its connection with the world of stars.

The fourth part is something human beings do not have in common with the rest of creation. It is the part that gives human beings the power to call themselves ‘I’. ‘I’ is the mysterious word everyone can apply only to himself. In it, the soul gives expression to the original spark of the divine within it. With the I, the god in man begins to speak. In the occult schools of ancient Judaism, the I was called the name of god that must not be spoken, and the multitude would feel a shiver of profound veneration when the initiate spoke the name which those outside were not allowed to say: Yahweh—I am the I am.

These four parts make up the fourfold human nature that exists in every human being. It develops from childhood to adulthood but in a thoroughly differentiated way, and we must therefore consider each on its own.

The embryo holds the potential for everything, but development is different in each case. Human beings cannot develop without an environment and are only able to thrive if other spirits and elements of the cosmos are around them. The process which occurs when the physical body is born is later repeated, for it is not yet the whole human being who is born at that time. Just as the developing embryo is protectively held within the physical material organism, so is the human being surrounded by a spiritual organism after his physical birth, an organism that is part of the whole spirit world. The child has a protective ether form and a protective astral form around it and rests in these, as the embryo does in his mother's womb.

In the seventh year of life, at about the time when the second teeth emerge, an enveloping ether form separates from the ether body, just as at physical birth the maternal organism separates from the child's physical body. The child is thus gradually born a second time, this time etherically. The third body, the astral body, continues to be surrounded by a protective astral form. This envelops the human being until sexual maturity is reached, up to the 14th or 15th year, and then withdraws. The human being is thus born for the third time when his astral birth takes place.

This triple birth process shows that we must consider each of the bodies separately, for only the first of them, the physical body, becomes free in every newborn child. And just as it is impossible to bring external light to the child in the womb, so we should avoid letting external influences reach the ether body from outside before it has come free of its protective envelope. Influences should not reach the ether body before the changing of the teeth, nor the astral body before sexual maturity is reached. Up to the seventh year of life we can only educate the human being in the right way by influencing him in his physical aspect. Just as the care given to the mother is intimately bound up with the well-being of the embryo, so we have to respect the inviolability and sacredness of the child's protective ether envelope if the child is to develop and thrive. Up to the changing of the teeth, only the physical body is open to external influences and only the physical body can therefore be educated. If we bring anything external to the child's ether body, we commit a sin against it. The human ether body is the bearer of everything that has lasting nature—habits, character, conscience, memory, temperaments. The astral body relates to the ability to form opinions, using reason to judge the surrounding world. Just as the child's external senses should develop up to the seventh year, so his habits, memory, temperament and so on are let go free by the 14th year, and then, by the 20th, 21st year, critical reasoning, an independent relationship to the surrounding world.

In the science of the spirit we thus have quite definite rules for educating children in these different stages of life. Care of everything connected with the physical body is what counts up to the 7th year. This includes harmonious development of the organs by influencing the child's senses. The physical body is what matters, therefore, and needs to be educated. We do this by offering everything to the child that encourages development through the senses. Aristotle said: ‘Man is the most imitative of all creatures.’ The child is thus an imitator, everything is for him under the sign of imitating things he hears and sees. Dictates and prohibitions carry little weight at this age. The greatest significance attaches to example, and this is how the environment must awaken the child's senses. What matters is the way we are, and adults must carefully observe everything they do and do not do. They should not do anything the child would not be allowed to imitate, for the child believes everything it sees to be something it is allowed to imitate. Thus a good-natured child surprised his parents by taking money from a cash box. They were horrified and thought the child was going to be a thief. But when they asked some questions they found that he had simply copied something he had seen his parents do every day. Up to the changing of the teeth, education consists in being an example to be imitated. Because of this, anyone bringing up a child must be in every respect an example to the child up to his 7th year. It would also be wrong to make the child learn the significance of letters up to that age. A child can merely copy their shapes, for the power to grasp their significance belongs to the ether body.

In these years, when the organs of the child should develop and the foundations are laid for health, everything that happens around the child in moral terms is also most important. It is far from immaterial if the child sees pain and sorrow or joy and pleasures in his world, for joy and pleasures lay sound foundations in the physical body. Everything around the child should breathe pleasure and joy, and those bringing him up should make it their concern to create them, even in the colour of clothes, wall paper and objects. Careful attention must be paid to the child's individual nature. A child tending to be serious and quiet should have darker, bluish, greenish colours around him, a quick, lively child more yellows and reds, for this evokes the ability in the senses to produce the counter colours. The organs that are developing should thus be made to evolve their inner powers. This is also why children should not be given finished toys such as boxes of bricks, dolls, and so on. Every child prefers a doll he has made himself from a boot jack or an old serviette to dressed up ladies made of wax. Why is that so? Because this brings the imagination alive, fantasy is used and the internal organs begin to function to give the child pleasure and joy. See how lively and interested such a child is in his play, entering into the images created in his fantasy with heart and soul. And think of the slouching, bored child whose inner senses are not brought alive. A child knows very well what is good and what is harmful for him. His relationship to the outside world is such that he'll reject anything that is not good for his physical body, for example his stomach, and show desire for the things that suit his stomach. And it would be foolish to go against the healthy desires that help the child develop and force the child to eat foods, for instance, that will drive out his natural instincts. The least suggestion of asceticism serves to eradicate the child's natural health.

Towards the 7th year, as the second teeth are gradually emerging, the protective ether forms around the ether body fall away and now the teacher must bring in everything that develops the ether body and influences it so that it evolves. But the teacher must still be careful not to put too much emphasis on developing the mind and the intellect. During this period, between the 7th and 12th years, what matters most is authority, belief, trust, respect. Something that is most important for the whole of later development in life is that the child should have known many moments like the following. He looks up with some degree of holy awe to someone he respects, feeling a reverence in his inmost heart that will make it impossible for him to think of criticizing or opposing that person. So there he stands one day outside the respected person's door in reverential awe, hesitating to turn the door handle and enter the room which to him his sacred ground. Such moments of reverence give strength for later life, and it is of tremendous importance that the teacher himself is an authority for the child. The people around the child, people he sees and hears, should be his ideals. Every child should choose a hero from history and literature, someone he looks up to with admiration and respect. It is utterly wrong for people with materialistic views to say that they are against all authority and have no regard for feelings of devotion and veneration.

It is important to train memory at this time, something best done in a wholly mechanical way. They should not use calculators but learn numbers and poems and so on, to develop their powers of memory. In earlier times children were brought up very sensibly in this respect. The good old nursery rhymes and children's songs, where it was not the intellectual meaning that mattered but the awakening of an immediate inner response, seem meaningless today because people no longer have a feeling for them. But they hold profound meaning. When they were sung for the children, it was the combination of sounds and harmony that mattered for the child's ear, hence the often meaningless rhymes.

Anyone who has not received a good foundation in character, memory and so on between the ages of 7 and 14 has been wrongly brought up. The right way of education at this age is through authority. The child intuits something in the inmost nature of the individual who is an authority for him, and this develops his conscience, his character and even his temperaments and becomes a permanent disposition in him.

Parable and allegory also shape the ether body in these years, anything that shows the world in parables. Hence the blessing of fairy tale books in our time and the stories about great people and heroes in legend and history.

Gymnastics are also important, for they give the child a feeling of strength, health and joy in life, thus helping to develop his organs just as much as joy and pleasure do. But at the present time physical education is very badly taught. The teacher should not look at his pupils with an anatomist's eye but consider what kind of physical movement would give the child's soul a feeling of greater strength and let him enjoy his body. A teacher must intuitively think his way into the child's feeling soul and design every exercise in such a way that it will give a feeling of growing strength.

Any work of art has a great influence that goes right into the ether body and astral body. Because of this, genuine, true art must enter into the ether body. Thus good vocal and instrumental music is very important, and the children should see many things around them that are beautiful.

Nothing, however, can take the place of religion lessons. The images of things beyond the world of the senses leave a deep impression in the ether body. Children should not hear criticism and learn to judge a particular confession but be given images from the world of infinity. All religious ideas must be images; a parable has a strong influence on the ether body. The greatest care must be taken to teach the children out of the sphere of life.

Today, children's minds and spirits are much involved in dead things. Mobile picture books will help to counteract this in the first seven years of life, for example. Everything should be action, deed, life; this enlivens mind and spirit and makes inwardly mobile. Children should therefore not build with building bricks and play with finished things; they must learn to let something that lives come forth from something that is not living.

Much dies in the child's developing brain with dead activities such as woven or plaited work. Much potential will remain undeveloped because of this. Toys without life in them will also fail to develop belief in the sphere of life. A deep connection therefore exists between the way children are brought up and the lack of faith that exists in our age.

When sexual maturity is reached, the protective astral envelopes drop away. As a feeling for the other sex develops, personal powers of judgement emerge. From then on we can appeal to their yes and no, the critical intellect. Powers of judgement only develop from the 12th year onwards, but the process needs quite some time. Critics aged 19 or 20 cannot possibly judge an issue properly. It is extremely important who will be the young person's teacher at this time, to guide his desire to learn and his urge for freedom in the right direction.

These principles, the fruit of spiritual research, are of the greatest importance for the healthy further development of the human race. Theosophy may use them to intervene in the most important processes in human life in a practical way. This spiritual view of the world thus offers the educator an abundance of insights, which are needed to solve the riddle of the developing young person. The science of the spirit is intended not only to convince and teach; it is meant to do things, to act, to have an effect in everyday life. It it meant to prove its value, becoming part of everyday practice and making life healthy in both body and mind. Theosophy is a truth that is not only correct but also healthy. We can best serve humanity and give it social and other powers if we are able to let these powers come from the growing individual. The growing, developing human being is one of the greatest riddles in life, and to be a proper educator you must be a solver of riddles in taking a practical approach to the education of the developing human being.

• 212. Goethe. Urworte. Orphisch.

The name ‘Rosicrucian’ has an indefinite, vague air for anyone who studies the theosophical literature, as if there were a secret behind it. Many consider it to be a term for people who involved themselves in possible and impossible magic in the 18th century. Reading the works of people who want to study the Rosicrucians scientifically and historically one feels the kindly shrug of the shoulders when they write such things as: ‘There was a kind of brotherhood once that had noble ideals and ideas of moral progress.’ They may also refer to their symbolic formulas. But it is emphatically stated again and again in learned works that the Rosicrucians are degenerate. If the Rosicrucians had ever been what those people say they are, Rosicrucianism would be something that is utterly wrong. In reality it is one of the greatest treasures humanity has. Their secrets have never appeared in books. If something did come out, it was due to betrayal or the like, and such things might then easily be taken for foolishness or superstition. Such a view has nothing to do with what Rosicrucianism actually was. Rosicrucianism may be found encompassed in a book published in 1616. The author was called Johann Valentin Andreae. The title of the book was The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶² It describes the progress of someone who was becoming a Rosicrucian. Later Andreae published a book where it was impossible to tell if it was meant to be serious, a joke or a retraction.¹⁶³

Today we shall discover the things that may be said in public about the true nature of Rosicrucianism. There has always been initiation. People are at different stages of development. Some are far advanced and initiated into the most profound secrets of the world, people who know something about the way worlds evolve, how the earth evolved, and how human beings gradually reach higher and higher levels of development. When it is said that an initiate ‘has the knowledge’, this is often taken too lightly. To know the real secret of man, to know the future of man, is the greatest thing anyone can learn. Yes, there is a knowledge that actually has a deadly effect on someone who is unprepared. If it were simply told today, humanity would be lost. It would be split, with the greatest part destroyed, whilst a smaller part would benefit from the knowledge. The secret can never be elicited from initiates by anyone who does not have the right to know; not even if you were to torture them and make them into martyrs. No initiate would ever reveal the ultimate secret of the world to anyone who does not have the right to know. The very thought of having to reveal the secret would drive him mad or kill him. Let me give you a picture that gives the whole development connected with this secret in perspective—it is of an avenue that gets narrower and narrower, seemingly, though one day the great secret will be revealed to all humanity.

Rosicrucianism is one way of gaining initiation. It was established by Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶⁴ There are different ways of initiation. One was taught by the ancient Rishis in India; it is the Oriental yoga way. Then there was the gnostic Christian way, and the Rosicrucian way is the third. All three ways take people to the summit of initiation. But it is not usually taken into account that the mental and physical constitution of Indians and Europeans is utterly different. It would in fact be impossible for a European body to take the Indian way. People also fail to realize the difference in external influences. It is possible to see that in India, for example, some diseases—cholera, smallpox—take a very different course; they are different in hot compared to cold countries. The environment is completely different and therefore has a different influence on all the enveloping bodies of man. It was peculiar to think, therefore, to say that Europeans could go through yoga training. It was an error. People did not know, however, that the Rosicrucians had followed a way of development from the 14th century.

The Rosicrucian way is certainly not un-Christian. For many people who are firm and ardent Christians the gnostic Christian way is the right one they will reach the highest peaks by this route. But the number of such people is getting less. Rosicrucianism holds the most profound secrets of Christianity but also makes it possible to remove all the doubts raised in human minds today by popular or also less popular views. No one is protected from the most dreadful doubts today, which are coming to people from every direction. Christian training would not enable them to meet these doubts in the right way, protect and defend themselves from them. Do not take this lightly. If someone were to say, for instance, that he does not read Haeckel but stays firmly in the confines of his Christian view of the world, this would not achieve anything. We live in a world where people are full of our civilization. We are using natural laws when we go by train or use the newly developed sources of light.¹⁶⁵ However much a person may shut himself off—the thoughts that live in the spiritual environment come to him from every railway engine, every artificial flame. If someone were to limit himself entirely to reading the Bible, his astral body, his soul body, would nevertheless be surrounded by all kinds of destructive inner feelings during the night. You would not know what was making you nervous. Someone who knows the thoughts that reach us at an unconscious level does know. It is not a matter of materialistic science as such, but the whole atmosphere of mind and spirit in which we live. In the 12th century people still felt religious ardour, with the Church the spiritual and external focus of their lives. Having laboured hard, people would seek refuge in the house of the spiritual powers and find peace there. This has now changed. Rosicrucian training takes account of these facts, of everything modern man has to face.

What does Rosicrucian training consist in? You will meet high ideals in it. Anyone wishing to take up this training must turn to someone who has the requisite knowledge. Even as he takes the first steps the pupil will realize what really matters. Rosicrucian training completely transforms the human being. It is only by gaining the faculties for the higher world that he can be a citizen of it.

Seven elements, activities, are part of Rosicrucian occult training: 1) proper study; 2) acquiring imagination; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) gaining knowledge of man himself, the small world or microcosm; 6) gaining knowledge of the macrocosm; 7) knowing godliness. The sequence may vary, with a teacher perhaps taking 5) as the fourth step, for instance, to suit the pupil's individual nature. You will ask if genuine Rosicrucianism still exists today. Yes, it does, and it will achieve its greatest significance in the future. The Rosicrucian brothers also have signs of identification. Not many of them are able to present themselves in public; some work entirely in secret. Anyone who seeks them will find them; and if someone does not find them he may assume that the time is not yet right for him. It [the meeting] will inevitably happen, however. It may often seem to be pure chance. It may happen, for instance, that you have to sit in a railway waiting room for 3 hours because snow is blocking the line. A stranger approaches you seemingly quite by chance. You have found your teacher. This is just one instance which I mention to you.

1) Proper study. What does this involve? You will be taken into worlds of which ordinary people have no idea. It will be necessary to gain your bearings in those worlds. It is not for people who are divorced from reality, lacking a firm basis to their thinking. Absolute certainty in one's thinking is a precondition. The individual has to look around, endeavouring to look about him with sound eyes, and must also be able to shut off his senses. This is something not everyone appreciates, not even the greatest philosophers. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, said over and over again: ‘Something coming from the senses is always present when we think; thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible.’¹⁶⁶ It is unbelievably arrogant to say that thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible. Methods of developing a way of thinking free from sensory elements are now presented in the spiritual scientific literature and in lectures.

People who are found to be suitable are guided towards deeper knowledge. The elementary part of this knowledge is in fact open to many people. The way of study presented today, leaving aside the sense-related aspects of the world, consists in training one's thoughts. These then have nothing to do with the world we perceive around us through the senses. Wanting to enter even more deeply, one must put one's mind to more powerful thought training. I have endeavoured to give directions for such a way of thinking in the two books The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - A Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Knowledge. It is like this—when he begins to study these books at some depth, the reader will find that one thought follows another in a sequence that is determined by necessity. All people seeking to gain higher things are thus given the means for genuine growth in the spirit.

2) Developing powers of imagination. Here the way ideas are formed differs from ordinary thinking. Think of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’. When you see someone with a smiling or worried face you'll not say ‘a crease is developing in that face’, or ‘a tear runs down his cheek’. What you'll say is that this shows a cheerful and this a sorrowful soul. The outer reveals the inner aspect; it is a simile, a likeness of what lives in the soul. Anyone will accept this in the case of human beings. Everyone knows the difference between a human head and a picture of it. A geologist may describe the earth for you, concerning himself only with its purely physical structure. People do not know that the earth's body is the body of a living entity, and that particular plants reflect the happy and the sad earth spirit. Goethe knew to tell of this; he knew how to see the earth as a body and knew what lived in it. In his Faust, he made the earth spirit say:

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm
I surge to and fro,
Up and down I flow!
Birth and the grave,
an eternal wave,
Turning, returning,
A life ever burning.
And thus I work at Time's whirring wheel,
God's living garment I weave and reveal.

Everything on earth is a likeness of what is happening in the inner earth. People walk about on the earth's body. From my body, the earth may say, grows the seed that gives human beings their bread. The words in John's gospel, ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me’, speak of one of the most profound mysteries in the way we look at the world.

Imagination is gained by seeing everything as a likeness. It is, however, necessary to learn logical thinking first. But in Rosicrucian training no one will choose a different image. Each feels that everything is in the image of the eternal. Here I must use dialogue to speak of something that lies behind an image that was taught in medieval temples and then in the Rosicrucian schools. The teacher would say to the pupil: ‘Look at the plant putting its root down in the soil and turning its flower, the seat of its organs of fertilization, to the light of the sun. The calyx is given a chaste kiss by the sunbeam and a new entity comes into existence.’ Even Darwin said that the root of a plant may be compared with the head.¹⁶⁷ Man is an inverted plant. His organs of reproduction are turned towards the centre of the earth in shame. The animal is between man and plant. These three realms of nature are shown in the image of a cross (Fig. 5).¹⁶⁸

Plato said: ‘The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body.’/p>

The Rosicrucian teacher would then ask his pupil to compare matter as it exists in flesh with the chaste matter of a plant, telling him that a time would come when human beings would be cleansed of their passions and desires, maturing to a stage and shining out towards the sun of the spirit where they will be as chaste and without desire as the chaste plant. With this ideal they will cleanse their flesh, so that fertilization becomes chaste and pure. Medieval schooling represented this ideal in the holy grail. The chalice is a sacred symbol of what human sensuality must become if it is to be like the calyx of a plant. It will then receive the kiss of the white dove—the chalice is shown with the dove above it.

To make the world thus spiritual, seeing man's environment in such images, raises him to the point of vision in astral images. Imagination is developed out of heart and mind and out of feeling.

3) Learning the occult script. The occult script reflects the inner currents in nature. One such sign is the vortex. If you were able to see the whole of the Orion nebula you would have two sixes intertwined. You see a world that is dying and one that is becoming in the nebula. Things are like this everywhere. When a plant sheds a new fruit, nothing from the old plant passes on to the new one. Nothing but powers cause a new plant to develop. And once again you would only see the vortex swirling inwards and out. In the same way you might see an old civilization spiralling into itself and a new one snaking out. This spiritual process can help us understand such a sign that is part of the script (Fig. 6).

800 years before Christ was born the sun entered into the sign of the Ram or lamb. Every spring it moves on a distance. The spring equinox is now in the constellation of the Fishes. At that earlier time people thought the Ram brought all that was good, new strength and power in spring. They even connected the redeemer with this. In early Christian times, the cross and the lamb were their symbol for this. Before the sun was in the sign of the Ram in spring, it was in the sign of the Bull. The Egyptians venerated the sacred bull Apis at that time, the Persians the Mythras bull. After the Flood, the sun was in the sign of Cancer. Cancer was given this occult sign: (Fig. 6).

And so there are many such lines, and also colours. And so one learns the signs that take us into the forces and powers of nature. One learns to develop the will in the occult script.

4) Finding the philosopher's stone. This was felt to be a secret in the 18th century. Someone then also published something about it. It is something everyone knows. The philosopher's stone is at the same time the noblest thing man can attain to, can make of his organism in order to achieve higher development.

Let me give you a story from Vedanta philosophy for this.¹⁶⁹ People once wanted to see if man could also live without eyes. After a year the individual concerned said: ‘Yes, I have lived, but as a blind person? He then tried to live without ears and a year later reported: 'Yes I have lived without ears, but as a deaf person.’ The voice was taken away and he lived as a mute person. Then his breath was to be taken away as well and that proved impossible. He could not live without breathing. Our breathing gives us the air we need to live. ‘And god breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’¹⁷⁰ We take in oxygen with every breath and release carbon dioxide. In the plant, the cycle goes the other way round. The plant uses carbon to build its body. This is why we find fossilized plants in coal after thousands of years. Man has carbon in him; he breathes in oxygen, and the carbon dioxide which is produced is removed. Animals do the same. The Rosicrucian school teaches a special way of breathing, so that the person learns the process which the plant carries out in itself. One day man will be able to transform his carbon himself; he himself will transform the blue blood that is streaming back into red blood. Now he takes in plant nature; one day he himself will do what the plant does today. The Rosicrucian says: ‘Today your body is made of flesh; one day you will create it yourself through the breath. Plant nature will appear in you, but you'll not sleep the way plants do but will be clairvoyant with it.’

This is the ideal man is moving towards—to build his body of carbon. Ordinary coal is the philosopher's stone. When man's body has become star-like it will not be black coal but transparent carbon, clear as water. These are not just chemical processes but sublime ideals. The Rosicrucian goes through it in stages, and later the whole of humanity will ascend to this level.

5) Knowing the human being as microcosm. In all the rest of nature, the world is spread out; man is an extract of it. Everything is spread out in the world in letters, and man is the word. In the early 19th century Oken¹⁷¹ and Schelling¹⁷² presented the basic ideas of this, which were quite correct. They sought to gain understanding of the essence that lies in an organ. Oken got a bit grotesque when he said the tongue was a cuttlefish. Goethe said: ‘The eye is created by the light for the light.’¹⁷³ We only come to recognize the true nature of light when we find the principle in man that corresponds to light.

The teacher gives his pupil a leitmotiv, asking him to concentrate on a point, the organ that lies behind the root of the nose, and he comes to know the nature of dream consciousness in addition to his wide-awake conscious awareness. The human being gets to know the whole world when he deeply considers the spleen, liver and other things. When he has expanded his conscious awareness by thus entering into himself—it is dangerous to go broody—he will become one with the whole world.

6) Coming to know the macrocosm. Having perceived what I have just described, he will also perceive the creator behind all creation.

7) Getting to know godliness. At the 7th stage the individual reaches a point that calls forth universal feeling from the depths of the human soul and something he only has a right to know at this stage—the feeling of blessedness. It is only by gaining insight into macrocosm that he learns to enter into universal feeling. Entering into every individual thing in a clear and living way is godliness. There he discovers the soul that lies at rest behind nature. Someone once said to me: ‘I never thought a stone would feel anything if I split it.’ The spirit of the mineral world feels the greatest voluptuousness when a stone is split, a feeling of bliss. It may seem to us that the marble quarry is going through martyrdom; yet for the spirit of the stone is it the greatest bliss. Now you might ask why people are not told such details. Someone once said it would be most useful for people to know them. My reply was: 'People would want to gain things for themselves from this, and this secret must only be used in utterly selfless service to humanity.’

The Rosicrucians knew this secret, as do those who now walk this earth and serve human progress. They tell the things that will serve progress, they who know how the ‘chymical wedding’ may proceed.

• 162. Andreae, Johann Valentin (1586–1654), German protestant theologian. ‘The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, Anno 1459’, written in 1603. was published anonymously in Strassburg in 1616. See Steiner R. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, essay written in 1917 (in GA 35); P. M. Allen compiler and editor. Blauvelt: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1968.
• 163. Andreae's later works, including the allegorical Die Christburg (1626), were more pietistic.
• 164. See lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Neuchatel on 27 and 28 October 1911. In Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (in GA 130). Tr. P. Wehrle. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1984.
• 165. New York had the first electric street lighting in 1882.
• 166. von Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard (1842–1906). His Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) was translated into English by Coupland , with a new edition in 1931. At the beginning of the second volume (1882) we read: ‘We think either in images, in which case we rake sensory impressions and transformations and combinations of them directly from memory, or we think in abstract terms. Abstract notions have, however, merely been abstracted from our sensory perceptions, and we may discard as much as we like in the process of abstraction, so long as something actually remains. This has thus been part of the whole before from which the abstraction was made. Abstract notions thus are merely residues of sensory impressions and therefore take sensory by nature.’
• 167. Darwin, Charles (1809–1882). ‘Surely it is no exaggeration to maintain that a root tip which has the capacity for achieving movements of adjacent parts performs a function similar to that of the brain of a lower animal.’ Darwin C., assisted by Darwin F. The Power of Movement of Plants. New York 1892.
• 168. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC) Greek philosopher. After living for a time at the Syracuse court, Plato founded the most influential school of the ancient world, the Academy, in Athens. The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body. Rudolf Steiner would frequently refer to these words from Timaeus (chapter 8), but always in the form given by the Viennese philosopher Vincenz Knauer, who was a personal acquaintance, in his Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwickelung und teilweisen Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Vienna 1892, S. 96 (the passage is underlined in the copy of the work in Rudolf Steiner's library): ‘We know from mythology, in Timaeus, that god placed this world soul in the universe in the form of a cross and stretched the world's body upon it.’ The passage in Timaeus says that god split the world's soul in two halves, ‘brought the two parts together in the form of the Greek letter chi (Χ) and made each into a circle, so that the two met with their ends opposite to the middle, and each also met itself. He gave both parts the uniform movement of the circular orbit that took place in that same space, but made one of these circles the inner one, and the other the outer one’ (quoted from German translation by Otto Apelt, Der philosophischen Bibliothek Band 179. Leipzig 1919). See also Rudolf Steiner's discussion of this in Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8) (1902).
• 169. It has not so far been possible to trace this.
• 170. Genesis 2: 7.
• 171. Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851), German naturalist and natural philosopher, professor of medicine at Jena, later at Munich and then Zurich. The quote: ‘The tongue is a cuttlefish’ was freely rendered by Rudolf Steiner, basing on Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Jena 1831. Friedrich Frommann, 14. Buch: Zoologie, S. 424,466,496.
• 172. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854). German philosopher.
• 173. ‘The eye owes its existence to light. Light creates an organ for itself from indifferent accessory animal organs, an organ to be like unto itself Thus the eye is created in the light for the light, so that the inner light may come to meet the outer.’ From the introduction to Goethe's Theory of Colour, An Outline. See Rudolf Steiner's Goethe the Scientist (GA 1).

Humanity originally had an all-embracing basic approach which then took different forms depending on the character of nations and the climatic conditions in which they lived. Like the Lord's Prayer, all religious formulae and confessions contain the basic ideas of what is known in the spirit. Some may say these are mere dreams, but they are indeed present. How did they get there, however? Here we must understand that the things we are taught today were not presented in the same way in earliest times. The formulas of religious confessions differed greatly through the ages. The earliest views were in images, not concepts like those we have today. Those images were held on to, in a way, and we find them again and again. Thus insight is always referred to as a light, and wisdom as flowing water. But why was it that earlier peoples were spoken to in images? Let us try and understand how religious teachers would speak to the people before Hermes, before Buddha, Zarathustra and Moses and before the Christ as greatest founder of a religion.

We have to distinguish between everyday and image-based consciousness. We have our everyday object-bound conscious awareness from morning till night. We then see things the way they present themselves to the senses. The other levels of consciousness are hidden from us to begin with. We have all heard of the state of dreamless sleep. This means something very different to an initiate than it does to an ordinary person. The initiate is in a conscious state from going to sleep to waking up. He perceives a world, though in a very different way than one normally does. Ordinary people know nothing of this condition. The level of consciousness one has in dream-filled sleep is better known. We will therefore let dream-filled sleep serve to explain dreamless sleep to us.

Dream-filled sleep shows everything in symbols. It is similar to the state of consciousness an initiate has in the world of the spirit. The initiate also sees images, though these, too, are constantly changing. On the physical plane everything has just one form—a table, for example, or a stone. But the higher we go the more do forms keep changing. The plant changes and moves, the animal even more so, and human beings are most capable of change of all. In the devachan everything is continually changing. One can do certain exercises that will make the colour lift away from a plant one is observing, so that it floats and moves freely in space. One then has to learn to guide such free-floating colours and also sounds to particular objects and spirits. The colour then gives expression to the inner life. The human aura works like this in colour and form. Inner life experience comes to expression in it. But it is never at rest. It is eternal motion, eternal motion being the essence of the higher world. This is also what makes the world of the spirit so confusing to anyone entering into it for the first time. An inexperienced individual is confused by the fleeting manifestations. No entity endowed with spirit can hide its inner life from those who see with the eyes of the spirit. An ordinary person has to consider the outer aspect to draw conclusions as to the inner life. In the world of the spirit, the inner nature of every entity lies openly revealed. There we are united with the inmost nature of things. Today only initiates can have this; they are able to add the inner nature of things to their outer aspect. It is something they do in full conscious awareness. A long time ago, people were able to do this unconsciously.

The further back we go the less were people able to do the things we can do—they could not calculate, nor count. They knew nothing of logic. That is how it was around the middle of the Atlantean period. The Atlanteans could do something else instead, however. Looking at a plant, for example, they could feel a quite specific feeling arise in them. Our own feelings are pale and shadowy compared to theirs. The early Atlanteans did not yet have such definite ideas of colour as we have. They would see a colour rise like a mist from a plant and float freely. Nor would they have seen the colour of a crystal. They would, for instance, see a corona of colours around a ruby, with the ruby itself just a break in it. Even earlier, human beings would not even see the outlines of people, animals and plants. But if they approached an enemy they would see a form arise that was coloured a browny red. A beautiful bluish red would indicate a friend. They thus perceived the inner life in single shades of colour.

If we go even further back, to Lemurian times, all will impulses were also different. The will still had magic powers, showing its relationship to the powers of nature outside. When someone held his hand above a plant and let his will be active, it would immediately begin to grow. When man enclosed himself in a skin, his powers became more remote from those of nature.

Powers of thought are least like those of nature. Even earlier there were entities that would have considered it a monstrous thing to say: ‘I form an idea of something outside me.’ They would see the idea at work outside as an entity. Originally things made up ideas. Today we look at a watch and get an idea of it. But we would not be able to form the ‘watch’ idea if someone had not at one time formed the idea before there were any watches and then made a watch. It is the same with the ideas for all things. The ideas we have about the things in the world were realities in the far distant past. At that time they were put into the things. Everything arises according to such ideas, which is what people still do today when they are creative. The spirits that existed at the time were watching the master mechanic of things, as it were. They had a creative intellect. They were not yet incarnated in the flesh. The principle which dwells in the human body today was still in the keeping of the godhead at that time. Physical life already existed down below on earth, with life forms that were between today's animals and humans and were ready to receive the human soul. We can use a metaphor for this. If many tiny sponges are dipped in water, each will absorb droplets of water, and so the water is divided up into lots of single drops. The physical earth with its teeming throng of creatures was surrounded by spirit then where it is surrounded by air today. Individual souls only came into being when each had absorbed a droplet of the spirit. This also started the process in which man developed a separate object-related conscious mind.

Before that, the soul received everything as though from within from the cosmic soul, for the cosmic soul knew everything. That is the difference between knowledge now and knowledge then. The inner world goes down into the darkness of dreamless sleep when bright daytime consciousness arises. It is the astral body which perceives the outside world, seeing colours, hearing sounds, feeling pleasure and pain, but it cannot do this without the physical body. The astral body is the same as the one that once was part of common soul substance. If everyone were to go to sleep at the same moment and their astral bodies would be all mixed up, with the part of the general world soul that has not entered into individual bodies also mixed in, dreamless sleep would end, colours and sounds would arise in the astral bodies the way it was in the past when all souls still rested in the cosmic soul. Night, as we know it today, was then filled with light, filled with perceptions made in the world of the spirit. The whole of humanity once had this kind of astral perception.

What has humanity been perceiving since then? What has man gained for himself since? His self-awareness, the ability to say ‘I’ to himself. The whole of that earlier consciousness was only an enhanced dream consciousness, and people had no self-awareness. self-awareness was given to human beings when they descended into the body. And this is on the increase all the time. It is the content of present human evolution. ‘I am the I am’ has revealed itself to humanity. That is the true name of Jahveh,⁹⁰ or, more fully: ‘I am he who is, was and shall be.’ In those far distant times human beings had no awareness of this. Where did an ‘I am’ awareness exist then? In the spirit who had all the souls in it like drops in water. The holy spirit is the one who had I-consciousness before there was embodiment. It is the spirit as such which comes to I-awareness in human beings.

In that remote past, teaching was a pouring out of wisdom which came from inside, not outside. Between that time and our own there was an intermediate period, the Atlantean age. When this was at its mid-stage, human beings were able to see outlines of objects and life forms. But everything was still enveloped in a mist of colours for them, with sounds alive in it that had something to say, that were wise. A teaching then developed that later became religious teaching as we know it. Aeons of time ago⁹¹ they had a great school for adepts. Everything we learn today comes from those Turanian adepts.⁹² Pupils passed it on right to the present day. But people taught in a different way in those times. It had to be taken into account that humanity was in an in-between stage. Even the wisest men could not have counted up to five. But by reacting to their inner reality it was possible to illuminate them, teach them wisdom in images. They could not have been given the wisdom in words, for those would not have been understood. Human beings did not have the bright daytime consciousness that we have today. On the other hand it was easy to put them in a state where the godhead illumined them from inside. The teachers would put the pupils into a hypnotic state. This would not have been the hypnotic state used to cause so much mischief today, but it was similar. The teachers would use this sleep state to illuminate the pupils.

They had occult writing at that time, something we might also call occult language. We still have mantras that rank higher in value than thoughts. They are mere shadows, however, compared to the sound compositions of those early times. These were simple, but when a note was sounded, the lost capacity for illumination would be restored. The world of inner illumination then came to people artificially and they would see the cosmic spirits at work as in earlier times. The pupil would receive formulas and specific drawings from the teachers. This would give direct perception of cosmic secrets. This sign, for instance, would tell him how a new plant grows from a seed (Fig. 3).

Today people need to have this explained if they are to think or feel anything as they see it. In those days, the sign had an immediate effect on those who saw it or heard the beat of it. The founders of religions taught the formulas used in those times to the people of later ages.

The further we go back, the more was the cosmic soul still all one. In sleep, the astral bodies of all human beings are still fairly alike. In Atlantis the astral bodies were all alike in this way. It was then possible to give one original wisdom to all people. When the great flood had passed over Atlantean humanity, wisdom could no longer be the same for all. It was then necessary to teach in India the way the Indian body needed it, and differently in Persia and again in Egypt, differently for the Greeks and Romans, and do it differently again for the ancient Germans. But the origins live on in all true forms of religion. In Atlantis, illumination was to have life conveyed to one, not to be taught. The sign of the vortex would arouse an immediate inner response. Today our feelings need concepts to catch fire. The seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer would in the past have been presented like a scale of seven notes, connected with seven particular colours and smells.

The Atlantean pupil thus came to have living experience of the sevenfold nature of man. The Christ, the greatest of the religious teachers, put this into the Lord's Prayer. The power of the Lord's prayer is given to everyone who says it. It is not an actual mantra, though it may have mantric powers. It is a thought-mantra. It did of course have its greatest power in the original language, but because it is a thought-mantra it will not lose its power even if it is translated into a thousand languages. Just as we are able to digest food without knowing the laws that govern digestion, so we may have the benefit of the Lord's Prayer even if we do not have higher knowledge. Someone with higher knowledge will, of course, have even greater benefit of it.

That is the route which has been followed by religious truths. All our souls were somnambulant once in the cosmic soul. This then became differentiated and was drawn down into many bodies. Spiritual perception became obscured, as did the possibility of restoring people to the original state. The religious teachings, and especially the formulas taken from the world of the spirit are only an echo, being now in concepts and words. The wisdom of the Old Testament still speaks of primal ideas and ideas. A faint reflection of primal ideas lives on in ideas. But that original wisdom has not been lost. It still rests in our dormant souls. It is the task of the science of the spirit to bring it to clear conscious awareness. When man will have knowledge of the whole of the outside world after his last incarnation, he is received into the original clairvoyance and brings new illumination, clairvoyant consciousness with him. In the East, it is said that redemption is gained by giving oneself up to universal consciousness. But it will not be like that. Once, before man's first embodiment, there was no self-awareness. But it will be there after the last incarnation. Every drop of soul fluid takes on a specific colour, each a different one. Every one will in the end bring its own colour, and the water, formerly bright and clear, will shimmer in infinitely beautiful, luminous colours, each of which will be separate, however. Everyone brings his own colour, his individual conscious awareness that can never be lost. Universal consciousness will ultimately be all conscious awarenesses in harmony. The many will be one of their own free accord! We have to imagine this in its true nature. Every individual consciousness is then wholly within the universal consciousness.

This human evolution has its purpose. Yes, life has meaning, and the most beautiful meaning is that in the end the human being will lay down a piece of human existence on the altar of the godhead that he has gained for himself And from this the garment will be woven which the Earth Spirit is spinning, as Goethe put it so beautifully and in such rousing terms:

In flooding life and storm of activity up and down I flow, moving to and fro! Birth and the grave, an eternal sea, going one way and t' other, a burning life thus I work at the roaring loom of time making the godhead's living garb.⁹³

• 90. Exodus 3: 14
• 91. One of the sets of notes on the lecture has ‘about 200 000 years ago’.
• 92. Turan was the name of the realm beyond the Amu Daria (formerly Oxus) river in Central Asia.
• 93. Goethe, Faust 1, 4: 501-9.

Today²¹³ we'll be considering the question as to whether other creatures have souls, as human beings do, and above all whether animals have some form of soul. Someone who tends to gloss over things may consider this a waste of time, but great people have also given thought to the matter in the past. Descartes, the philosopher who brought philosophy, which had died away in medieval times, alive again at the beginning of the 17th century raised the question. He did, of course, consider animals to be like machines, creatures one could not say had real souls but were reflex machines.²¹⁴ Anyone observing animal life and giving some thought to it will hardly be able to share his views. We merely have to consider the way some animals in the world around us do things, also making relationships among themselves that one would hardly think possible without a soul. The faithfulness of a dog is an example. It would be hard to think that there isn't something in that dog which is similar to what lives in a human being.

When we observe certain things animals do, can we say they do no involve higher mental activity? Consider a beaver's lodge, for instance. A human being would have to use considerable mental effort and skills to produce such a structure. Profound wisdom is evident in the way certain beams are placed exactly, at absolutely the proper angle, to meet the fall of the river and the given situation.

Look at ants! In every ant heap you see something that would be wise government among humans, actually going beyond anything present-day humanity knows. Ants are divided into three groups—workers, males and females. It can be shown that the workers are very clever, the females less clever and the males quite stupid. Everything in the heap is skilfully organized—the way they transport the things needed for their building and to breed their young, go on forays, and so on. If all such things call for soul activity in human state affairs, we cannot say animals lack soul. People have always thought it was enough to speak of instinct, but they never try to think what instinct really is.

We must now also consider the other side and not fail to realize that there is a fundamental difference between the things an animal achieves by its powers of soul and the things a human being achieves by them. A definite fact, which may serve us as an example. Travellers would often find that when they had lit a fire to ward off the cold and then went away, apes would come to warm themselves by the fire. No ape was ever seen to gather more wood to keep the fire going, however. It does not make this connection, and this is of eminent significance. It cannot add something new by using its own mental faculties, such as stoking a fire, and so on.

To understand the animal soul we must make this difference from the human soul our starting point. Another difference between the animal and the human soul is that you can write a biography of every human being but not of every animal. This is most important. If you consider your own interest in the different life forms, you will find that the interest you have in an individual human being is the same as for a whole group of animals of the same species. If you think of a lion, your feelings for the lion grandfather, father, son and grandson are exactly the same. Such an approach would seem absolutely frivolous if applied to human beings. Yes, the owner of a dog may say he can write a biography of his dog, but this means nothing. You can also write the biography of a steel nib or about differences in the life of a darning needle and a sewing needle. That is merely a transfer of ideas. Just as one whole animal species differs from another, so does a single human being differ from others. A common soul lives in the whole group of animals. Just as your ten fingers are part of your hands, so are all wolves part of the wolf group soul.

Now we also need to consider the human soul more closely. It was not as individual in earlier times as it is today. There was a point in human evolution when man was much closer to a group soul. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus gave a description of individual German tribes in his Germania. All members of a group felt they belonged together, though there were, of course, differences, everything happening by degrees in human evolution. All who belonged to a group saw themselves to be the same. Markedly individual facial features are a sign that the individual soul is more removed from the group soul. You still see more or less the same facial features among savages. We have to remember the fact that marked facial features prove that the individual nature is influencing the bodily configuration. This will be increasingly the case as human beings continue to evolve. A time will come when national characteristics disappear completely. With a soul incarnating now in one nation, now in another, national differences will vanish, with everyone immediately always looking just like himself the more his individual nature has come through. In earlier times, when people still married within the tribe, its members would hold together like the fingers on a hand, with one avenging the dishonour done to another as though it had been done to him. This cohesion is gradually disappearing, and the greater the union, the more general the unity of human beings, the more individual will souls and characters be. So you do not get a mishmash but the more the differences fall away, the greater the individuality.

Where do human group souls differ from animal group souls? We have to go back a long way in evolution. In Lemurian times human beings did not yet have different bodies enveloping a spiritual core. The highest form of life was a kind of human-animal with physical body, ether body, astral body and the potential for an I, but not yet the I as such. They were able to receive the divine seed. The soul which now lives inside man had not yet left the keeping of the godhead and still lived in a soul spirit stratum. Think of a container holding a thousand water droplets that merge into one another, forming a single whole. Take a thousand small sponges, each able to absorb one drop, and put them in, so that each contains one drop. This makes them individual and independent. Now imagine that to begin with the soul did not came to dwell in every individual but that one soul was shared by many bodies, a group soul. At that time, the soul which today dwells in every individual dwelt in a whole tribe.

And here you have to accept a new idea. Such a group soul also does not die. The beautiful, significant aspect of death is something specific, something given to the individual human soul. When one unit which is part of a group soul dies, it is replaced immediately, just like the process when you cut off a polyp. And so the group soul, which does not come down on to die physical plan, is sentient of death as the loss of a part, and birth as a new one growing in its place. It does not have the special quality that comes with death. It is only when a sentient entity says: ‘It is I’ that death begins to intervene in individual life. Man gains a higher life by facing death. If death were not overcome, he could not go through death into a higher life.

On the astral plan we find the souls of animals that are linked by a thread to each individual in the group. To understand the origin of animal group souls you have to know what makes man the kind of physical being he is.

When the divine seeds came down, they found very different vessels to contain them. Some were specially developed to be fighters, others were similar, but more developed for work, for patience, and so on. The various bodies thus became different in their development and also in their external form. The lower animals of today insects and others, had branched off during an earlier stage in earth evolution and become something separate.

We'll now only consider animals from the fishes upwards. Mammals did not yet exist when the descent came into the waiting body which externally, not inwardly, was more or less at the level of a fish's body. The human being of that time had to move around half by swimming and half by floating, and had fin-like organs for that purpose. What happened to his body on earth happened because of the human soul that dwelt in it. It took long periods of evolution to transform it into the god-like body of today. Much came to a standstill along that long route. But because the earth continued to go through its transformation, coming to a standstill became bodily regression. Take two siblings, for an example. One changes at every stage of life, the other remains at childhood level. He will no longer look like a child when he's 60, however. That is how the fishes of today have regressed, looking different from the way they did before.

Humanity continued to evolve, configuring everything, finally also the mammalian body. All the time some would come to a standstill, human bodies grown decadent. If you really enter into it you will realize that all animals have aged at their juvenile stage, prematurely, assuming fixed forms which they should have gone beyond. They have crystallized, as it were, in the whole of their development.

Further evolution did, however, put man in a peculiar position where some of his qualities are concerned. He lost his certainty. Apes kept imprisoned will soon develop tuberculosis and other diseases. Animals do not tolerate the human way of life. They also have some degree of certainty where the choice of foods is concerned. A cow walking across a pasture knows exactly which herb is good for it. Man no longer has this. He needs uncertainty in order to determine his free choice. Present-day uncertainty is necessary so that certainty may be gained at a higher level. Man adapts to the higher level. Growing uncertain thus guarantees his independence. Certainty has remained where development has not gone so far that the I is at work in the individual entity. We should not be surprised at the wisdom we see in the animal world any more than at the wisdom of our own hand. An individual beaver is just the group soul's unskilled worker on the physical plan. The ant is at a very different level from the beaver and much further removed from us, for it separated off at a much earlier planetary existence of the earth. In taking just a single route it has gone further than man. For human beings, thinking, feeling and doing are firmly connected. If I see something I like, I reach out for it. The idea leads to the action. Without this firm connection people would be very unsure of themselves. Spiritual training tears will, idea and feeling apart, separating them completely. This will only come true for the whole of humanity at the Jupiter stage of earth evolution. But before he experiences this, the pupil meets the guardian of the threshold who gives him clarity concerning the whole of his life so far.

Some animal group souls went prematurely through this separation of soul functions into three. It is a fact that some parts in the brain of a spiritual pupil are differentiated like the ants in an ant heap. The ant did this prematurely and continues to be immature but clever like a child. The beaver group soul will have to catch up on things it has missed, the ant soul has thrown away its opportunity, going in a completely different direction. Animal souls are human souls that have grown one-sided. Oken said the tongue was a cuttlefish. This should not be taken literally, of course, but the creature in whom tongue properties came too much to the fore has remained stationary at that point. Paracelsus said the profound words: ‘Looking at nature, we see individual letters, together they create the word that is the human being.’ All the different qualities you find combined in man can be thought of as distributed among different bodies, each belonging to an animal group soul. Animals are human beings who have come to a standstill in developing their particular qualities. Man became inventive because he lost his certainty. The first element he learned to make serve him was fire. With this he climbed the first step towards civilization and became productive. He is an encyclopaedia of the different animal souls.

Another thing you must clearly understand is that when you go to the lower animals you will find that they are not able to give direct expression to pleasure and pain in sound. Insects produce noises, but those are boa noises. In occult science, clear stages are established between animals that sound and those that do not. But it is only in man that the inner sound becomes word, becomes speech. Even the more highly developed animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds. At a later time animal group souls, not individual animals, will become human beings, but their constitution will differ greatly from that of present-day humans.

Goethe was aware of this and put it most beautifully in his Metamorphosis of Animals,²¹⁵ saying that they were like a human being separated into his individual parts. The whole animal world, he said, looked at us in the human form. And in looking at the whole of animal creation, the human being thus says: ‘All this brought together in one, that is you.’

Questions and answers

Will more of creation split off as human evolution continues?

Yes, and this is what theosophists call ‘going through the crisis’.²¹⁶ We are now in the 5th epoch; the 6th epoch will see a completely different race, noble and beautiful compared to the split-off decadent race of revoltingly ugly, bestial, sensual people who have many vices, arousing much greater revulsion than is possible with present-day humanity, because there will have been downward development. And you can see it clearly stated in the Book of Revelation, in what is called The Last Judgement. Anyone who is completely selfless may be ripe now for the 6th epoch. He may still incarnate a number of times, but only in order to help others. Some may find that the Last Judgement sounds harsh, but they do, after all, have the choice. Please do not misunderstand me. I mean not concerning reincarnation but concerning the 6th epoch.

Why do old people grow weak-minded, seeing that the soul remains unchanged?

The soul does not change. It never descends from the level it has reached, but its instrument has grown weak. It is like a great pianist who cannot play as well as before if the instrument is poor.

You will say the soul no longer knows its own level. Yes, for it cannot see itself for as long as it is in a physical body. There you altogether have only the reflection of the soul, the mirror reflection. When the mirror grows dim or breaks, it can no longer give a reflection. It is only the occult student who is truly able to perceive his soul.

• 213. See also lectures given in Berlin on 10 November 1910 (in GA 60—Engl, as The human spirit and animal spirit. The human soul and the animal soul. Typescript Z-55 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London).
• 214. Descartes, Rene (1596–1650). Creator of the mechanistic view of the universe. According to Descartes, basic laws of mechanics govern the objects not only of physics and astronomy but also of physiology and psychology, the exception being 'thinking substance\ See his philosophical works.
• 215. See Goethean Science (GA la) (Rudolf Steiner's lectures on the first three chapters of the draft for a general introduction to comparative anatomy, with osteology as the starting point, 1796). Tr. W. Lindemann. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1988.
• 216. See Steiner R. Karmic Relationships of the Anthroposophical Movement (GA 237), lecture of 3 August 1924. Tr. G. Adams, D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

Translated by Anna R. Meuss

Today we are to deal with the question of the ensoulment of creatures other than man, especially the question whether animals have any kind of soul. Such things appear superfluous to one who hurries by them without attention, and yet noted men of the past have already occupied themselves with them. Cartesius (Descartes), who at the beginning of the 17th Century was a keen renewer of the philosophy which decayed in the Middle Ages, put the question. But he regarded animals as machines—beings of which one could not really speak of a real ensoulment—reflex machines.

Whoever thoughtfully regards animal life can only share this view with difficulty. We need merely to point out that many animals in our environment perform actions, and enter into relationships even among themselves, which are difficult to imagine without a soul. One example is the faithfulness of the dog. We can only with difficulty give ourselves to the thought that nothing lives in its inner being analogous to what lives in man. If we consider certain performances, can we disregard a higher, spiritual activity? Let us consider, for example, a beaver's dam. This so artistically constructed performance would denote for a man a great spiritual effort. A deep wisdom lies, for instance, in the way certain beams are adapted most exactly in the correct angle, to the fall of the water, and the prevailing conditions.

Consider the ants. In each ant heap, you meet something like a wise state order of human beings—indeed transcending that of modern man. The ants are divided into three groups: workers, males, and females. It is demonstrable that the workers are very clever, the females more stupid, and the males very stupid. Everything in the structure is elaborately organized—the way they procure everything necessary for the building and for the rearing of the young, the way they lead their foraging expeditions, etc. If all this within a human state needs a soul, then we cannot deny an ensouling to these creatures. People always satisfy themselves with “instinct,” but they never attempt to think about anything underlying this “instinct.”

We must now also consider the other side, and not overlook the radical distinction between what man performs with his soul, and the animal with its soul. As an example, we will start from a definite fact. Travelers have often noticed that if they kindled a fire because of the cold, after they left it the apes would come and warm themselves at it. They never observed, however, that an ape had fetched some wood, to keep the fire going. It cannot arrive at this combination, and that is eminently important. It can never, from its own spiritual powers, do anything new, such as stir up the fire, etc.

If we want to make clear to ourselves the animal soul, we must start with this difference from the human soul. A further difference between the animal and human soul is that you can write a biography of each human soul, but not of the animal. That is very important. If you ask yourselves about your interests in different beings, you will find that you bring the same interest to an individual man as in the case of the animals, to a whole group of similar ones. Think of a lion. You feel the same towards the lion-grandfather, father, son, grandson, etc., but this idea would appear to you nonsensical, if applied to human beings.

It says nothing when a dog owner perhaps maintains that he could write a biography of his dog. You could also write a biography of a pen, or the differences in the life of a pin and a needle. That is only an overdrawn distinction. Just as strongly as one whole animal species differs from another, does the single individual person differ from another.

One common soul lives in the entire animal group. As your ten fingers are members of your hands, so are all wolves members of the wolf group soul.

Now we must enter more exactly into the nature of the human soul, which formerly was not as individualized as it is today. At one point of human evolution, man stood far closer to the group soul. Tacitus, one hundred years after Christ, gives us a picture of the different tribal groups. All members of a group then felt themselves belonging together, naturally with gradations, for everything in human evolution is in stages. All members of a group then looked alike. The markedly individual physiognomies are the sign of this freeing of the individual souls from the group soul. You still find today, among savages, more or less the same features. We must hold fast to this fact, that the physiognomy coming to expression is the proof that the individuality works formatively on the body. This will be more and more marked among the further evolved human races. A time will come when the racial character entirely recedes. If a soul incarnates, now in this, now in that nationality, then the national distinctions vanish, and each one will always only remember himself the more his individuality has worked itself out. Formerly, when marriage only took place within the tribe, the members held together like the fingers of the hand, one revenging the wrong done to another, as if it had happened to himself, etc. This cohesion disappeared more and more; the larger, and more general, the aggregation of human beings, all the more individual became the soul and character. A medley does not arise, but the more the distinctions fall away, the more does individuality arise.

Now, in what way are the human group souls distinguished from the animal? For this we must go back far into the story of their origin.

There was a time in which man did not yet live, as now, in his various bodily sheaths and spiritual germ of his being. I mean the Lemurian Age. At that time the highest beings were a kind of human-animal, with physical, etheric, astral bodies, and the tendency to the ego, but not yet the ego itself, beings that were adapted to take up the divine germ. The soul which now lives in their inner being, had not yet left the bosom of the Godhead. It still lived in a soul-spiritual stratum. Think of a vessel of water with 1000 drops, which pass over without separation into each other, thus forming a unity. Take 1000 tiny sponges, each one of which can absorb one drop, and immerse them. Then each will be filled with one drop. You must think similarly that the human sheaths absorb the divine germ; thereby they first become individual and independent.

Now imagine that in the beginning the soul did not take up its dwelling in each single one, but that one soul distributed itself as group soul among many. What today dwells in one, then inhabited a whole tribe. Here you must grasp a new concept. Such a group soul does not die. The beautiful, significant side of death is a specific privilege of the individual human soul. If one part of the group soul dies, then it immediately replaces it, like the tentacle you cut from a polypus. Thus the group soul, which does not descend to the physical plane, feels death as the loss of one member, and birth as the growing of a similar one. It has not the privilege of death. Only when a sense being says “It is I,” death begins to enter individual life. Man struggles for and attains his higher life through death. Unless death were overcome, he could not attain through it to higher life.

The soul of the animal is to be found on the astral plane, and is connected with each single member of its group by a thread. In order to understand how animal group souls arise, you must be clear what makes man the physical being that he is. When the divine germs descended, they found the bearers very different. Many were especially developed for conflict; others were similarly formed but more developed for work, for patience, etc., so that the various bodies differed greatly in development even in external form. What today exist as lower animals, as insects, etc., had already branched off during a former incarnation of the earth, and originated by themselves. We are now concerned only with animals from the fishes upwards. When that descent occurred into the waiting bodies, which outwardly (not inwardly) stood approximately at the stage of the fish body, there were no mammals yet existing. The human being who lived then had to move forward half swimming, half floating, and for this purpose had fin-like organs. That which took place in his body on earth, took place through the indwelling human soul. Only in the course of a long evolution was this body transformed to the present god-like body.

Many things remained stationary on this long path. Since, however, the earth was meantime transformed, this standing still caused a decline in the development of the bodies. Take two brothers—the one is transformed through the different ages of life, the other remains stationary at the childhood stage. At the age of 60, however, he no longer looks like a child. Thus the present fishes have come down and look different from how they looked formerly.

Humanity developed further, and fashioned everything to the mammalian body. Everywhere, again, are those who remain stationary—decadent human beings. If you really grasp aright, you will understand that all animals have aged at the youth stage, have aged too early, have adopted fixed forms which they should have gone beyond. They have, as it were, crystallized in their whole evolution. The upward development, indeed, now brought man into a peculiar position, with reference to certain characteristics. He lost security. Monkeys in captivity soon end through tuberculosis and other illnesses. Animals cannot stand the human way of life. Even as regards nourishment, they have a certain security. If a cow goes over a meadow, she knows exactly what plants are good for her. Man has that no more. He needs insecurity in order to come to freedom of choice. The present insecurity is necessary to reach security at a higher stage. Man adapts himself to higher stages. Thus his becoming insecure is the guarantee that he becomes independent. To have remained secure denotes something that has not advanced to the point where the ego can work in the individual being. We should wonder as little about animal wisdom as about the wisdom of our own hand. The single beaver is merely the handyman of the group soul on the astral plane.

The ant stands at quite a different stage from the beaver, and much further from us, because it already separated off at a much earlier planetary condition of the earth. In its one-sided development it has advanced much further than man. Man thinks, feels, wills, in fixed connection. If I see something which pleases me I grasp at it; the idea evokes the will. Without this interaction man would be very insecure. With the Chela, will, idea, and feeling are torn asunder, and must be quite separate. For general humanity that will first be attained at the Jupiter stage of the earth. But before he experiences this, the Guardian of the Threshold meets him, and gives him clarity about the whole of his previous life.

This falling apart into threefoldness has been gone through prematurely by certain animal group souls. As a matter of fact, individual parts in the brain of the Chela are differentiated like the ants in the ant hill. The ant has undertaken that prematurely and now remains like an unripe, clever child. The beaver group soul will have to make up for what it has missed; the ant soul has lost it once and for all, and goes quite other paths.

The animal souls are human souls that have become one-sided. Oken says: “The tongue is an ink fish.” Naturally, that is not to be taken literally. The being, however, in which the characteristics of the tongue have become too prominent, remains stationary at that point. Paracelsus uttered the profound words: If we survey nature we simply see separate letters and the word they form is the human being. Imagine all the different qualities which you find together in man, allocated to different bodies, then you need a group soul. Animals are human beings which have remained stationary in the one-sided development of their characteristics.

Man became a discoverer through the loss of security. The first element which he learned to put to his service was fire. Therewith he reached the first stage of civilization which made him a productive being. He is an encyclopedia of the different animal souls.

Now you must still be clear on one point. If you go to the lower animals, you will find that they cannot directly express pain and pleasure through sound. The insects, indeed, produce noises, but they are body noises. Occult science here makes a quite decisive distinction between the sounding animals and the non-sounding ones. But, first, in man, does the inner sound become word, speech. Even the highest animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds. In a later epoch the animal group souls, not the single animals, will become human beings but quite differently constituted from the man today. Even before Theosophy, Goethe felt this and expressed it wonderfully in his “Metamorphosis of Animals”; that they (animals) are like a man laid asunder, that the entire animal kingdom looks out from out of the human form.

Thus man says to all animal beings (speaking of himself), “All this, comprised in one, art thou!”

Question: Will further cleavages come in human evolution?

Answer: Yes, and in fact that is what is called in Theosophy “going through the Crisis.” We now stand in the Fifth Root Race. The Sixth Race will see quite another race, noble and beautiful, in contrast to the thrown off, decadence which will be a race of men, horribly ugly, animal-like, sensual, vicious, far more horror-provoking than our present humanity, because these will go on developing downwards. It is shown quite clearly in the Apocalypse how the division will occur in the so-called Last Judgment. He who is quite selfless can even now become ripe for the Sixth Race. He may still indeed continue to incarnate, but only in order to help the others. Many may perhaps find that the Judgment sounds harsh, but they have, as we know, the choice. Understand me aright, not for reincarnation, but for the Sixth Race.

Question: Why do old people become mentally weak, even if the soul cannot change?

Answer: The soul, indeed, does not change. It never descends from the stage once reached. But its instrument has become weak, like a great pianist who can no longer play as he played formerly, if he has a bad instrument. You will say the soul no longer knows its own stage. Yes, the soul does not see itself as long as it is in a physical body. There is only to be found the reflection of the soul, the mirror image. Now the mirror becomes clouded or broken. Then it can no longer reflect. The Chela is really the first able to perceive his soul.

Many people who are naturally fitted to receive Anthroposophy in our present age will find it necessary to clear away various contradictions that may arise in their minds. In particular, the soul can be brought up against a certain contradiction when it wants to take seriously the memories of such a season of festival as that which includes Christmas and the New Year. When we take these memories seriously, then it becomes clear to us that at the same time as we try to gain knowledge, we must penetrate into the spiritual history of mankind if we are to understand rightly our own spiritual evolution. We need only take a certain thought, and we shall find it on the one hand full of light, while on the other it makes us disturbingly aware of how contradictions, difficulties, must pile up before the soul of anyone who wants to accept in the right sense our anthroposophical knowledge concerning man and the evolution of the world.

Among the varied forms of knowledge that we try to reach through our anthroposophical studies we must of course include knowledge of the Christ; knowledge of the fundamentally important impulse—we have called it the Christ Impulse—which came in at the beginning of our era. And we are bound often to ask ourselves how we can hope to penetrate more effectively, with deepened anthroposophical knowledge, into the course of human evolution, in order to understand the Christ Impulse, than those who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were able to do. Was it not much easier for them to penetrate into this Mystery, whose secret is specially bound up with the evolution of humanity, than it is for us, at this great distance in time? That might be a troublesome question for persons who want to seek an understanding of Christ in the light of Anthroposophy. It might become one of those contradictions which have a depressing effect just when we want to take most earnestly the deeper principles of our anthroposophical knowledge. This contradiction can be cleared away only when we call up before our souls the whole spiritual situation of humanity at the beginning of our era.

If we try—at first without any kind of religious or similar feeling—to enter into the psychic disposition of man at that time, we can make a most peculiar discovery. We can say to ourselves that we will rely on what cannot be denied even by minds most given over to externals; we will draw on the old tradition as found in history, but we will try to penetrate into that part of it which embraces the purest spiritual life. In this way we may hope to lay hold of essential elements in the evolution of humanity. Let us therefore try to enter quite historically into the endeavours that were made by men, say two hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha and a hundred and fifty years after it, to deepen their thinking in order to understand the secrets, the riddles, of the world. Then we realise that during the centuries before and after the Mystery of Golgotha a change of far-reaching significance occurred in the souls of men with regard to the life of thought. We find that a large part of the civilised world received the influence of that which Greek culture and other deepened forms of thinking had achieved some centuries previously.

When we consider what mankind had accomplished in this way by its own efforts, not in response to any impulse from without, and how much had been attained by men called “sages” in the Stoic sense (and a good many personalities in Roman history were so ranked), then we are bound to say: These conquests in the realm of thought and ideas were made at the beginning of our era, and Western life has not added very much to them. We have gained an endless amount of knowledge concerning the facts of Nature and have been through revolutions in our ways of thinking about the external world. But the thoughts, the ideas themselves, through which these advances have been made, and with which men have tried to discern the secrets of existence in external, spatial terms, have really developed very little since the beginning of our era. They were all present—even those of which the modern world is so proud, including the idea of evolution—in the souls of that period. What might be called an intellectual laying hold of the world, a life of ideas, had reached a certain summit, and not only among particular individuals, such as the pupils of Socrates a little earlier; it had become popular in a limited sense and had spread widely over Southern Europe and other regions. This deepening of thought is truly astonishing.

An impartial history of philosophy would have to pay special attention to this triumph of human thinking at that time.

But if we now take these highly significant advances in the realm of ideas, and on the other hand the secrets bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha, we become aware of something different. We realise that as the story of the event on Golgotha became known in that age, an immense wrestling of thought with that Mystery occurred. We see how the philosophies of the period, especially the Gnostic philosophy in its much profounder form, struggled to bring all the ideas it had gained to bear on this one purpose. And it is most important to let this struggle work upon us. For we then come to recognise that the struggle was in vain; that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to human understanding as though it were dispersed through far-distant spiritual worlds and would not unveil itself.

Now from the outset I would like to say that when in these lectures I speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, I do not wish to invest this term with any colouring drawn from religious traditions or convictions. We shall be concerned purely with objective facts that are fundamental to human evolution, and with what physical and spiritual observation can bring to light. I shall leave aside everything that individual religious creeds have to say about the Mystery of Golgotha and shall look only at what has happened in the course of human evolution. I shall have to say many things which will be made clear and substantiated later on.

In setting the Mystery of Golgotha by the side of the deepest thought of that time, the first thing that strikes one is what I expressed by saying: The nature of this Mystery lies far, far beyond what can be reached by the development of thinking. And the more exactly one studies this contrast, the more is one brought to the following recognition. One can enter deeply into the thought-world that belongs to the beginning of our era; one can try to bring livingly before one's soul what thinking meant for those men of Greece and Rome; one can call up before one's soul the ideas that sprang from their thinking, and then one comes to the feeling: Yes, that was the time when thought underwent an unprecedented deepening. Something happened with thought; it approached the human soul in a quite new way. But if then, after living back into the thought-world of that time and recreating it in one's soul, one brings clairvoyant perception to bear on this experience, then suddenly something surprising emerges. One feels that something is happening far, far away in the spiritual worlds and that the deepening of thought is a consequence of it.

We have already called attention to the fact that behind our world lie other worlds—the Astral, the Devachanic, and the Higher Devachanic. Let us first remind ourselves that these three worlds lie behind our own! Then, if the clairvoyant state of soul is raised to full activity within oneself, the impression is received that neither in the Astral world nor in the lower Devachanic world can a complete explanation of the deepening of thought at that time be found. Only if one could place one's soul in the higher Devachanic world—so says clairvoyant insight—would one experience what it is that streams through the other two worlds and penetrates right down into our physical world.

On this physical plane there is no need to be aware, while steeping oneself in that past world of ideas, of anything told concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. One can leave that quite out of account and ask simply: No matter what happened over there in Palestine, what does external history indicate? It shows that in Greece and Rome an infinite deepening of thought took place. Let us put a circle round this Greek and Roman thought-world and make it an enclosed island, as it were, in our soul-life—an island shut off from everything outside; let us imagine that no report of the Mystery of Golgotha has reached it. Then, when we inwardly contemplate this world, we certainly find there nothing that is known to-day about the Mystery of Golgotha, but we find an infinite deepening of thought which indicates that here in the evolution of humanity something happened which took hold of the innermost being of the soul on the physical plane. We are persuaded that in no previous age and among no other people had thinking ever been like that! However sceptical anyone may be, however little he may care to know about the Mystery of Golgotha, he must admit one thing—that in this island world that we have enclosed there was a deepening of thought never previously known.

But if one places oneself in this thought-world, and has a clairvoyant faculty in the background, then one feels truly immersed in the individual character of this thought. And then one says to oneself: Yes, as this thinking flowers into idea, with Plato and others, as it passes over into the world we tried to enclose, it has a quality which sets the soul free, which lays hold of the soul and brings it to a loftier view of itself. Whatever else you may apprehend in the external world or in the spiritual world makes you dependent on those worlds; in thinking you take hold of something which lives in you and which you can experience completely. You may draw back from the physical world, you may disbelieve in a spiritual world, you may refuse to know anything about clairvoyant impressions, you may shut out all physical impressions—with thoughts you can live in yourself; in your thinking you lay hold, as it were, of your own being!

But then—and it cannot be otherwise if one enters with clairvoyant perception into this sea of thought, as I might call it—a feeling of the isolation of thought comes over one; a feeling that thought is still only thought; that it lives first of all only in the soul, and that one cannot draw from it the power to go out into a world where the ground of the rest of our being—the ground of what else we are—is to be found. In the very moment when one discerns the grandeur of thought, one discerns also its unreality. Then one can see also how in the surrounding world that one has come to know through clairvoyance, there is fundamentally nothing to sustain thought.

Then why should thought be there at all? The physical world can do nothing but falsify it. Those who wish to be pure materialists, who refuse to ascribe to thought any primal reality of its own, should really prefer to prohibit it. For if the natural world is the only real world, thought can only falsify it. It is only because materialists are illogical that they do not embrace the only theory of cognition that goes with monistic Materialism—the refrain-from-thinking, think-no-more theory. But to anyone who immerses himself with clairvoyant perception in the world of thought there comes this disquieting awareness of the isolation of thought, as though he were standing quite alone with it. And then only one thing remains for him; but it does remain. Something comes towards him, even though it be from a far spiritual distance, separated from him by two worlds; and it becomes apparent—so the clairvoyant soul says to itself—that in this third world lies the true origin, the fountain-head, of that which is in the life of thought. For clairvoyant souls in our time it could be a powerful experience to immerse themselves, alone with their thinking, in the time when thought underwent its deepening; to shut out everything else, including knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, and to reflect how the thought-content on which we still nourish ourselves came forth in the Graeco-Roman world.

Then one should turn one's gaze to other worlds and feel rising over the Devachanic world a star that belongs to a higher spiritual world; the star from which rays out the power that makes itself felt in the thought world of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Then one feels oneself here on Earth, but carried away from the world of today and plunged into the Graeco-Roman world, with its influence spreading out over other regions at that time, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But as soon as one lets the spiritual world make its impression on one, there appears again, shining over Devachan, the star (I speak symbolically), or the spiritual Being of whom one says to oneself: Yes, the experience of the isolation of thought, and of the possibility of thought having undergone such a deepening at the beginning of our era—this is a consequence of the rays that shine out from this star in the higher spiritual world. And then comes a feeling which at first knows nothing of the historical tradition of the Mystery of Golgotha but can be expressed thus: Yes, you are there in the Graeco-Roman world of ideas, with all that Plato and others were able to give to the general education of mankind, with what they have imparted to the souls of men—you feel yourself living in the midst of that. And then you wait ... and truly not in vain, for as though deep in the background of spiritual life appears the star which sends forth its rays of power; and you can say that what you have experienced is a result of that power.

This experience can be gone through. And in going through it one has not relied on any kind of tradition, but has quite impartially sought the origin of what took place in the Graeco-Roman world. But one has also had the experience of being separated by three worlds from understanding the root-causes of that Graeco-Roman world.

And then, perhaps, one turns to the men of that time who tried in their own way to understand the change. Even the external scholarship of today has come to recognise that in this period of transition at the beginning of our era some religious-philosophic geniuses lived. And they can best be encountered by looking at Gnosticism. The Gnosis is known in the most varied ways. Externally, remarkably little is really known about it, but from the available documents one can still get an impression of its endless depth. We will speak of it only in so far as it bears on our present considerations.

Above all we can say that the Gnostics had a feeling for what I have just described; that for the causes of what happened in that past epoch one must look to worlds lying infinitely far away in the background. This awareness was passed on to others, and if we are not superficial we can, if we will, see it glimmering through what we may call the theology of Paul, and in many other manifestations also.

Now, anyone who steeps himself in the Gnosis of that period will have great difficulty in understanding it. Our souls are too much affected and infected by the fruits of the materialistic developments of the last few centuries. In tracing back the evolution of the world they are too readily inclined to think in terms of the Kant-Laplace theory of a cosmic nebula, of something quite material. And even those who seek for a more spiritual conception of the world—even they, when they look back to the beginning of time, think of this cosmic nebula or something similar. These modern people, even the most spiritual, feel very happy when they are spared the trouble of discerning the spiritual in the primal beginnings of cosmic evolution. They find it a great relief, these souls of today, when they can say to themselves: “This or that rarefied form of material substance was there to start with, and out of it everything spiritual developed side by side with everything physical.” And so we often find souls who are greatly comforted when they can apply the most materialistic methods of inquiry to the beginning of the cosmos and arrive at the most abstract conception of some kind of gaseous body.

That is why it is so difficult to enter into the thoughts of the Gnosis. For what the Gnosis places at the beginning of the world carries no suggestion of anything at all material. Anyone thoroughly attuned to modern education will perhaps be unable to restrain a slight smile if he is invited to think in the sense of the Gnosis that the world in which he finds himself, the world he explains so beautifully with his Darwinism, bears no relation to a true picture of how the world began! Indeed, he will hardly be able to help smiling when he is asked to think that the origin of the world resides in that cosmic Being who is beyond all concepts, not to be reached by any of the means that are applied nowadays to explaining the world. In the primal Divine Father—says the Gnosis—lies the ground of the world, and only in what proceeds from Him do we find something to which the soul can struggle through if it turns away from all material conceptions and searches a little for its own innermost depth. And this is Silence: the eternal Silence in which there is neither space nor time, but silence only.

It was to this duality of the primal Father and the Silence preceding time and space that the Gnostic looked up; and then, from the union of the primal Father with the Silence, as it were, he conceived other existences proceeding: one can equally well call them Worlds or Beings. And from them others, and again others, and again others—and so on through thirty stages. And only at the thirtieth stage did the Gnostic posit a condition prior to our present mentality—a condition so delightfully explained by Darwinism in terms of that mentality. Or, strictly speaking, at the thirty-first stage, for thirty of these existences, which can be called Worlds or Beings, precede our world. “Aeon” is the name generally given to these thirty Beings or Worlds that precede our own.

One can get a clear idea of what is meant by this Aeon-world only by saying to oneself: To the thirty-first stage there belongs not only what your senses perceive as the external world, but also the way in which your thinking as physical man tries to explain the sense world. It is easy enough to come to terms with a spiritual conception of the world if one says: Yes, the external world is certainly Maya, but with thinking we penetrate into a spiritual world—and if one hopes that this thinking really can reach the spiritual world. But according to the Gnostic this is not so; for him, this thinking belongs to the thirty-first Aeon, to the physical world. So not only sense perception, but human thinking, lies outside the thirty Aeons, who can be looked up to through the stages of spiritual evolution, and who reveal themselves in ever-mounting perfection.

One can easily imagine the smile that comes to a Monist, standing at the summit of his time, if he is asked to believe in thirty preceding worlds—thirty worlds with a content entirely different from anything his thinking can conceive. But that was the view of the Gnostics. And then they asked themselves: How is it with this world?

We will disregard for a while what we have ourselves said about the world in the sense of the early twentieth century. What I am now telling you must not be taken as offering a convincing world-picture. In the Anthroposophy of the twentieth century we have naturally to get beyond the Gnosis, but just now we want to sink ourselves in it.

Why is this surrounding world, including the human faculty of thinking about it, shut off from the thirty Aeons? We must look, said the Gnostic, to the lowest but still purely spiritual Aeon. And there we find the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. She had evolved in a spiritual way through the twenty-nine stages, and in the spiritual world she looked up to the highest Aeon through the ranks of spiritual Beings or Worlds. But one day, one cosmic day, it became evident, to her that if she was to maintain a free vision into the spiritual world of the Aeons, she had to separate something from herself. And she separated from herself that which existed in her as desire. And this desire, being no longer present in the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, now wanders through the realms of space and permeates everything that comes into being in the realms of space. Desire does not live only in sense perception, but also in human thinking, and in the longing that looks back to the spiritual world; but always as something cast out into the souls of men. As an image, but as an image of the Divine Sophia cast out from her, lives this desire, Achamod, thrown out into the world and permeating it.

If you look into yourself, without raising yourself into spiritual worlds, you look into the desire-filled world of Achamod. Because this world is filled with desire, it cannot disclose within itself that which is revealed by looking out into the world of the Aeons. Far, far away in the world of the Aeons—so thought the Gnosis—the pure spirituality of the Aeons engenders what the Gnostics called the Son of the Father-God, and also what they called the pure Holy Spirit. So we have here another generation, as it were, another evolutionary line, different from that which led to the Divine Sophia. As in the propagation of physical life the sexes are separate, so in the progression of the Aeons another stream took its origin from a very high level in the spiritual world: the stream of the Son and the Holy Spirit stemming from the Father. So in the world of Aeons there was one stream leading to the Divine Sophia and another to the Son and the Holy Spirit. If one rises through the Aeons, one comes eventually to an Aeon from whom there arose on the one hand the succession leading to the Divine Sophia, and on the other the succession leading to the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then we ascend to the Father-God and the Divine Silence.

Because the human soul is shut off with Achamod in the material world, it has in the sense of the Gnosis a longing for the spiritual world, and above all for the Divine Sophia, from whom it is separated through being filled with Achamod. This feeling of being separated from the Divine, of not being within the Divine—this feeling is actually experienced, according to the Gnostic, as the material world. And the Gnostic sees originating from the divine-spiritual world, but bound up with Achamod, what one might call (to borrow a Greek word) the Demiurgos, the cosmic Architect.

This Demiurgos is the real arch-creator and sustainer of that which is permeated with Achamod and the material. The souls of men are woven into his world. But they are imbued also with longing for the Divine Sophia. As though in the far distance of the Aeon-world appear the Son and the Holy Spirit in their pure divine spirituality, but they appear only to someone who has—in the sense of the Gnosis—raised himself above everything in which is embodied Achamod, the desire that pervades space.

Why is there this longing in the souls that have been drawn into the world of Achamod? Why, after their separation from the divine-spiritual world, do they feel a longing for it? The Gnostics also asked themselves these questions, and they said: Achamod was cast out from the Divine Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, but before Achamod had completely become this material world, where men now live, there came to her something like a brief raying-out of light from the Son of God; and then immediately the light vanished again. For the Gnostic this was an important concept: that Achamod—the same Achamod that lives in the souls of men—had been granted in the primal remote past a glimpse of Divine light, which had then immediately disappeared. But the memory of it lives on today in human souls, however deeply enmeshed in the material world the soul may be. “I live in the world of Achamod, the material world”, such a soul might have said. “I am surrounded with a sheath drawn from the material world, but when I sink into my inner being, a memory comes to life within me. The element that holds me bound to the material world longs after the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom; for the being of Achamod, which lives in me, was once illuminated by a. ray from the Son of God, who dwells in the world of the Aeons.”

We should try to picture clearly to ourselves such a soul as this, a disciple of the Gnosis. There were such souls: they are not a hypothetical invention. Anyone who studies history with understanding will come to realise through the external documents that many souls of this kind lived in that period.

. We need to see clearly why there are such strong objections nowadays to what I have been saying. What will a thoroughly level-headed man of today have to say about the Gnosis? We have already had to listen to the view that the theology of Paul gives an impression of rabbinical subtleties, far too intricate for a sensible Monist to concern himself with—a Monist who looks out proudly over the world and draws it all together with the simple concept of evolution or with the still simpler concept of energy, and says: “Now at last we have grown up; we have acquired the ideas which give us a picture of the world based on energy, and we look back at these children, these poor dear children, who centuries ago built up the Gnosis out of childishness—they imagined all sorts of spirits, thirty Aeons! That is what the human soul does in its time of nursery play. The grown-up soul of today, with its far-reaching Monism, has left such fancies far behind. We must look back indulgently at these Gnostic infantilisms—they are really charming!”

Such is the prevailing mood today, and it is not easily teachable. One might say to it: Yes, if a Gnostic, with his soul born out of the Gnosis, were to stand before you, he might also take the liberty of expressing his outlook, somewhat like this: “I understand very well how you have become so proud and arrogant, with your ideas of evolution and energy, but this is because your thinking has become so crude and simple and primitive that you are satisfied with your nebulae and your entirely abstract concepts. You say the words ‘evolution’ and ‘energy’ and think you have got something, but you are blind to the finer spiritual life that seeks its way up into that which rises through thirty stages above anything you have.”

But for us the antithesis mentioned at the beginning of this lecture becomes all the sharper. We see on the one hand our own time, with its quite crude and primitive concepts, and on the other the Gnosis. And we have seen how the Gnosis employs endlessly complicated concepts—thirty Aeons—in order to find in the course of evolution the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and to find in the soul the longing for the Divine Sophia and the Holy Spirit.

Then we ask ourselves: Is it not from the deepening of thought in the Graeco-Roman world that we have gained what we have carried so splendidly far in our thoughts about energy and evolution? And in this Gnosis, with its complicated ideas, so unsympathetic to the present day, are we not looking at something quite strange? Are not these colossal contrasts? Indeed they are. And the contradiction, lying like a weight on the soul, becomes even greater if we reflect on what was said about clairvoyant souls: that they can transpose themselves into the thought-world of the Greeks and Romans, and then see the world with the star, of which we have spoken. And mingled everywhere with this deepening of Greek thought we find that other deepening which the Gnosis exemplifies. Yet when we look at this with the aid of what Anthroposophy should give us today, and are yet powerless to understand what the star should signify, separated as we are from it by three worlds—and if we ask the Gnostics: Have you understood what happened at that time in the historical evolution of humanity? ... then, standing on the ground of Anthroposophy, we cannot take the answer from the Gnostics, for it could never satisfy us; it would throw no light on what is shown to the clairvoyant soul.

It is not my wish that you should treat our considerations today as offering an explanation of anything. The more you feel that what I have told you is not an explanation; the more you feel that I have put before you contradiction after contradiction and have shown you only one occult experience, the perception of the star, the better will you have understood me for today. I would wish you to see clearly that at the beginning of our era there appeared in the world something which influenced human understanding and was yet far, far from being understood; I would like you to feel that the period at the beginning of our era was a great riddle. I want you to feel that in human evolution there happened something which seemed at first like a deepening of thought, or a discovery of thought; and that the root causes of this are a profound enigma. You must seek in hidden worlds for that which appeared in the Maya of the physical sense-world as a deepening of Graeco-Roman thought. And it is not an explanation of what we have heard, but the setting out of a riddle, that I wished to give you today. We will continue tomorrow.

If we call to mind once more the thoughts of yesterday's lecture, we can draw them together by saying that the period at the beginning of our era took all possible pains to understand the Mystery of Golgotha out of the treasure of its wisdom, and that this endeavour encountered the very greatest difficulties. We must pause to consider this, for unless we are clear about this inevitable misunderstanding of what came about through the Mystery of Golgotha, we shall not be able to comprehend an essential fact of later centuries: the advent of the Grail idea, concerning which we shall have something to say in connection with our subject.

When we recall the beginning of our era and look at its most significant, wisdom-filled current of thought—when we look, that is, at the Gnostics—then on the one hand we can see, in the light of yesterday's lecture, how grandly original were the ideas with which they sought to place the Son of God in the centre of an imposing world-picture. But if on the other hand we look at what can be learnt about the Mystery of Golgotha from the spiritual chronicle of the time, then we must say that no real truth can be had from the concepts and ideas of the Gnostics. And this is particularly evident when we consider the various ways in which the Gnostics pictured the manifestation of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

There were some Gnostics who said: “Yes, the Christ is a Being who transcends everything earthly and comes from spiritual realms; such a Being can remain for only a limited time in a human body, as was the body of Jesus of Nazareth.” These Gnostics had discerned something which today we must emphasise again and again: that in truth the Christ Being dwelt for three years only in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. But these Gnostics went wrong over the way in which the Christ Being dwelt in the body of Jesus. First of all, the mystery of the body of Jesus of Nazareth was not clear to them. They did not know that the Ego of Zarathustra had lived in this body; that the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth represented in their conjunction an essence of humanity which had never before been incarnated in the flesh on Earth. The whole relation of the Christ to the two Jesus-boys¹ was hidden from these Gnostics. Hence they were never satisfied—or at least their followers were never satisfied—with what they could say about the temporary inhabiting of the body of Jesus of Nazareth by the Christ.

Another question touched on by the Gnostics was the manner of the birth of Christ, the most tremendous mystery in human evolution. They knew well enough that the necessary reason for the appearance of Christ on Earth is connected with the passage through conception in the flesh, but they could not quite see how to bring the mother of Jesus into relation with the birth of Christ. And those who tried to work this out—there were some—were very little understood.

Again, there were Gnostics who because of these various difficulties denied entirely that the Christ had appeared on Earth in bodily form. They formed the idea that it was only a phantom body—what we should call an astral body—which had gone about on, Earth before and after the death on Golgotha: it had appeared here and there, but it was not a physical body. Because of the difficulty of conceiving how the Christ could have been united with a physical body, it was said that no such union had occurred and that when people thought He had gone about in a physical body, this was illusion, Maya. This notion, too, gained no recognition. So we can see everywhere that the Gnostics tried to master with their concepts the greatest historical mystery in the Earth's evolution; but their ideas were inadequate, powerless in face of what had actually occurred.

Now we must speak of the way in which Paul tried to come to terms with the problem, but first it will be well to grasp clearly how it was that such misunderstandings were inevitable. If with the help of spiritual investigation we ask ourselves a series of questions and try to answer them, the course of events will become apparent to us in—one might say—an abstract form.

For example, we can ask: If the epoch of Christ Jesus was so poorly equipped to understand His nature, would another epoch have been in a position to understand Him? If as a spiritual investigator one enters into the souls of men at different periods of the past, one certainly comes to a strange result. First of all, one can enter into the souls of the great teachers of the ancient Indian civilisation, the first of the post-Atlantean culture-epochs. There, as we have often emphasised, we stand with deepest admiration before the comprehensive, deeply-grounded wisdom, permeated throughout with clairvoyant vision, of the holy Indian Rishis of that ancient time. We know that the souls of those great teachers were open to cosmic mysteries which were lost to the wisdom-knowledge of later times. And when one tries to enter clairvoyantly, as well as one can, into the soul of one of these great teachers of ancient India, one must say that if it had been possible for the Christ Being to have appeared on Earth among the holy Rishis at that time, their wisdom would have been in the highest degree capable of understanding the nature of Christ. Then there would have been no difficulties; they would have known what it was all about. And since one cannot properly express in abstract words such significant phenomena as those I have just described, let me evoke a picture.

If the holy Rishis of ancient India had perceived in a man the splendour of the wisdom of the Logos, the wisdom that pulses through the world, they would have brought to the Logos their offering of frankincense, symbolising a recognition of the Divine that works in the realms of humanity. But the Christ Being could find no body at that period; the bodies of that time would not have been suitable for Him. So He could not appear—the reasons for this will be given later—in the epoch when all the means of understanding were present.

If we go further and enter into the souls of the old Zarathustrian civilisation, we can say: These souls were certainly not endowed with the high spiritual resources of the old Indian civilisation, but they would have understood that the Sun-Spirit had elected to live in a human body, and they would have been able to grasp the significance of this fact in relation to the Sun-Spirit. To speak pictorially again: the disciples of Zarathustra would have honoured their Sun-Spirit with an offering of shining gold, the symbol of wisdom.

If we go further still into the Chaldean-Egyptian culture-epoch, we find that the possibility of understanding Christ Jesus would have again decreased; but it would not have narrowed down as far as it did in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, when even the Gnosis was not powerful enough to understand this manifestation. It would have been understood that a Star from spiritual heights had appeared and had been born in a human being. This divine-spiritual line of descent from spheres beyond the earthly would have been clearly grasped; and myrrh would have been brought as an offering. And if we enter into the souls of those who figure in the Bible as the three Magi, who come from the East and are the guardians of the treasures of wisdom derived from the three preceding culture-epochs, we find the Bible itself indicating that a certain understanding was present, since these three Magi do at least appear at the birth of the Jesus-child.

One thing that very few people think about today will certainly strike us—that the Bible is in a strange position with regard to the three Magi. For does it not wish to say that here were three men of exceptional wisdom who even at the time of the birth understood its significance? But one might ask—where were the three Wise Men later on? What came of their wisdom in the end? Have we anything that could lead us back to an understanding of the Christ manifestation by way of these three Wise Men? This must be thrown out only as a question. It is one of the many questions which must certainly be put to the Bible, and which will be more significant than all the pedantic Bible-criticism of the nineteenth century.

When we come to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can say of it: Now there is present a body in which the Christ can incarnate. It was not there in the preceding epochs; but now it is there. In this fourth epoch, however, men lack the possibility of finding their way to a real understanding of what is happening. Indeed a strange paradox, is it not? For the fact that confronts us is actually this: the Christ appeared on Earth in an epoch that was least adapted to understanding Him. And when we look at all the attempts that were made in subsequent centuries to understand the nature of Christ Jesus, we find endless theological wrangling; and finally in the Middle Ages a sharp distinction is drawn between knowledge and faith—which implies a complete abandonment of any knowledge about the being of Christ Jesus ... not to speak of modern times, which up to the present have remained powerless in face of this manifestation.

A truly remarkable phenomenon! The Christ was born in the very epoch that was least adapted to understanding Him. And if in the evolution of humanity the essential thing had been for Christ to work on the understanding of human souls on Earth, then—one must say it—this working would have been in a sad way. One might perhaps call that putting it very strongly; but in order not to be misunderstood I want to say this: To anyone who looks from the standpoint of Spiritual Science at the history of theology in relation to the Christ Event, it must seem as though theology had deliberately set out to place one hindrance after another in the way of understanding the Christ Being. For theological erudition seems to take a course which leads it farther and farther away from this understanding. That is radically expressed, but anyone ready to enter into this way of putting it will be able to grasp the deeper meaning of my words.

Now, fundamentally speaking, it is certainly not easy to unravel the riddle I have been speaking of, and I avow that in the course of time I have tried to come near it through the most varied ways of spiritual research. Obviously there is not time to speak of these ways now. But there is one way among the many that I should like to mention. It is the way that leads round at the beginning of our era through a very remarkable manifestation of spiritual life, the life of the Sibyls.

These Sibyls were indeed a remarkable phenomenon, with a prophetic character entirely their own. External scholarship cannot say from which language the word ‘Sibyl’ comes. As soon as we start looking at the fairly detailed knowledge about the Sibyls that external documents provide, we come upon something quite extraordinary, at the very beginning of the Sibylline age. From about the eighth century B.C. onwards we encounter the first abode of the Sibyls, in Ionian Erithrea; from there the first Sibyls sent out into the world their manifold prophecies. And these prophecies, even in the form handed down by external tradition, show that they arose from strange subconscious regions of human nature and soul-life. As though out of chaotic psychic depths the Sibyls utter all kinds of prophecies about the future development of this or that people, telling mainly of awful things to come, but sometimes also of good things. Far removed from anything like orderly thought, the utterances of the Sibyls pour out in such a way that—if they are studied with the means of Spiritual Science—it seems as one listens that every Sibyl is a spiritual fanatic who wants to force upon people what she has to say. She does not wait to be questioned, in the manner of the Greek Pythian oracle; she steps forth, the people assemble, and her utterances about men and peoples and Earth-cycles seem to ring out with overbearing force.

It is remarkable, as I said, that the Sibyls should appear first in Ionia, for Ionia was at the same time the birthplace of Greek philosophy: the wisdom which from Thales and Aristotle on into the Roman epoch is so preeminently an expression of a well ordered soul life, entirely opposed to anything chaotic. It draws forth from the soul-life all that can be expressed in clear, lucid, light-filled concepts. From Ionia sprang the philosophy of clarity and light, which with Plato—one might say—became the philosophy of the heavenly. And like its shadow appear the Sibyls, with their psychic products emanating from the chaos of the soul, often shedding a true illumination on the future, but also often announcing things which their followers had to falsify in order to make it seem that the prophecy had been fulfilled.

And then we see further how the Sibyls, always accompanying the fourth culture-epoch like a shadow of its wisdom, spread through Greece, through Italy. We hear tell of the most varied kinds of Sibyls, and we see Sibyllism spreading on through Italy, until we come to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we see how Sibyllism gains influence over the Roman poets; how it even plays into the poems of Virgil; how it is just the intellectuals who try to shape their lives by appealing to the sayings of the Sibyls. How much importance was attached to these sayings is shown by the so-called Sibylline Books, which were turned to for guidance. And again in the external world we see how in connection with the Sibylline sayings great intelligence is chaotically mixed up with arrant humbug. And then we see Sibyllism even gaining a foothold in Christianity. We hear its voice in Thomas of Celano's hymn:*

Dies irae, Dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.²

And so, right into the time of the development of Christianity, many minds were aware of the Sibyls and their prophecies, especially those that bore on doom and destruction and the coming of a new world-order. Hence one can say that through many, many centuries—indeed all through the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and with an influence extending, if only sparsely, into the fifth epoch—the Sibyls are encountered in the history of mankind. Only someone dominated by present day rationalistic ideas can overlook the far-reaching influence of Sibyllism on the world in which Christianity grew up. As I have often said, the history we are given to read is in many respects a fable convenue, especially where anything of a spiritual nature is concerned. Until quite recent centuries the ideas of all classes of people were influenced much more widely than is generally believed by what came from the Sibyls. Sibyllism is a remarkable, enigmatic phenomenon, occurring as it did in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

What really went on in the souls of the Sibyls must be of interest to us, for through spiritual research we must unearth such things from beneath the layer of materialistic culture which covers them nowadays. In this condition they are useless; they must be brought to light and renewed by the resources of spiritual research which are available in our epoch. But attention must also be drawn to the fact that in comparatively recent times the nature of Sibyllism was not forgotten to the extent it is today. We have indeed an important work of art which points to the traditions concerning the significance of Sibyllism. Perhaps we do not always look at this work with an awareness of its significance in this respect, but the significance exists and should give occasion for reflection. I mean the great paintings in the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo depicted not only the development of Earth and Humanity, but also the Prophets and the Sibyls. And in looking at these paintings we ought to notice the way in which Michelangelo portrays the Sibyls, and particularly how he contrasts them with the Prophets. In this contrast, if we look at it impartially, we find something which through Spiritual Science we can recognise as having to do with various hidden aspects of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, during which the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.

In this wonderful work of art we see first the portrayal of the Prophets—Zechariah, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah, Jonah. And ranged with them are the Sibyls—the Persian, Delphic, Erythrean, Libyan and Cumaean Sibyls. Almost all the Prophets, we find, have to a greater or lesser degree something of the character which strikes us immediately in Jeremiah and comes out with particular significance in Zechariah; they are deeply reflective men, for the most part absorbed in books or something similar, quietly taking into well-ordered minds whatever it is they are studying. In the countenances of these Prophets we encounter the calmness of their souls. Daniel looks like a slight exception, but only an apparent one. He stands before a book which is supported on the back of a boy; he has in his hand something to write with, in order to write down in another book what he is reading. Here there is a slight effect of transition from reading the world-secrets to writing them down; while the other Prophets remain in meditation, calm and relaxed in soul, entirely devoted to the world-secrets. In gazing at them we see—and this must be kept firmly in mind—that they are all absorbed in super-earthly things; their souls are at rest in the spiritual and they are seeking to fathom the emergence of humanity, from out of the spiritual. We see that in their thinking they are far removed from their immediate surroundings, far above human passion and fanaticism, untouched by the ecstasy that may spring from these emotions; they are not only beyond human ken, but beyond anything a human being can experience in himself in so far as he is a man on Earth. That is the greatness of this portrayal of the Prophets by Michelangelo.

Then we turn our gaze to his depiction of the Sibyls. Here we have first the Persian Sibyl, close to the Prophet Jeremiah, contrasting remarkably with his meditative demeanour. She raises her hand as though wishing to force on humanity what she has experienced; as though in the style of a bad speaker she wants to add all possible emphasis to her words; as though impelled by the passion of a fanatic to impose with imperious gesture her message on all mankind. Then we turn to the Erythrean Sibyl; we see how she is connected with everything that can accrue to man from the elemental secrets of the Earth. Above her head is a lamp; a naked boy is lighting the lamp with a torch. How could the intention of the painting be more clearly expressed? Here is human passion kindling out of the unconscious soul-forces the message that is to be instilled with all the power of prophecy into mankind.

The Prophets are devoted in their souls to the primal eternity of the spirit; the Sibyls are carried away by the earthly, in so far as the earthly reveals the psychic-spiritual. The Delphic Sibyl shows this particularly clearly; we see how her hair is even blown to one side by a gust of wind, and the same wind catches her blue veil, so that she has the air element to thank for what she imparts. In this gust of wind we see pictured what the Earth wished to reveal through the lips of this Sibyl, with forcibly persuasive power. Then the Cumaean Sibyl! She speaks with half-open mouth, as though muttering; as though stammering out a prophecy from the unconscious, the unknown. The Libyan Sibyl, the hasty one, looks as though she is turning round to grasp something from which secrets can be read—something like that! In these Sibyls everything is devoted, so to speak, to the immediate element of Earth.

Much was entrusted to images of this kind in the days when—as we can readily understand—things could be much more effectively expressed in paintings and other forms of art than they would be in our time, when concepts and ideas are more to the purpose.

What then is the special character of these Sibyls? What are they? What does their prophesying signify? We must penetrate deeply into the mysteries of human evolution if we want to fathom what went on in the souls of these Sibyls.

With this aim in view, let us ask again: Why would it have been so easy for the old Indian Rishis, with their scarcely conceivable wisdom, to understand Christ Jesus? It seems trivial, yet it is true to say—because they had the necessary concepts and gifts of wisdom, and in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch these were lacking. They had everything for which the Gnostics, and the anti-Gnostics, and the Apostolic Fathers, as they are called, thirsted in vain. They had it all, but in what form did they have it? Not as ideas that had been worked out, somewhat as the ideas of Plato and Aristotle were worked out, but as inspirations, as something that stood before them with the full power of concrete inspirations. Their astral bodies were laid hold of by that which streamed into them from the great Universe, and out of this working of the Cosmos on their astral bodies came the concepts which could have conjured up before their souls the Being of Christ Jesus. One might say that this was given to them. They had not worked it up for themselves; it came as though showered forth from the depth of the astral body. And with wonderful clarity it showered upon the holy Rishis and their pupils, and fundamentally speaking upon the whole Indian culture of the first post-Atlantean epoch. It became more and more narrowed down, but in the second and third post-Atlantean epochs it was still there, and the remains of it passed over into the fourth epoch. But what was this remainder?

If we were to examine what things were like in the third post-Atlantean epoch, we should find that at least those who had raised themselves to the height of their epoch—and proportionately there were many more spiritually developed persons than there are today—had ideas about the interconnections of the super-earthly and the symbolic significance of the starry heavens. They could read world-secrets in the motions of the stars. It is quite certain that the third post-Atlantean epoch, if Christ had appeared on Earth then, would have known from the writing in the stars what relationship it had with Him. But—in accordance with the principle we have often mentioned with regard to the evolution of humanity—it was necessary that the gift of entering into relation with the mysteries of the world through living pictures should recede more and more into the background of the astrality of man. These pictures became increasingly chaotic. That which flowed by this channel into the human soul became less and less authoritative—I am not saying that it lost all authority—but it became less and less authoritative as a means of fathoming the real mysteries of the Universe.

And so two quite different developments can be traced. On the one hand there was the world of concepts, let us say of Plato and Aristotle: a world of ideas which could be called the most attenuated form of the spiritual world, a world which had in it the least of spirit, a world grasped and explored directly by the Ego and no longer experienced through the astral body. For that is the distinguishing mark of Greek philosophy: there for the first time the spirit spoke out of the Ego, as it can do, in concepts that were perfectly lucid, but far removed from real spiritual life. But the Greek philosopher still felt that his thoughts emanated from the spiritual world, whereas a modern philosopher is by necessity a doubter, a sceptic, because he no longer feels any connection between his thoughts and the mysteries of the world. In modern times there has been a decline in the faculty for saying: When I think, the world-spirit is thinking in me. As I have tried to show in The Threshold of the Spiritual World, it is necessary to gain, through meditation, a little of that confidence in the forming of concepts and ideas which came naturally to the Greek philosopher, because he was able to accept his thoughts as thoughts of the world-spirit itself. Only the outermost fringe of the world-spirit approached humanity through Greek philosophy, but it was a fringe permeated with the actual life of the world-spirit; and this was felt to be so.

The second element which persisted from older times was atavistic, an heirloom, and it persisted most plainly in the prophecies of the Sibyls. Out of the chaos of their inner life they brought forth once more the human soul forces which had worked harmoniously during the second and third post-Atlantean epochs and now gave confused glimpses of the spiritual world.

Let us take a hypothesis which in our present context is perhaps permissible: What would have happened if neither the Christ nor Greek philosophy had come into the world? Humanity would then have had to get along with what it had received as inheritance from the past, and in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch this had reached the stage of Sibyllism. Imagine this developing on its own lines in the West, without the Christ Impulse and without philosophy, and without the science that followed philosophy—then you will have a picture of the spiritual chaos that would have overtaken the West, arising inevitably from all that had been active in the souls of the Sibyls. But forces have after effects. If with the resources of Spiritual Science one examines this elemental strength, through which the spiritual powers connected with wind and water and fire find expression in the immediate circumference of the Earth, and if one studies how these powers would have found an abode in human souls—especially if one tests the strength with which the spirits of wind and fire, water and earth, would have taken possession of the souls of men—then one can see how harmony and order had faded out of the old way of knowing the world, prevalent during the first three post-Atlantean epochs, and how the forces only would have remained in human souls.

Human souls would have lost the capacity for relating themselves truly to the great phenomena of the Cosmos, but they would have assuredly had a relation with the spirits of wind and water, fire and earth, and particularly with the whole tribe of spectres and demons which would have got loose from their cosmic connections. Men would have fallen quite under the sway of the elemental spirits; their teachers would have been of the Sibylline kind, and the force would have been so strong that it would have persisted right up to the present, and indeed up to the very end of Earth days. And if we ask why this has not happened, and who has brought it about that the force so apparent in the Sibyls has gradually declined, then we must answer: the Christ, who through the Mystery of Golgotha infused the Earth's aura with His Being; thus He destroyed the Sibylline force in the souls of men and has driven it away.

And so on the ground of Spiritual Science we observe the remarkable fact that men with their wisdom have not understood much about the Christ Impulse: their concepts and ideas have turned out to be virtually powerless in this respect. But the essential thing is not that the Christ Impulse came into the world primarily as a teaching. The essential thing is the character of the facts, the direct impulse that flowed from the Mystery of Golgotha. And this we must look for not only in what is taught or understood, but in what is accomplished for human souls. And one of these deeds, the struggle waged by Christ, who had permeated the Earth-aura, against Sibyllism—it is this deed that I wished to bring before you today.

Thus the Christ had in fact to fulfil the office of a judge. This was misunderstood by those who took it materialistically to imply that Christ would return soon after His resurrection. Human concepts at that time could not reach to an understanding of these things. But in the chaotic ideas of an early return there was the truth that there had been this early manifestation of Christ. He had manifested on ground which (as we shall see tomorrow) had been prepared externally by Paul; but above all He had manifested in the region behind the sense-world where the spiritual conflict between Christ and the Sibyls had been waged. We must pierce the veil that shows us the spreading of Christianity on the physical plane. We must look behind the physical plane at the spiritual conflict whereby the souls of men were freed from that chaotic element which would otherwise have gone on from strength to strength. And this fact is seen in a false light by anyone who fails to comprehend that through this supra-physical deed something of endless value was accomplished for mankind by the Christ. But who were they who achieved at least something, indeed much, towards this comprehension? They were the writers of the Gospels, and Paul, who were endowed with a certain inspiration or revelation from the spiritual world.

We shall have to appreciate from other points of view the emergence of the Evangelists and of Paul. But we can now see how Paul stands in the midst of a world where something is going on beyond the reach of his words, beyond all that he could contribute through his powerful, fiery words towards an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And yet—particularly if one grasps the nature of the struggle waged by the Christ against the Sibyls—one has a feeling about Paul that I would like to sum up in a few concluding words. With Paul it always seems that there is much more between his words than one gets from simply reading them. It is as though the Damascus vision had come to expression through him; as though there penetrated into humanity through him a note which was opposed to the prophetic note of the Sibyls; as though through him there rang out again the note of the old Prophets whom Michelangelo has represented so beautifully in his paintings. As I have said, the Sibyls had something that came from the elementals of the Earth; something that could not have been there if the elemental spirits of the Earth had not spoken to them. With Paul there was something similar, something which external scholarship has noted in a remarkable but quite exoteric way; and this, if one examines it from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, really leaves one standing before a world of amazement.

Paul also, in a certain way, created something out of the elemental nature of the Earth, but in a distinctive region of the Earth. Naturally one can understand Paul quite well in a theological, rationalistic, abstract way if one leaves out of account what I am going to say, for this cannot be explained in terms of external science. One can understand Paul quite well, if one wants to understand him only from the standpoint of ordinary rationalism. But if one wants to grasp what it was that lived spiritually in Paul, in and between his words, and why one feels through his words something akin to the prophecies of the Sibyls, but with him proceeding from a good element in Earth evolution, then one comes to the phenomenon which answers the question: How far does Paul's world extend? What are its boundaries? And the remarkable answer we receive is: Paul is great throughout the world where the olive tree is cultivated. I know I am saying something strange, but we shall see that this strangeness explains itself, in a certain sense, when tomorrow we enter a little into the character of Paul.

Geographically, too, the world is full of secrets. And the region of the Earth where the olive tree flourishes is different from the regions where flourish the oak or the ash. Man as a physically embodied being has a relationship with the elemental spirits. In the world of the olive tree the rustle and movement, the whisper and gesture, are not the same as in the world of the oak or the ash or the yew. And if we want to grasp the connection of the Earth-nature with human beings, we need to pay attention to such peculiar facts as this—the fact that Paul carries his message just as far over the Earth as the domain of the olive tree extends. The world of Paul is the world of the olive tree.

• 1. See, among others, the following references in lecture courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Luke, notably lectures 4 to 7; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lecture 6; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of St. Matthew's Gospel.
• 2. Day of Wrath, O Day which leads this World-Age into destruction, according to the witness of David and of the Sibyl.

These lectures are so arranged that separate themes will be introduced, and then I shall bring in considerations which will lead towards the themes and throw light upon them. One theme, accordingly, resides in what was said about the difficulty of understanding the Being of Christ Jesus. Then we came to the significance of the prophecies of the Sibyls as illustrating one side of human soul life during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Finally, at the close of yesterday's lecture, I introduced the theme of Paul and the olive tree.

I will return to these leading themes, but we must approach them as it were in circles, with our themes inscribed at the centre. What is really meant by the themes will then gradually emerge. Today I would like to say something about the Christ Being as such. We shall then see how in Paul the Christ Being is reflected in a certain definite way.

From earlier lectures we know that the Christ Being can be understood if we follow the evolution of our system back to the Old Sun existence.¹ And on various occasions, in lectures already published, attention has been drawn to the fact that in the Christ Being we have to do with a high spiritual Being—that is the term we will use for the present—for whose own evolution the Old Sun period was especially important. I will not go further into that just now. We will simply look up to the Christ Being as a high spiritual Being. But for understanding human evolution something else is necessary, and we have seen how necessary it is, for in relation to a certain fact the concepts and ideas which in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch aspired to understand the Being of Christ were powerless to do so.

Again and again, especially during the early centuries among the Gnostics, among the Apostolic Fathers and among the persons who contributed in one way or another to the founding of Christianity, this question came up—How was the nature of Christ related to the nature of Jesus? Now we already know that we have to distinguish two Jesus-boys.² Of one of these we need not speak further here, for he can be readily understood from previous anthroposophical explanations. I mean the Jesus in whom lived the Ego of Zarathustra. Here we have a human being who in the second post-Atlantean epoch had already reached a high degree of evolution; who at that time founded the Zarathustrian spiritual stream and then had subsequent lives; who later reincarnated in the Solomon Jesus-child and in him, up to his twelfth year, underwent the development appropriate for so lofty an Ego in that period. We know also that the Zarathustra Ego passed over into the body of the other Jesus-child, on whose nature the Luke Gospel throws some gleams of light.

We must now consider a little this Nathan Jesus child. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that in this child we have not to do with a human being, like other human beings, in the strict sense of the term. We cannot say of this Being that he had previously been incarnated on Earth in this or that individual. We have always emphasised that of the soul-element which has come forth from spiritual worlds in order to live in single individuals on Earth, something as it were remained behind; and that what had thus remained behind appeared in the Nathan Jesus-child. Hence of this child we cannot say that in him there lived an ordinary human ego which had developed in a certain way through earlier incarnations. We have to recognise (this follows from what is said in my book, Occult Science—an Outline) that he had not previously walked the Earth as man. The only question is: Did this Being, whom we will now call simply Jesus of Nazareth, have any previous connection with Earth-evolution?³ We must remember that the Beings and Powers connected with human evolution are not confined to those who incarnate on the Earth itself; there are also spiritual Beings and Powers who belong to the higher Hierarchies. If therefore we say that something of the substance which divided itself among single human souls remained behind, and was then in a certain sense born in the Nathan Jesus-child, we are not saying that this .Being had no previous relation with Earth evolution. We are saying only that he was not related to the evolution of the Earth and of humanity in such a way as to have walked the Earth as man. We must look for him not in the history of the physical Earth, but in pre-earthly spiritual realms. And then, for the kind of observation I have often spoken about—clairvoyant observation—the following is revealed.

Let us recall what is described in Occult Science—how from the Lemurian Age onwards souls gradually came down from the other planets (with the exception of one principal human pair who had stayed on earth) and were incarnated in human bodies throughout Atlantean times. We must accordingly think of Earth-evolution as being such that the souls withdrew from the Earth's cosmic surroundings and at various points of time took up again their evolution on Earth. We know that before the Lemurian Age they had gone away to other planets. But we know also that the evolution of the Earth had been exposed to the attacks of Lucifer, and later to those of Ahriman. Thus the souls of men had to enter into bodies wherein they were exposed in the course of human evolution to the attacks of both these spiritual Beings. If nothing further had come about—if, that is, the human souls had come down from planetary existence into evolution on Earth, there to encounter the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences—then something else would have happened to them as they went through subsequent incarnations; something I did not intimate in Occult Science, for at the present day one cannot say everything in public.

First of all, when the human beings came down from the planets into physical bodies, the development of their senses would have been exposed to a certain danger. We must not think it was a quite simple matter for these human souls to come down from their planetary abodes and assume bodies on Earth, and that after that everything went on normally. Because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles held sway in these bodies, they were not so organised as to enable human beings to pursue the course of evolution which in fact they did pursue. If these souls had simply gone on using the forces which governed the sense-organs of these bodies, they would have had to use their senses in a peculiar way—a way not really human.

For example, the eye would have been so impressed and affected by a colour that it would have felt itself permeated with intense feeling. At the sight of one colour it would have positively glowed with pleasure; for another colour it would have felt intense, painful antipathy. And so, because of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, the souls descending from the planets would have found no bodies equipped with senses of the right kind. They would have been tormented by sympathy and antipathy; on seeing one colour or another they would have been seized with bliss or repulsed with acute pain, all through their lives. That was how evolution was going; cosmic forces, especially those from the Sun, would have worked on the Earth in such a way as to give the senses this character. Any contemplation of the world, in a spirit of quiet wisdom, would have been ruled out. So a change had to be brought about in the forces which flowed from the cosmic environment into the Earth and had built up the senses of man. In the spiritual world something had to happen so that these forces would not turn the senses into mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, for they would then have been under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman. Hence the following took place.

The Being of whom we have said that he had not chosen the path down from the planets to the Earth, but had remained behind, the Being who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who had dwelt from primal ages in the spiritual worlds—this Being resolved (if we may use this expression, for of course all these expressions are taken from human speech and cannot fully convey what one wants to say) while still in the world of the higher Hierarchies to go through a development which would enable him to be permeated for a time by the Christ Being. Thus we have to do not with a man but with a superhuman Being who (if we may speak in this way) lived in the spiritual world and as it were heard the distress of the human sense system crying out to the spiritual world for help, and in response to this cry made himself fitted to be permeated by the Christ.

So it was that in the spiritual worlds the Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ Being, and then brought about a change in the cosmic forces which were streaming in to build up the human senses. These senses were changed in such a way that instead of being mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, they became organs that human beings could use, and so could look with wisdom at all the nuances of sense-perception. Very differently would the cosmic forces have flowed into mankind if this event, far back in the Lemurian Age, had not taken place in the spiritual worlds. This Being who appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child was then still living (if I may use the phrase) in the Sun-sphere, and because he listened to the human cry of distress, he experienced something which made it possible for him to be permeated by the very Spirit of the Sun, so that the activity of the Sun was modified in such a way that the human sense organs, which derive essentially from solar activity, did not become organs of mere sympathy and antipathy.

Here we touch upon a significant cosmic secret, and one which will enable us to understand much that happened later on. A certain order and harmony, imbued with wisdom, could now flow into the realm of the human senses, and evolution could go on normally for a while. The worst activity of Lucifer and Ahriman had been turned away from the human senses by a deed in the higher worlds.

Later on came a time, in the Atlantean Age, when it once more became apparent that the human bodily constitution could not be a suitable instrument for the further course of evolution. The human vital organs, and their underlying forces in the etheric body, which for a time had developed in a suitably useful way, had fallen into disorder. For the cosmic forces which had worked on them from the surroundings of the Earth, and whose task it was to bring order into these organs—the organs of breathing, blood circulation and so on—these forces would have developed under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in such a way that the vital organs would have ceased to be usable by human beings on Earth. They would have acquired a quite peculiar character. The forces which provide for these vital organs do not flow in directly from the Sun, but from the seven planets, as they used to be called. The planetary forces worked from the cosmos into man. And it was necessary that these forces, also, should be modified. If they had remained under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman, the vital organs would have become merely organs of greed or organs of loathing. For example, a man would not have been able to restrain himself from hurling himself greedily upon a given dish, while a terrible loathing would have driven him from another. These are things which unveil themselves as world secrets, as cosmic secrets, when we try to penetrate into them clairvoyantly.

So again something had to happen in the spiritual worlds in order that this destructive activity should not enter into human life. And this same Being, who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who (as we have explained) dwelt in earlier times on the Sun and was there permeated by the Christ Being, the sublime Sun-Spirit—this Being went from planet to planet, touched in his innermost nature by the fact that human evolution could go no further, as things were. And this experience affected him so strongly, while he was assuming a form of body on the different planets, that at a certain time during the Atlantean evolution the Spirit of Christ permeated him again. And through what was now brought about by the permeation of this Being by the Christ Spirit, it became possible for moderation to be implanted in the vital organs of man. In the same way that wisdom had been given to the sense-organs, so moderation was now bestowed on the vital organs. Thus it came about that when a man breathed in a particular place, he was not impelled to suck in the air greedily, or to recoil with loathing from the air in another place. That was the deed accomplished in the spiritual worlds through a further permeation of the Nathan Jesus-child by the Christ Being, the high Sun-Spirit.

Then in the further course of human evolution a third thing happened. A third confusion would have arisen if the souls had been obliged to continue using the bodies then available for them on Earth. We can put it in the following way.

At this time the physical nature of man was in order. Through the two Christ deeds in the super-sensible world, the human sense organs were in a condition serviceable for man on Earth, and so were the vital organs. But it was not so with the soul-organs, thinking, feeling and willing. If nothing further had happened, these soul-organs would have become disordered. I mean that willing would have been continually disturbed by thinking, feeling would have interfered with willing, and so on. Men would have been condemned as it were to a perpetually chaotic use of these soul-organs. They would have been maddened by an excess of will, or confused by repressed feeling, or there would have been people plagued with fleeting ideas through a hypertrophy of thinking, and so forth. This was the third great danger to which humanity was exposed on Earth.

Now these three soul-powers, thinking, feeling and willing, are coordinated from the surroundings of the Earth, for the Earth itself is essentially the scene of action for the Ego. The working together of thinking, feeling and willing has to be kept in order; not, however, from all the planets, but only from Sun, Moon and Earth, so that through the inter-working of Sun, Moon and Earth, if this is harmonious, man is made fit for the harmonious cooperation of his three soul-powers.

Help for these soul-forces had to be provided from the spiritual world. And now the soul of that Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child assumed a cosmic form such that his life was in a sense neither on the Moon nor on the Sun, but as though it encircled the Earth and felt a dependence on the influences of Sun, Moon and Earth at the same time. The Earth influences came to him from below; the Sun and Moon influences from above. Clairvoyant observation really sees this Being, in the spring time of his evolution—if I may use that phrase—in the same sphere as that in which the Moon goes round the Earth. Hence I cannot say exactly that the Moon influence came to him from above, but rather that it came to him from the place where he was, this pre-earthly Jesus-Being. Again there rose to him a cry of distress, a cry that told of what human thinking, feeling and willing were on the way to becoming; and he sought to experience completely in his own inner being this tragedy of human evolution. Thereby he called to himself the high Sun-spirit, who now for the third time descended upon him, permeating him. So in the cosmic height, beyond the Earth, there was a third permeation of this Nathan Jesus-child by the high Sun Spirit whom we call the Christ.

Now I would wish to depict for you this third ensouling rather differently from the way in which I described the other two. That which took place through these successive stages of spiritual evolution—or heavenly evolution, I would say—was reflected in the various world outlooks of the post-Atlantean peoples. For it had effects which worked on into later times; the Sun's activity continued to be influenced by the fact that in ancient Lemurian times the Being who afterwards became the Nathan Jesus-child had been permeated by the Christ Being. And the essential thing about the initiation of Zarathustra was that he perceived the activity of the Sun impregnated with this influence. In this way his teaching arose; his initiation had revealed to him—had projected into his soul—what had happened in primeval times.

The third post-Atlantean epoch, which we call the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, came about partly through the reflection in human souls, as a continuing human experience, of the activities that had originated from the permeation by the Sun-Spirit of the Nathan Jesus-Being while that Being was journeying round the planets. From this arose that science of planetary activities which comes before us in Chaldean astrology; people today have a very meagre conception of what it really was. Among the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples of the epoch there developed also that star worship which is indeed known exoterically; it arose because the moderating of planetary influence was still making itself felt at that later time.

Later still, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can see in Hellenism a reflection of planetary spirits who had as it were come into existence because the Being who had been permeated by the Christ journeyed from planet to planet and on each planet became one or other of these spirits. On Jupiter he became the one whom the Greeks later called Zeus; on Mars, the one later called Ares; on Mercury, the one later called Hermes. In the Greek planetary gods there was this later reflection of what Christ Jesus in the super-sensible worlds had made of the planetary beings who were imbued with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles. When a Greek looked up to his heaven of the gods, he came into touch with the adumbrations, the reflections, of the activity of Christ Jesus on the individual planets, together with much else that I have described.

To this was added as a third event the reflection or adumbration of that which the Jesus-Being, in the later post-Atlantean times, had experienced as a celestial Being in relation to Sun, Moon and Earth. If we are to characterise this we can say: The Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. We say of Christ that he embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth, but we are speaking now of an event that took place in spiritual worlds: the Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. And the effect was that human thinking, feeling and willing took an orderly course. This was an important event, coming early in the evolution of humanity: the development of the human soul-powers was brought into good order. The two earlier Christ events had brought order rather into the bodily constitution of man on Earth: what then had had to happen in the celestial worlds for this third event to come about?

It will be easier to recognise this third event if we look for the reflection of it in Greek mythology. For just as the planetary spirits projected themselves into the figures of Zeus, Ares, Hermes, Venus or Aphrodite, Kronos and so on, so was this third cosmic event reflected not only in Greek mythology but in the mythologies of the most diverse peoples. We can understand how it was reflected if we allow ourselves to compare the reflected images with their sources; if, that is, we compare what happened in Greece with what first happened in the Cosmos.

What was it that happened up there in the Cosmos? The need was to drive out something which would have raged chaotically in human souls; this had to be overcome. The angelic Being who was permeated with the Christ had to accomplish the deed of vanquishing and driving out from the human soul that which had to be driven out if thinking, feeling and willing were to be harmonised. And so there arises the picture—let us bring it vividly before our souls—of an angelic Being, dwelling still in the spiritual worlds, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child: he appears to us ensouled by the Christ and thereby rendered capable of special deeds—able to drive out from thinking, feeling and willing the element which would have raged within them as a dragon and brought them into chaos.

A reminiscence of this is preserved in all the pictures of St. George vanquishing the Dragon which are found in the records of human culture. St. George and the Dragon reflect that celestial event when the Christ ensouled the Jesus-Being and enabled him to drive the Dragon out of the soul-nature of man. This was a significant deed, made possible only with the help of Christ in the Being of Jesus, at that time an angelic Being. For this angelic Being had actually to connect himself with the Dragon-nature; to take on as it were the form of the Dragon in order to hold off the Dragon from the soul of man. He had to work from within the Dragon, so that the Dragon was ennobled and brought out of chaos into a kind of harmony. The training, the taming of the Dragon—that is the further task of this Being. And so it came about that the Dragon indeed remained active, but because there was poured into him the influence and power of the Being I have described, he became the bearer of many revelations which proved their worth to human civilisations throughout the course of post-Atlantean evolution. Instead of the chaos of the Dragon manifesting in maddened or bewildered men, the primal wisdom of the post-Atlantean time came forth. Christ Jesus used the Dragon's blood, as it were, so that with His help it could transfuse human blood and thereby make human beings the vehicles of divine wisdom. A significant reflection of this is apparent—even quite exoterically—in Greek mythology from the ninth century B.C. onwards.

It is remarkable how for the Greek mind one particular divine figure emerged from the others. The Greeks, we know, reverenced a variety of gods. These gods were the reflections or projections of the Beings who originated from the journey round the planets of the Being, permeated by the Christ, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child. The Greeks saw them in such a way that when they looked out into cosmic spaces, when they looked up through the light-aether, they rightly ascribed to the planet Jupiter—in an inward spiritual, not an external, sense—the origin of the Being they spoke of as Zeus. So they spoke of Pallas Athene, of Artemis, of the various planetary gods who were the reflections of what we have spoken about. But from these pictures of the various figures of the gods there emerged one figure—the figure of Apollo. The figure of Apollo emerged in a distinctive way: what did these Greeks see in him?

We come to know Apollo if we look at Parnassus and the Castalian spring. To the west of it there was a cleft in the earth, and over this the Greeks built a temple—why? Vapours used to rise up out of the cleft, and when the air-currents were right the vapours crept up the Mountainside like the coils of a snake, like a dragon. And the Greeks imagined Apollo as shooting his arrows at the dragon, as it rose from the cleft in the form of turbulent vapours. Here, in the Greek Apollo, we see an earthly reflection of St. George, shooting his arrows at the dragon. And when Apollo had overcome the dragon, the Python, a temple was built, and instead of the dragon we see how the vapours entered into the soul of the Pythia, and how the Greeks imagined that Apollo lived in these swirling dragon-vapours and prophesied to them through the oracle, through the lips of the Pythia. And the Greeks, that self-conscious people, rose through the stages for which their souls had been prepared; they accepted what Apollo had to say to them through the Pythia, who was imbued with the dragon-vapours. It meant that Apollo lived in the dragon's blood and filled men with wisdom from the Castalian spring. And the place became a meeting-place for the most sacred plays and festivals.

Why was Apollo able to do this—who was he? It was only from spring to autumn that he caused wisdom to flow up from the dragon's blood. Towards autumn he went away to his ancient home in the north, in the Hyperborean land. Farewell festivals were held at the time of his departure, and his return was welcomed in the spring. A deep wisdom resides in this idea of Apollo going north. The physical sun withdraws towards the south; in a spiritual sense it is always the opposite. The story shows that Apollo has to do with the sun. Apollo is the angelic Being of whom we have spoken; he was a reflection, projected into the Greek mind, of the angelic Being who had in fact worked at the end of the Atlantean time and who had been permeated by the Christ. This reflection was the Apollo who spoke wisdom to the Greeks through the mouth of the Pythia. And what was the content for the Greeks of this Apollo wisdom? We might say it was everything that led them, on the most important occasions, to take this or that decision. Again and again people went to Apollo at difficult moments in their lives, with their souls well prepared, and received prophetic guidance from the Pythia, who was stimulated by the vapours in which Apollo lived. And Asklepios, the Healer, is for the Greeks the son of Apollo, the healing god. The weakened form of the Angel in whom Christ once dwelt is a healer on Earth, or for the Earth. For Apollo was never physically embodied, but he worked through the Earth-elements.

And the god of the Muses, above all the god of song and the art of music, is Apollo. Why is this? Because through the power of song and string-music he brings thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. We have only to keep firmly in mind that in Apollo there was a projection of what had happened at the end of the Atlantean time. Something had then worked from spiritual heights into the human soul, and a weak echo of it could be heard in the musical art cultivated by the Greeks under the protection of Apollo. They knew it as an earthly reflection of the ancient art which the Angel-Being, permeated by the Christ, had cultivated in the heavenly heights in order to bring thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. They did not say so openly; only in the Mysteries was the meaning of it understood.

In the Apollonian Mysteries it was said: A high Divine Being once sank Himself into a Being of the Hierarchy of Angels and thereby brought harmony into thinking, feeling and willing. The art of music was a reflection of that happening, especially the Apollonian art which flowed from the sound of strings. The music which demands less of the elements than wind instruments do; which depends in the main only on the skill of human hands; in short, the music that sounds from the strings of Apollo—to this music the Greeks ascribed the musical effects which bring harmony into the soul. And persons who have no inclination for Apollo's music, or do not value it highly enough, were said by the Greeks to carry a bodily mark of their obtuseness in this respect; a sign that they had stayed behind, atavistically, at an earlier stage.

It is remarkable that when a certain man—King Midas—was born with exceptionally long ears, the Greeks said he had come into the world with ass's ears because in his life before birth he had not rightly devoted himself to the influence of the Being whom the Christ had enfilled. Therefore, said the Greeks, he had asses ears, and that was why he preferred wind instruments to string instruments. And when once a child was born who so to speak had no skin—he is known in mythology as the Flayed Marsyas—the Greeks said it was because before his birth he had not paid heed to all that flowed from the angelic Being. For that is how it looks to occult observation: Marsyas was not flayed in his lifetime, but before his birth, and it was then that his misdeed occurred.

Many towns founded by the Greeks as colonies were named Apollonia, because the sites for them had been chosen after consulting the Pythia. The Greeks cherished their freedom and so were not politically united, but they had an ideal unity through the god Apollo, for whom a kind of confederation was founded later on.

We see how the Greeks revered in the god they called, Apollo the Being of whom we have spoken; and we might say that in the Being who truly corresponded to Apollo at the end of the Atlantean time, the Christ was ensouled. Who then was Apollo—not the reflection revered by the Greeks, but Apollo himself? A celestial Being who from the higher worlds poured out healing forces for the soul, paralysing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. These forces brought about in the human body a harmonious co-operation of brain, breath and lungs with the larynx and the heart, and it was this that came to expression in song. For the right co-operation of brain and breathing with the speech organ and the heart is the bodily expression of harmony in thinking, feeling and willing. The Healer, the celestial Healer, is Apollo. We have seen this Being pass through three stages of evolution, and then the Healer, whom Apollo reflected, was born on Earth and men called him Jesus, which in our language means “He who heals through God”. He is the Nathan Jesus-child, the one who heals through God, Jehoschua-Jesus.

Now, at this fourth stage, this Being made himself ripe to be enfilled with the Christ Being, with the ‘I’. This came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. For if this Mystery had not been enacted—if the Being whom we have followed through cosmic ages had not given embodiment to the Christ—then in the course of later time human souls would not have found bodies in which the Ego-force could come to necessary expression on Earth. The Ego had been brought to its highest stage in Zarathustra. The souls who had taken part in the evolution of the Ego would never have found earthly bodies suitable for its further development if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come to pass.

We have now seen the four stages of harmonisation: the harmonising of sense perception, of the life-organs, of thinking, feeling and willing, and the harmonisation in the Ego, this last through the Mystery of Golgotha. You have the connections between the Being who was born as the Nathan Jesus-child and the Christ Being, and the way in which this was prepared. It is now possible, through that which it is permissible to reveal in true Anthroposophy, to understand this kind of growing together, belonging together, of the Christ Being and the human nature of Jesus. This is possible for us. And a healthy development of spiritual life in the future will depend on this—on it becoming possible for more and more people to grasp that which could not be grasped by the thoughts and ideas of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.

• 1. See Occult Science—an Outline, Chapter IV. Chapter IV. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)
• 2. See, among others, the following references in lecture courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Luke, notably lectures 4 to 7; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lecture 6; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of St. Matthew's Gospel.
• 3. See lecture given by Dr. Steiner at Pforzheim (7–3, 1914): Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ.

Yesterday we spoke of how preparation was made for that which had to come about for the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. We spoke of the three permeations of a Being of the higher Hierarchies by the Christ, and in the wonderful emergence of the Greek Apollo we found an echo of what had taken place at the end of the Atlantean time, as a far distant prefiguring of the Mystery of Golgotha. Now we have to inquire how the effects of this are manifest in the evolution of mankind. It will first be necessary to say something about the basic characteristics of the world pictures which appeared in post-Atlantean times as the echoes, or after effects, of the threefold Christ-event, for this, as we have seen, reached a certain conclusion at the end of the Atlantean Age.

Let us try to look more deeply into the fundamental characteristics of these world pictures. They arose as after effects in human souls of all that I described yesterday. These post-Atlantean world-pictures are indeed the reflections of the threefold Christ-event in the souls of post-Atlantean mankind. From this point of view we need say only a few words about the first post-Atlantean epoch. We know that in terms of spirituality it was the highest post-Atlantean epoch up to now, but that what the souls of the holy Rishis and their disciples received from it was less penetrated by the Mysteries of which I spoke yesterday.

The first post-Atlantean world-picture to show a direct effect of the threefold Christ-event was that which arose from the Zarathustrian impulse. Now I must here remark in parenthesis that I shall have to introduce words which—because of the way they are used today—have a dry, abstract, even pedantic sound; but, search as one may through the language; there are no other words available. And so I shall want to appeal to your souls to understand by these words something far more spiritual than anything they can signify for the and scholarship of the present time.

From the point of view relevant here I should like to associate the Zarathustrian world-picture with “Chronology”. It looks beyond the two Beings, Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman, to the workings of Time—Zervan Akarana. Not, however, the abstract Time we think of today, but Time viewed as a living, super-personal Being. From this Being proceed the rulers of Time; first of all the Amshaspands, the spiritual Beings who are symbolised in cosmic space by the signs of the Zodiac. Through the number six—or twelve if we reckon in their antipodes—they rule over the Izeds, who rank below them and are 28–31 in number. The Izeds are spirits of a lower kind, servants of the high Time Beings; they regulate the days of the month.

The Zarathustrian consciousness looked at the wonderful harmony which works through forces and is symbolised numerically by all the relations and combinations which result from the interweaving of 28 to 31 with 12. It looked into all that streams into the world and resounds through it, because in the great world-orchestra the instruments sound harmoniously together in these numerical relationships. For the Zarathustrian world-picture this appears as the ordering and harmonising principle in the cosmic order. I want to give only a hint of these relationships. And because in that which creates, and nourishes itself in creating, in that which takes the world-pictures into itself, absorbing them spiritually and carrying them over to higher stages—because the Zarathustrian outlook sees in “Time” something living and super-personal—so, while spiritualising the term, we may call this world-picture “Chronology”, whereby we are led to think at once of the god Kronos, the Regent of Time.

Then we come to the third post-Atlantean epoch. Yesterday I described it as the epoch in which knowledge was kindled in human souls by the forces which shone out from the stars; when the secrets of the world were no longer discerned only through the relations between the Rulers of Time in the super-sensible, for these were becoming manifest in the realm of sense existence. In the courses of the stars, in the signature of their movements in cosmic space, men could now perceive how harmony and melody in cosmic happenings are brought about. This picture of the world I would like to call Astrology. So Chronology is followed by Astrology. And everything that was disclosed by the true, authentic Chronology of Zarathustrianism, and by the true, authentic Astrology of the Egyptian and Chaldean Mysteries—all this was activated by the secret influence which had come into the world though the threefold Christ-event before the Atlantean catastrophe.

And what followed in Greece or in the Graeco-Latin epoch? What I am now going to say applies not only to the Greek and Roman cultures, but also to all the other regions of Europe. Yesterday I tried to illustrate it through a single example, but it holds good, one might say, for all the West. Let us recall how the Greeks reverenced Apollo, the reflection of the Nathan Jesus-child as he had been at the end of the Atlantean time. It was out of the Hyperborean land, from the North, that Apollo came to the Oracle at Delphi. Through the Pythia, in summer, he spoke the most important things that the Greeks wished to hear. In the autumn he returned to his Hyperborean land. We connected this journey of Apollo with the journeys of the sun; but it is the spiritual sun that speaks through Apollo, and the spiritual sun goes away to the north, while the physical sun goes to the south. The myths are seen to be endlessly full of wisdom if they are considered in the light of true occultism. But in revering Apollo the Greeks did not look on the sun as his visible sign in the heavens; Apollo was not a sun god in this sense. For a god symbolised by the external sun the Greeks had Helios; it was he who regulated the course of the sun in the sky. Even if we take only the physical sun into account, we find that its influence on earth-life is not confined to the direct effects of its rays. The sun works in the first place through air and water and water-vapour, and so through the vapours which (as we have seen) rise from the site of the Castalian spring and coil round the neighbouring hillsides like a dragon—the dragon killed by the Greek St. George. The sun works in all the elements, and after it has worked into them, inoculated them, its activity plays out from them on to human beings, through the servants whom we call elemental spirits. In the elements the Sun-Spirit is actively alive, and this is the activity the Greeks saw in their Apollo.

Thus for the Greeks Apollo was a sun god, but not the Helios who drove the chariot of the sun across the heavens and to some extent regulated the times of the day. In Apollo the Greeks saw the sun's activity in the atmosphere, and this activity they addressed as Apollo when they addressed it spiritually. And so it was with many gods and spiritual beings whom we find in the West. I could mention many, but we need point only to Wotan with his wild host, rushing through the storm. What form then did the world-picture—still echoing the threefold Christ-event—take in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? Again I must make use of a pedantic, dried out word. Astrology was followed by Meteorology. Chronology, Astrology, Meteorology! We have only to bring the “logy” into relation with the Logos.

But while all this was breaking in over the Western world, something else streamed into the whole post-Atlantean civilisation. This too was an after-echo of the threefold Christ-event, but it came from quite another side. And this fourth element, running as though parallel to the Meteorology of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, is something I must again designate with a dry, pedantic word: Geology—but I beg you once more to relate the “logy” to the Logos. Geology, then—where do we encounter it?

The development of the ancient Hebrew civilisation will never reveal its particular secrets unless it is studied as Geology, in our sense of the term. How do we first come upon the ranks of the Elohim, or upon the Jahve-god?¹ We meet him first when he wishes to form into man something taken from the Earth itself. He wishes to clothe with a new covering, an Earth-vesture, the part of man that has come down from earlier times, from Saturn, Sun, Moon. Jahve is precisely the god who forms man out of the Earth—that is, out of the forces and elements of the Earth. Therefore the ancient Hebrew wisdom, since it professed the Jahve-god, had to become Geology. And this teaching about man, that he is formed out of the forces of the Earth, is Geology. Is not the geological character of the ancient Hebrew teaching shown to us at once in the name of the first man, Adam—he who was formed out of earth! That is the significant point that we must keep before us: among other peoples—the peoples with a meteorological world-picture, let us say—the creation of man is spoken of quite differently, with the emphasis on his soul. In the Greek tradition, for example, we see Prometheus engaged in the forming of man. Athene lends her aid and causes a spark from spiritual heights to be united with man. Prometheus forms the soul in the symbolic likeness of a butterfly. The Jahve-god forms man out of earth; and he, the Jahve-god, having become in the course of his evolution the Ruler of Earth, breathes out of his own substance a living soul into man. So Jahve unites himself through his breath with what he has formed out of earth. And he wishes to dwell in his offspring, in his living breath, in Adam and his descendants; those beings whom Jahve considered it his task to clothe in earth. And now to carry this further, let us try to call up before our souls everything we find handed down by the Bible from Hebrew antiquity itself.

We know, and have emphasised, that the Earth develops certain forces. Goethe and Giordano Bruno, among others, compare these forces to those of in-breathing and out-breathing in human beings. The Earth does have forces of in-breathing and out-breathing which bring about ebb and flow, the swelling and sinking of the waters; they are inner Earth-forces, but the same as those which guide the Moon round the Earth. In water-effects we encounter a manifestation of these Earth-forces. In this realm the Bible shows us the Deluge as another important event after the creation of Adam, the ‘man of earth’. And now let us pass on to the time of Moses!

If we look at the doings of Moses in the right light, we find them constantly related to activities of the Earth. Moses goes to the rocks with his rod and makes water gush out. Moses goes up the mountain. Above and below, the mountain is connected with Earth activity. For we must think of this mountain as a volcano, or at least as volcanic. It is not the Sinai generally imagined; the Earth is active in it. The column of fire in which Moses stands is akin to what happens when we bum a piece of paper in the sulphur hills of Italy and smoke comes out. So does fiery smoke, telluric activity, come out of the mountain. And in telluric activity the Jews always saw symbols. In front of them went the pillar of cloud or of fire—telluric activity! We could go deeply into details and everywhere we should find that the spirit of Earth prevails in all that Moses gives out as a revelation of the Jahve-god. What Moses proclaims is Geology!

The profound difference between the Greek and the Hebrew conceptions of the world will never be understood unless it is recognised that the Greek conception belongs to Meteorology, and the Hebrew conception to Geology. The Greeks felt that they were living in the midst of forces pouring in on the Earth from the surrounding Cosmos; pouring into the air and pervading the atmosphere. The Hebrews felt themselves in close relationship to forces rising from the Earth below and bound up with the Earth. Yes, even the sufferings of the Hebrew people come from the desert, where the Earth-forces prevail. Geology dominates the destiny of the Hebrews. Geology, expressed now in the fruitfulness of the Earth, is what draws them, through the reports of their spies, to the Promised Land.²

Paul knew well that this consciousness of a connection with the Earth-spirit is a result of the pre-earthly Christ-event, for he indicates that it was the Christ who led the Jews through the desert and caused water to flow from the rock. And if we were to go on from the Bible to some of the significant Hebrew legends, we should find them permeated with Geology, in the sense meant here. Thus we are told how Jahve, when he was forming man out of earth, sent forth an angel to gather earths of different colours from all parts of the Earth, so that everything belonging to the Earth should be mingled in Adam's bodily vesture. Today we should say that Jahve took great care to place man on the Earth so that in his true being he would be the highest flower, the crown, of earthly creation.

For the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Zoroastrians, the Greeks, the Romans and the European peoples of central and northern Europe, the most important part of man was the part that came from the spiritual world. For the Jews, the most important element in man was connected with the Earth and its forces. Jahve felt himself as the god whose spiritual rulership prevailed throughout the Earth.

Thus we can regard as the most important event in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the emergence of Geology side by side with Meteorology. And a wonderful spiritual reflection of this comes to expression in ancient Hebrew prophecy.

What were these prophets really striving for? Let us try to look into the prophetic souls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hezekiah, Daniel, Joel, Jonah and Zechariah. If we do this quite impartially, without any preconceptions, we find that they were endeavouring, fundamentally, to bring a particular soul-force into the forefront of the soul and to drive another soul-force down, as it were, into the depths. I have already asked you to notice how, in the paintings by Michelangelo which I described, the prophets are always depicted sitting there as if wrapped in deep thought, inwardly at rest, so that one sees how in the devotion of their souls they are connected through sub-earthly depths with the Eternal. In contrast with them Michelangelo places the Sibyls, who are open to the elemental powers of the Earth. Thus the hair of one Sibyl is blown about by the wind; even her blue mantle billows in the wind, and under the influence of the wind she utters her prophecies. We see another Sibyl seized by inner fire; in the typically assertive gesture of her hand we see the fire, the earthly element. We could look again at these Sibyls one by one and we should find that they live in the midst of the forces which play into their souls from the elemental surroundings of the Earth. These Sibylline forces, which so to speak draw into their souls the spirit of the elements and bring it to expression—these are the forces that the old Jewish Prophets wanted to repress. If you read impartially the whole history of the Jewish Prophets, you will find that the prophet sets himself—and that is the aim of his training—to suppress in himself the Sibylline urge and to prevent it from ever breaking out.

Apollo changed the Sibylline impulse of the Pythia by sinking himself into it and speaking through her. The Prophets wanted to suppress everything Pythian in their souls and to cultivate solely that which works in the clear force of the Ego; the Ego which is bound up with the Earth and belongs to it; the Ego which is the spiritual counterpart of the geological element. How the Eternal reveals itself in the Ego through calm repose, when the Sibylline elements are silent, when all inner turmoil ceases, when only calm prevails and gazes into the grounds of the Eternal—that is what the Jewish Prophets wished to manifest, so that their proclamations could spring from a temper of soul which corresponds in the highest degree with Geology.

Thus the stirring message that sounds forth to us from the Prophets is like an out flowing of the geological element, and even when things turn out quite differently from what has been prophesied, this very fact shows us how closely bound are the Prophets to the element of Geology. A future kingdom which will redeem the existing kingdom while remaining in all appearance an earthly kingdom, a heaven on Earth—that is first of all what the Prophets announce, so closely are they united with Geology.

This geological element in the Prophets flowed on even into the early days of Christianity, since people expected not only the return of the Messiah, but that he would come down from the clouds and found his kingdom on Earth. The distinctive inner character of Jewish culture will be understood only if it is taken in this sense as Geology. This was what the Prophets longed for and inculcated in their pupils—to suppress the Sibylline element, together with everything that leads the soul into unconscious depths, and to make manifest that which lives in the Ego.

The relations of all other peoples to their gods were different from those of the Jews to their Jahve. The other relations were predetermined: they reflected the outcome of the relations of men to the spirits of the higher Hierarchies during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods. The Jewish people had the task of developing a relationship which belonged specially to the Earth period. But when the Ego wishes to establish a relationship with its god, how does this find expression? Not as inspiration, so that morality springs from the operation of divine forces within the soul, but as commandment. The form of commandment found in the Decalogue is encountered first among the Jews—whatever nonsense learned men may talk about earlier commandments, Hammurabi, and so forth. I cannot go now into the follies of modern scholarship. The commandments that arise when the Ego stands directly over against God and receives from God the rule, the precept, that the Ego must follow out of its own inner will—this kind of commandment is met with first among the Jewish people. And it is here, too, that we first find God entering into a covenant with his people.

The other gods worked with forces which are always connected with subconscious realms of the soul. Let us recall how Apollo worked through the Pythia, and how a person on his way to the Pythia had to prepare himself, so that the god might be able to speak to him. Apollo spoke through the unconscious soul-life of the Pythia. In contrast with this we have the Jahve-god uttering his commandments, making a covenant with his people, speaking directly to the Ego in the soul. And the Prophets immediately wax wrath if something happens which did often happen to the Jewish people—if the influence of heathen peoples gains sway over the Jews. No subconscious forces were to be allowed to influence the Jews; everything had to rest on the alliance with God and the principle of the Law. That was the especial concern of the Prophets. And now let us look back a little, with the aid of occult knowledge, over what we have already tried to illustrate.

Yesterday we came to know about the threefold Christ-event which took place in Lemurian and Atlantean times. We saw how on three occasions the Being who appeared later as the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ, but in such a way that he did not incarnate on Earth but remained in spiritual worlds. And when we look back over what happened then, we must say that what was accomplished in Atlantean times flowed over into the East.

For example, Elijah was one of the Prophets—but in what sense is he a Prophet?³ He is a servant of the God Jahve, but in his soul an echo of the threefold Christ-event lives on. In his soul is the knowledge: “As a prophet of Jahve I must above all things proclaim that in Jahve there lives the Christ who will later on fulfil the Mystery of Golgotha; the Christ who poured His enduring influence into the cosmos through His third experience at the end of the Atlantean time.” Elijah proclaimed the Christ-filled Jahve. For the Christ was indeed living in Jahve, the Jahve-god, but as a reflection of Himself. As the moon reflects the sunlight, so did Jahve reflect the Being who then lived as Christ. Christ caused his Being to be reflected from Jahve or the Jahve-god. But a messenger such as Elijah worked in the after-effects of the threefold Christ-event; we might say that Elijah went ahead of the Nathan Jesus-being, who was passing spiritually from West to East in order to find his way into the course of civilisation and then to be born as one of the Jesus-children.

The overflow, as it were, of Meteorology, especially when this came into touch with Geology, was felt by all peoples as a heralding of things to come. And we meet with the remarkable fact that in the region which afterwards became so important for Christianity one of these prefiguring signs occurred. We see how in the most varied places of Asia Minor, and also in Europe, festivals were held which were like foreshadowings of the Mystery of Golgotha. The cults of Attis and Adonis have been correctly noted as having this character. But if we look at these festivals in their true light, we see that the event they prefigure is on the meteorological level. The god who was slain as Adonis, and who rose again, was not thought of as embodied in the flesh. What his worshippers had for a god was primarily an image, a picture; and in fact it was a picture of the angelic Being who in spiritual heights was permeated by the Christ at the close of the Atlantean time and was later born as the Nathan Jesus-child. It was the destiny of the Nathan Jesus-child that was celebrated in the worship of Adonis and Attis.

We can now say that it was part of the karma of world history—you will perhaps look for something more behind these words—that in the place where the Bible with a certain truth locates the birth of the Jesus-child—in Bethlehem—there was a centre of the Adonis cult. Bethlehem was one of the places where Adonis had been worshipped. The Adonis who died and rose, again was often celebrated there, and so was an aura prepared by the calling up of a memory: Once in the spiritual heights there was a Being who then belonged still to the Hierarchy of Angels and was later to come to Earth as the Nathan Jesus-child; a Being who at the end of the Atlantean time had been permeated by the Christ. What had formerly been done for the harmonising of thinking, feeling and willing—this was celebrated at the Adonis festivals. And in Bethlehem, where Adonis festivals had been held, we have also the birthplace of the Nathan Jesus-child. In conjunction, these words sound strange. But when we have sought out the threefold Christ-event, the super-earthly event which on three occasions preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, do we not see the Christ pass over from West to East, to the place where the Mystery of Golgotha was to be fulfilled? Do we not see how He had sent His messenger in Elijah, and do we not know how in his next incarnation the messenger reappeared as John the Baptist? And are we not expressly told of this in a wonderful harmony of words: “He sent his angel before him, to herald his coming?”⁴ That can be said as well of John as of Elijah. Or even better of Elijah, as will be understood by those who remember my saying that Elijah remained in spiritual heights and worked through a representative, so that he himself never went about on Earth. If you reflect on that, the expression, “He sent his angel before him”, is even more appropriate to Elijah than to John. Such messengers were always messengers of the Christ, who was passing from West to East.

And now the Geology of the Jews was to be permeated by the spiritual Being whom we have learnt to see as having a particular activity in relation to the Earth. Geology was to be Christened (durchchristet). The spirit of the Earth was to be experienced in a new way by men; they had to be enabled to free this spirit, in a certain sense, from the Earth. But this was possible only if there came a power which could free the spirit of the Earth from the forces of the Earth. This happened when the Earth's aura was permeated by the power of the Christ and in consequence a change came over the Earth itself. The Christ entered into the forces which the Jahve-god had released and gave them a different character.

From all this, if we look back over it, we can understand why the laurel became a visible symbol of Apollo. For those who bring something of Spiritual Science to the study of the plant kingdom, the laurel has a strong connection with meteorological conditions. It is shaped and built out of Meteorology. Another plant is much more closely bound up with the Earth; is so to speak an expression of Geology. If one really feels how the oil penetrates the olive tree, so that in one's own soul the elemental forces are stirred by the way in which the tree allows a new sprout to be grafted on to it and to flourish there—then one can feel how the olive tree is inwardly penetrated with the oil of Earth. One can feel the earthly element pulsing through the oil.

And now you will remember something I touched on in the second lecture—that Paul was called to build a bridge between Hebrew antiquity and Christianity, between Geology and Christology. As we said, Paul's activity extends through the realm of the olive tree. And if we understand Apollo in the vapours rising from the mountain chasms, and how through the vapours he inspires the Pythia and speaks oracular words concerning human fate, then we can also feel how the elemental forces stream from the olive tree into its environment, and these are forces familiar to the soul of Paul. We can feel it in his words. He immerses himself, as it were, in Geology in order to feel the elemental forces in the aura of the olive tree and to let its aura inspire him in that geographical realm where his work lay.

Nowadays people read these things far too abstractly. They imagine that things said by writers in the past were as abstract, as dependent only on the brain, as are the things often said by modern authors. People do not reflect how not only understanding and reason, but all the forces of the soul, can be connected in a primordial earthly sense with all that gives a certain region its particular stamp. It was the olive tree that gave its stamp to the Pauline region. And when Paul sought to raise the Jewish Geology up to himself, then it was that—inspired by the olive tree—he spoke the most important things concerning the relationship of the Christ-filled man to men who are far from Christ. Let us hear the strange words Paul uses when he wishes to bring the Gentile Christians into relation with the Jews. They are not to be taken abstractly, but as words that rise new-minted from the elemental depths of his soul: Romans XI. 13–24. (From the New English Bible):

“But I have something to say to you Gentiles. I am a missionary to the Gentiles, and as such I give all honour to that ministry when I try to stir emulation in the men of my own race, and so to save some of them. For if their rejection has meant the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead! If the first portion of dough is consecrated, so is the whole lump. If the root is consecrated, so are the branches. But if some of the branches have been lopped off, and you, a wild olive, have been grafted in among them, and have come to share the same root and sap as the olive, do not make yourself superior to the branches. If you do so, remember that it is not you who sustain the root: the root sustains you.

“You will say, ‘Branches were lopped off so that I might be grafted in.’ Very well: they were lopped off for lack of faith, and by faith you hold your place. Put away your pride, and be on your guard; for if God did not spare the native branches, no more will he spare you. Observe the kindness and the severity of God—severity to those who fell away, divine kindness to you, if only you remain within its scope; otherwise you too will be cut off, whereas they, if they do not continue faithless, will be grafted in; for it is in God's power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from your native wild olive and against all nature grafted into the cultivated olive, how much more readily will they, the natural olive-branches, be grafted into their native stock!”

Thus wrote he of whom tomorrow we will speak further, showing how he took what he had to say from Jewish Geology and drew a superb picture of the elemental forces which rise up from the Earth and reign in the olive tree.

• 1. On the subject of the creative work performed by Jahve together with the other six Elohim, see Genesis. Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation. Lecture-course given by Dr. Steiner in Munich, August, 1910.
• 2. See Numbers, XIII. 16.
• 3. On the subject of the Prophet Elijah, see the following lecture-courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Mark (lectures III and VI) and The Gospel of St. Luke (lecture VI).
• 4. “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me.” Malachi, III. 1. “For this is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.” Matthew, XI. 10.