The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To gain an idea of this evolution we must have recourse not to abstractions but to pictures, for pictures have a living, creative quality that is not contained in the pure idea. The picture is a symbol in one world but corresponds to a reality in a higher world.

We know that before developing to its present stage, our Earth passed through a phase called the Old Moon period. But this Old Moon phase of evolution is not to be confused with the satellite we now see in the sky, nor to any other planet that astronomy might ever discover. The heavenly bodies visible today are bodies which have been mineralised. The human eye can only see objects which contain mineral elements and reflect the light, in other words, objects which have a physical body. When the occultist speaks of the mineral kingdom, he is not merely referring to the stones but to the milieu at the central core of which the consciousness of man unfolds. Many scholars regard living beings as mere machines and reject the idea of a vital force. This mentality is a result of the fact that our organism is unable really to behold life. The occultist, on the other hand, says that in our age man lives in the mineral world.

Think of the human eye. It is a highly complicated mechanism, a kind of ‘dark chamber,’ with the pupil as a window and the crystalline as a lens. The whole body of man is composed of a number of physical organs, equally delicate and complicated. The ear is like a harpsichord with a key-board and fibres for strings. And the same may be said of every sense-organ.

The consciousness of modern man is only awakened if connection is established with his physical or mineral body. True, it awakens first in the physical world, but it must none the less gradually light up in the other members of man's being—in the member that is constituted by the life-forces (the plant-nature of man), in the member that is chiefly dominated by the forces of feeling (the animal-nature), and finally in the Ego.

Truth to tell, man only knows what is mineral in the universe. He does not know the essential laws underlying the animal's life of instinct and feeling, and the growth of plants. He simply sees their physical expressions. Try to conceive a plant in super physical existence, having lost its mineral substance—it would be invisible to our physical eyes.

But even though man knows only the mineral, at least he has it in his power. He works it, moulds it, smelts and combines it. He fashions the face of the Earth anew. He is able to do this in our age with the help of machines. If we go back to remote historic ages when as yet no human hand had been laid on the Earth, we find it as it issued from the hands of the Gods. But ever since man began to exercise control over the mineral kingdom, the Earth has been changing, and we may foresee an age when the whole face of the Earth—which at the beginning was the work of the Gods—will have received the stamp imparted by the hand of man.

In the beginning, form was given to all created things by the Gods. This power of giving form has passed from the Gods to men, in so far as the mineral kingdom is concerned. In ancient traditions it was taught that man must accomplish the task of transforming the Earth in fulfillment of a threefold goal, namely the realisation of truth, beauty, goodness. It is for man to make the Earth into a temple of truth, beauty and goodness. And then, those who come after him will look upon his work as we now look upon the mineral world which came forth from the hands of the Gods. Neither cathedrals nor machines have been built in vain. The Gods have given form to the crystal which we extract from the Earth, just as we build our monuments and our machines. Just as in the past the Gods created the mineral world from a chaotic mass, so our cathedrals, inventions and even our institutions are the germs from which a future world will come to birth.

Having transformed the mineral world, man will learn to transform the plants. This denotes a higher power. Today, man erects buildings; in future times he will be able to create and give shape to plant-life by working upon plant-substance. At a still higher stage, he will give form not only to living beings but to conscious beings. He will have power over animal life. When he has reached the stage of being able to reproduce his like by an act of conscious will, he will accomplish, at a higher level, what he accomplishes today in the mineral world.

The germ of this sublime power of generation, cleansed of all element of sensuality, is the word. Man became a conscious being when he drew his first breath; consciousness will reach its stage of perfection when he is able to pour into the words he utters, the same creative power with which his thought is endowed today. In this age, it is only words that he communicates to the air. When he has reached the stage of higher creative consciousness, he will be able to communicate images to the air. The word will then be an Imagination—wholly permeated with life. In giving body to these images, he will be giving body to the word which bears and sustains the image. When we no longer simply embody our thoughts in objects, as for instance when we make a watch, but give body to these images, they will live.

And when man knows how to impart life to what is highest in him, these ‘images’ will lead a real and actual existence, comparable to animal existence. At the highest stage of evolution, man will thus be able, finally, to reproduce his own being. At the end of the process of the Earth's transformation, the whole atmosphere will resound with the power of the Word. Thus man must evolve to a stage where he will have the power to mould his environment in the image of his inner being. The initiate only precedes him along this path.

It is evident that the Earth today cannot produce human bodies such as will be produced at the final stage of evolution. When that final stage has come, these bodies will be a fit expression of the Logos. The one great Messenger, He alone Who manifested in a human body like our own, this power of the Logos, is Christ. He came at the central turning-point of evolution, to reveal its goal.

And now let us enquire into the form in which the Spirit of man lived before this Spirit entered into him by way of the breath. The Earth is a reincarnation of an earlier planet—of the Old Moon. In this lunar period of evolution, the pure mineral did not yet exist. The planetary body was composed of a substance somewhat akin to the nature of wood a substance midway between the mineral and the plant. Its surface was not hard like the mineral—indeed it was liken to turf. It brought forth beings by nature half-plant, half-mollusc, and was inhabited by a third kingdom of beings at a stage of existence midway between the human being and animal. These beings were endowed with a dreamlike, imaginative consciousness. We can envisage the kind of matter of which their ‘bodies’ were composed, by thinking of the nerve-substance of the crayfish. This matter densified to become the substance of which the brain is now composed. On the Old Moon, this matter remained in a more fluid state but on Earth it required a protective sheath of bone—the skull. In this sense, all the substances of which we are composed are ‘extracts’ of the macrocosm. All this preparatory activity in the universe was necessary in order that the Ego might descend into man.

We have heard that man was only ready to receive the germ of his Ego, when, on Earth, he began to breathe the air around him. Did he then breathe on the Moon?

The further we go back in the periods of evolution, the higher the temperature. Atlantis was bathed in hot vapours. In earlier times still, the air was pure warmth; before that again, fire. Fire was there in the place of air. The Lemurians breathed fire. That is why it is said in occult writings that the first Teachers of men were the Spirits of Fire. When physical man appeared on the Earth, air became his element of life. But man changes this air, in that he transforms it into carbonic acid and the breathing-process has thus caused the materialisation of our globe to descend still one degree lower. The equilibrium is restored by the plant-world.

In times to come, the physical body will disappear; man and the Earth will live as astral forms. Physical substance destroys itself by its own forces. But before this metamorphosis comes about, a cosmic night will fall, just as a previous cosmic night marked the transition of the Old Moon evolution to that of our present Earth.

The atmosphere of the Moon contained nitrogen, just as today the atmosphere of the Earth contains oxygen, and it was the predominance of nitrogen which brought about the end of the Old Moon period and the onset of a cosmic night. The cyanides on Earth are survivals from the conditions existing at the final stages of the Old Moon evolution. That is why they have a destructive effect on Earth, for the Earth is not their proper sphere. They are the poisonous remains of life in another age.

Animal-man, as he lived on the old Moon, is thus the ancestor of earthly, physical man; the Spirit within man is the offspring of the Spirits of Fire in the lunar period. The Beings who on the Old Moon were incarnate in the fire, incarnated, on Earth, in the air. But now, has anything of the action of these Spirits of Fire remained in man? On the Old Moon, living beings had no warm blood. What was it that gave rise to the warmth of the blood and, as a consequence, to the life of passions?—The fire which was inbreathed by the beings of the Old Moon and which lives again on Earth in their blood. And the Spirit of the air surrounds the body which contains the heritage of the Old Moon evolution, namely, the warmth of the blood, the brain, the spinal fluid, the nerves.

These examples serve to show that a close study of the transformation of substances is required before we can begin to understand the great processes of metamorphosis which took place during the earlier periods of the Earth's evolution. At a stage still earlier than that of the Old Moon, the planetary sphere which has now become our Earth had a body composed merely of gaseous substance; before that again, we can only speak of a body of sound. It is in this sound—the Cosmic Word—that man's evolution has its origin, proceeding thence towards light, fire, air. Only in the fourth condition does consciousness flash up in the Spirit of man. From this point onwards, the directing force bestowed by the Logos has its rise from within man's own being and his conscience becomes his rightful guide. His primordial being comes to expression in the ‘I,’ the Ego. The conscious Ego is the realisation in man of the Christ Principle.

In a preceding lecture we went back in human evolution to the time when the division of the sexes occurred. This moment is in itself the climax of a long cosmic preparation. After the night which separated the phase of the ancient moon from the terrestrial phase, the earth to begin with appeared combined with the forces of the present sun and moon. They formed but one body which, little by little, became differentiated thus giving birth to the three bodies as we now know them. The present division of the sexes is the result of the separation between the moon forces and the earthly forces. The feminine forces of reproduction have remained under the influence of the moon. The moon still rules over the forces of propagation both in man and animal. Thus occult knowledge reveals the forces that are at play in the planetary system.

At the time when the sun was still united both with the earth and the moon, neither plants nor animals nor human beings existed as we know them today. In fact, only a plant kingdom existed then but under totally different conditions from our own. This kingdom preserved a particular connection with the forces of the sun similar to that of the animal with the moon and of man with the earth. As long as the sun was united with the earth-moon, the plants directed their blossoms toward the center of the globe; when the sun separated off they oriented themselves in accordance with it and directed their flowers heavenward. We have seen in an earlier lecture (XI) that the plants have thus adopted an inverted position in relation to man; both manifest themselves in the vertical whereas the animal is found to be half way between the human orientation and that of the plant world. The spinal column of the animal is in the horizontal. It is by means of the gradual separation of the three heavenly bodies that the different kingdoms on earth have become as we now know them: the plant kingdom at the time of the separation of the sun, the animal when the separation of the moon occurred. The pristine composition of these forces contained in germ what was later to take on physical manifestation. Let us imagine a substance which is heated to a high temperature and then cooled; one would then see the various elements which it contains taking on form.

At the time of the ancient moon we also find the solar forces which during a certain period are concentrated in a celestial body outside the moon. The moon was revolving around the ancient sun but in such a manner that it always turned the same side to the sun; the orbit of the moon around the earth is a continuation of the motion formerly described around the ancient sun. These bodies, both at the beginnings and at the end of this cosmic period, became one—just as the earth, the moon and the sun were united at the beginning of earth evolution and will again be united at the end. These two ancient cosmic bodies would never have been able to be active in evolution had they not recast their forces after their separation. The moon, during the time it was separated from the sun, developed in such a way that forces were engendered which later made it possible for a third body to appear. In fact, it was during this separation that man was able to develop within himself what later took on physical embodiment and gave him the possibility of developing objective, waking consciousness on earth.

The period which preceded the lunar one is referred to as the solar. At this time of evolution everything was pure solar life. Occultism sees the sun as a fixed star which had previously been a planet and similarly it recognizes the earth as a planet destined to become the sun of a future cosmic system. During the solar period, man was only endowed with a consciousness akin to that of dreamless sleep.

Yet another state preceded the solar period; at that time the sun was not even a planet. The human being was only endowed with a deep trance consciousness or deep sleep. He was not yet the being of light which he would become on the ancient sun; he simply vibrated like a tone in the pure harmony of this Saturn period, but it should be noted that our present Saturn has nothing to do with this condition.

After our earthly period of clear physical consciousness, a fifth condition will dawn of conscious astral imagination during a period known as Jupiter. This will be followed by a period of Venus where we shall become conscious of what today is the unconsciousness of sleep. Finally, a period of Vulcan will come into being which corresponds to the highest state of consciousness which can be attained by an initiate.

But this does not exhaust the relationships of the earth and the planets. We in fact can divide our present terrestrial stage into two parts. During the first it came about that our blood is red. What has given us our red blood? During the separation of the earth and the sun, this globe composed of fluid substance was shot through by other fluid forces emanating from the planet Mars. Before this passage of Mars not the slightest trace of iron existed on this earth. In fact, that is a result of this passage; all substances containing iron such as our blood have been subjected to the influence of Mars. Mars has colored the substance of the earth. And the appearance of red blood is the result of its influence. That is why the first half of earth evolution is referred to as the period of Mars.

At that time, iron was a fluid substance and the metals only hardened later on. Mercury is the only metal which has not solidified. When this will have happened the soul of man will have become totally independent of the physical body and astral imaginative vision will have become conscious. This fact is connected with the forces of Mercury which influence the second part of Earth evolution during which they will densify and finally become solid. The Earth is both Mars and Mercury. And it is this which Initiates have woven into our language by indicating that the days of the week belong to the planets of our evolution: Mars and Mercury are placed between the Moon and Jupiter.

The Interior of the Earth

Physical science as yet only knows of the terrestrial crust, a mineral layer which in fact is only like a thin skin at the surface of the earth. In reality the earth consists of a succession of concentric layers which we shall now describe:

1) The mineral layer contains all the metals which are found in the physical bodies of everything that lives at the surface. This crust is formed like a skin around the living being of the earth. It is only a few miles in depth.

2) The second layer can only be understood if we envisage a substance which is the very opposite of what we know. It is negative life, the opposite of life. All life is extinguished there. Were a plant or an animal plunged into it, it would be destroyed immediately. It would be totally dissolved. This second shell—half liquid—which envelopes the earth is truly a sphere of death.

3) The third layer is a circle of inverted consciousness. All sorrow appears there as joy. And all joy is experienced as sorrow. Its substance, composed of vapors, is related to our feelings in the same negative manner as the second layer is in regard to life. If we now abstract these three layers by means of our thinking, we would then find the earth in the condition in which it was before the separation of the moon. If one is able by means of concentration to attain a conscious astral vision, one would then see the activities in these two layers: the destruction of life in the second and the transformation of feelings in the third.

4) The fourth layer is known as water-earth, soul-earth, or form-earth, It is endowed with a remarkable property. Let us imagine a cube and now picture it reversed inasmuch as its substance is concerned. Where there was substance there is now nothing: the space occupied by the cube would now be empty while its substance, its substantial form, would now be spread around it; hence the term ‘earth of form.’ Here this whirlwind of forms, instead of being a negative emptiness, becomes a positive substance.

5) This layer is known as the earth of growth. It contains the archetypal source of all terrestrial life. Its substance consists of burgeoning, teeming energies.

6) This fire-earth is composed of pure will, of elemental vital forces—of constant movement—shot through by impulses and passions, truly a reservoir of will forces. If one were to exert pressure on this substance it would resist.

If now again in thought one were to abstract these last three layers just described, one would arrive at the condition in which our globe was when Sun, Moon and Earth were still interwoven.

The following layers are only accessible to a conscious observation which is not only that of dreamless sleep but a conscious condition in deep sleep.

7) This layer is the mirror of the earth. It is similar to a prism which decomposes everything that is reflected in it and brings to expression its complementary aspect; seen through an emerald it would appear red.

8) In this layer everything appears fragmented and reproduced to infinity. If one takes a plant or a crystal and one concentrates on this layer the plant or the crystal would appear multiplied indefinitely.

9) This last layer is composed of a substance endowed with moral action. But this morality is the opposite of the one that is to be elaborated on the earth. Its essence, its inherent force, is one of separation, of discord, and of hate. It is here in the hell of Dante that we find Cain the fratricide. This substance is the opposite of everything which among human beings is good and worthy. The activity of humanity in order to establish brotherhood on the earth diminishes the power of this sphere. It is the power of Love which will transform it inasmuch as it will spiritualize the very body of the Earth. This ninth layer represents the substantial origin of what appears on earth as black magic, that is, a magic founded on egoism. (See diagram)

These various layers are connected by means of rays which unite the center of the earth with its surface. Underneath the solid earth there are a large number of subterranean spaces which communicate to the sixth layer, that of fire. This element of the fire-earth is intimately connected with the human will. It is this element which has produced the tremendous eruptions that brought the Lemurian epoch to an end. At that time the forces which nourish the human will went through a trial which unleashed the fire catastrophe that destroyed the Lemurian continent. In the course of evolution this sixth layer receded more and more toward the center and as a result volcanic eruptions became less frequent. And yet they are still produced as a result of the human will which, when it is evil and chaotic, magnetically acts on this layer and disrupts it. Nevertheless, when the human will is devoid of egoism, it is able to appease this fire. Materialistic periods are mostly accompanied and followed by natural cataclysms, earthquakes, etc. Growing powers of evolution are the only alchemy capable of transforming, little by little, the organism and the soul of the earth.

The following is an example of the relationship that exists between the human will and telluric cataclysms: in human beings who perish as a result of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions one notices, during their next incarnation, inner qualities which are quite different. They bring from birth great spiritual pre-dispositions because, through their death, they were brought in touch with forces which showed them the true nature of reality and the illusion of material life.

One has also noticed a relationship between certain births and seismic and volcanic catastrophes.

During such catastrophes materialistic souls incarnate, drawn sympathetically by volcanic phenomena—by the convulsions of the evil soul of the earth. And these births can in their turn bring about new cataclysms because reciprocally the evil souls exert an exciting influence on the terrestrial fire. The evolution of our planet is intimately connected with the evolution of the forces of humanity and civilizations.

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The Interior of the Earth:

1. Mineral crust
2. Negative life
3. Inverted Consciousness
4. Circle of forms
5. Circle of growth
6. Circle of fire
7. Circle of decomposition
8. Circle of fragmentation
9. Ego-centric-egoism

There are seven mysteries of life which up till now have never been spoken of outside the ranks of Occult Brotherhoods. Only in our age is it possible to speak of them openly. They have been called the seven ‘inexpressible’ or ‘unutterable’ mysteries. We shall attempt to deal with the fourth mystery, that of Death. These mysteries are as follows:

1. The mystery of the Abyss.
2. The mystery of Number (which can be studied in Pythagorean philosophy).
3. The mystery of Alchemy. (We can learn something of this mystery in the works of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme).
4. The mystery of Death.
5. The mystery of Evil (to which reference is made in the Apocalypse).
6. The mystery of the Word, of the Logos.
7. The mystery of Divine Bliss. (This mystery is the most occult).

In speaking of the planetary body which preceded our Earth—the Old Moon phase of evolution—we distinguished three kingdoms of Nature, very different from those we know. Our mineral kingdom did not then exist. It came into being as the result of condensation and crystallisation of what on the Old Moon was half-mineral, half-plant. Our plant-world has sprung from the lunar plant-animal. Similarly, the animal world has arisen from the lunar animal-man. So we see that on the Earth, each of these lunar kingdoms makes a descent into materiality. The same thing happens to the Beings who on the Old Moon were higher than animal-man: the Spirits of Fire. In that period man breathed fire, just as today we breathe air. This is why the legends and myths speak of fire as the primary manifestation of the Gods. Goethe alludes to this in Faust, in the words: “Let us kindle fire in order that the Spirits may clothe themselves as in a garment.” These Fire-Spirits of the ancient Moon descended to the air in the Earth period proper. They too have descended into denser materiality, into the air we inbreathe and outbreathe.

Now it is just because these Spirits have descended into the air that man can, by their help, rise to the Divine. A twofold movement occurred in the innermost nature of the beings dwelling in the Old Moon. Animal-man divided into two groups. In the one group, a brain developed under the influence of the inspiration and action of the Spirits of Fire who became Spirits of Air. The other group descended towards the animal kingdom. This division is now apparent in the very constitution of man, for the lower part of his being is more akin to the animal, while the higher rises towards the Spirit. According to whether the one or the other characteristic was more or less pronounced, two groups of human beings came into existence: the one bound by a lower nature to the Earth—the other more developed and free of the Earth. The first group grew more like the animals. The beings of the other group received the Divine Spark, the consciousness of ‘I.’ Such is the relation between man of today and the animals, more particularly the ape.

The physical correlate of this spiritual evolution was the growth and development of the human brain into a veritable temple of God. But if this had been the only evolution, something would have been lacking. There would have been minerals, plants, animals and human beings possessing a brain and a human form and figure, but something would have remained at the lunar stage of evolution. On the Old Moon there was neither birth nor death.

Try to conceive of man without a physical body. He would not pass through death; the renewal of his being would not be brought about by birth as we know it, but by some other means. Certain parts of the astral body and the etheric body would be subject to change, that is all. Around an imperishable centre, the surrounding sheaths alone would be the media of communication with the environment,—such was the condition of man during the Old Moon period of evolution; his being was subject to metamorphoses, not to birth or death. But in this state he had no consciousness in our sense of the word. The Gods who had given him form were around him, behind him, not within him. They were to him what the tree is to the branch or what the brain is to the hand. The hand moves, but the consciousness of the movement is in the brain. Man was a branch of the divine tree and if earthly evolution had not changed this condition of things, his brain would have been but a flower of the same divine tree, his thoughts would have been reflected in his countenance as in a mirror but he would have had no consciousness of his own thoughts. Our Earth would have been a world of beings endowed with thoughts, but not with consciousness, a world of statues ensouled by the Gods, above all by Jahve or Jehovah. What was it that changed this order of things and how has man arrived at independence?

The Gods of the nature of Jahve were able to descend into the human brain. But other Spirits who, on the Moon, had been of the order of the Spirits of Fire, had not completed their evolution, and instead of penetrating into the brain of man on the Earth they mingled with his astral body. The astral body is composed of instincts, desires, passions, and it was there that those Spirits of Fire who had not attained the goal of evolution on the Moon, took refuge. They found a home in the animal nature of man where the passions unfold, and at the same time they imbued these passions with higher qualities. They poured the capacity for higher enthusiasm into the blood and the astral body of man. The gift of the Jehovistic Gods was the pure, cold form of the idea; but under the influence of these Spirits—we may speak of them as Luciferian Spirits—man became capable of enthusiasm for ideas, of being passionately for them or against them. The Jehovistic Gods gave form and shape to the human brain; the Luciferian Spirits set up the connection between the brain and the physical senses; they live in the nerve branches which end in the sense-organs. Lucifer has lived in us for as long as Jehovah.

The fact that his senses give man an objective consciousness of the world around him is due to the Luciferian Spirits. Human thought is the gift of the Gods; human consciousness is the gift of Lucifer. Lucifer lives in the astral body of man, and Lucifer's activity comes to expression at the point where the nerves give rise to feeling and perception. That is why the Serpent in Genesis says: ‘Your eyes shall be opened.’ These words must be taken literally, for it was by the Luciferian Spirits that the senses of man were opened.

The individualisation of consciousness is due to the senses. If man's thoughts were not related to the sense-world they would simply be reflections of the Divine—not knowledge but belief. The contradiction between faith and science is due to this dual origin of human thought. Faith turns to the eternal Ideas, the ‘Mother-Ideas’ lying in the bosom of the Gods. All science, all knowledge of the outer world by means of the senses owes its existence to the Luciferian Spirits. In man, the Luciferian principle and Divine Intelligence are combined. It is this fusion of opposing principles which makes evil possible for man but it also gives him the power of self-consciousness, choice and freedom. Only a being capable of individualisation could be thus helped by opposing elements within his being. If when he descended into matter, man had only received the form given by Jehovah, he would have remained an impersonal being. And so it was due to Lucifer that man was able to become truly man, a being independent of the Gods. Christ, or the Logos made manifest in man, is the Principle which enables him to ascend once again to God.

Before the Coming of Christ, man embodied the principle of Jehovah (form) and that of Lucifer (individualisation). He was divided between obedience to the Law and the revolt of the principle of individuality. But the principle of Christ came to establish equilibrium between the two. Christ taught man how to find the Law which was originally laid down from outside, within the centre of individual being. This is what St. Paul meant when he said that freedom and love are the highest principles of Christianity. The ancient world was ruled by Law; Love is the governing principle of the new order of things. Thus three principles are inseparable from and essential to man's evolution—Jehovah, Lucifer, Christ. Christ Jesus is not only a Universal Principle; Christ is a Being who appeared once, and once only, at a definite moment in history. In human form, He revealed by His words and His life, a state of perfection which it is possible for all men ultimately to acquire by their own free-will. Christ came to the Earth at a critical moment, when the descending arc of human evolution was about to reach its lowest point of materialisation. In order that the Christ-Principle might awaken in man, the life of Christ Himself on Earth was necessary in a human body.

Karma is the law of cause and effect in the spiritual world; it represents the spiral process of evolution. The Christ Impulse intervenes in this karmic process and becomes its central pivot. Since He came to Earth the Christ has lived in the depths of every human soul.

When karma is conceived as a necessity imposed on man in order that his wrong doings may be redressed and his errors redeemed by an implacable justice working over from one incarnation to another, the objection is sometimes raised that karma must do away with the rôle of Christ as the Redeemer. In reality, karma is a redemption of man by himself, by dint of his own efforts as he gradually ascends to freedom through the series of incarnations. It is through karma that man is able to draw near to Christ.

The Christ-Impulse transforms implacable Law into Freedom, and the source of this Impulse is the person and example of Christ Jesus. Karma is not to be conceived as fatalism but as an instrument essential to the attainment of that supreme freedom which is life in Christ—a freedom attained not by defying the world-order but by fulfilling it.

Another objection is one that may be made from the point of view of oriental philosophy. It is said that the idea of a Redeemer of men does away with the logical concatenations of karma and substitutes for it an act of a miraculous Providence which intervenes in the universal laws of evolution. It is surely right and just that those who have committed sins should bear the weight of them. This is an error of thought. Karma is the law of cause and effect in the spiritual world, just as mechanical action is the law of cause and effect in the material world. At every moment of life karma represents something like a balance sheet, an exact statement of debit and credit. By every action, bad or good, man augments his debit or credit. Those who will not admit the possibility of an act of freedom are like a business man who will not venture to embark upon a new transaction because he does not wish to run any risk; he prefers always to keep the same balance sheet.

A purely logical conception of karma would prohibit one from helping a man in adversity. But there, too, such fatalism would be false. The help we give freely to another opens up a new era in his destiny. Our destinies are woven of these impulses, of these acts of grace. If we accept the idea of individual help, may we not conceive that a far mightier Being could help, not one man alone, but all men, could give a new impulse to all humanity? Such, indeed, was the act of a God Who was made man, not in order to defy the laws of karma but to fulfil them. Karma and Christ—the means of salvation and the Saviour. Through karma, the Act of Christ becomes cosmic law, and through the Christ-Principle karma achieves its aim—the liberation of conscious souls and their identification with God. Karma is gradual redemption, Christ is the Redeemer.

If men would steep themselves in these ideas, they would realise that they belong to one another; they would understand the law recognised in all true occult brotherhoods—namely that each individual suffers and lives for others. There will come a time in the future when outer redemption will coincide in each man with the interior act of the Redeemer. It is not revelation but truth which makes men free: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”

The path of evolution leads to freedom. When man has awakened in himself all those qualities which were prophetically manifest in the Christ, he will be a free being. For if necessity is the law of the material world, freedom is the law of the spiritual world. Freedom is only acquired step by step and it will not be fully manifest in man until the end of his evolution, when his nature will be truly spiritualised.

It has been said many times in the course of these lectures that Christianity marks the turning point of human evolution. All the religions have their raison d'etre and have been partial manifestations of the Logos, but none have changed the world so deeply as Christianity.—Those who ‘have not seen’ are those who have not known the Mysteries. Through Christianity, certain fundamental teachings of the ancient Mysteries—for instance those which dealt with morality, the immortality of the soul by Resurrection or the ‘second birth’—were given to the whole world.

Before Christianity, super-sensible truth was revealed in the rites and dramatic ritual of the Mysteries. Since then, we have believed in it as it was revealed in the Divine Personality of Christ. But in every epoch there has been a difference between esoteric truth as known to the Initiates and its exoteric form which has been adapted to the multitude and expressed in the religions. The same applies to Christianity. What is written in the Gospels is the message, the good tidings announced to all the world. But there was a more profound teaching; it is contained in the Apocalypse in the form of symbols

There is a way of reading the Apocalypse which only now can be made public. But it was practised in the Middle Ages, in the occult schools of the Rosicrucians. They paid less attention to the historic aspect of the writing, the question of its author and all the problems which occupy the minds of modern theologians who only seek to discover the outer, historical circumstances. Theology today only knows the shell of the Apocalypse and has neglected its essence and core. The Rosicrucians were concerned with the prophetic utterances, with the eternal truths.

Occultism in general is not concerned with the history of a single evolutionary cycle or period but with the inner history of human evolution as a whole. True occultism is at pains to discover the first manifestations of the life of our planetary system and the earlier stages of man's existence, but it looks forward through the millennia to a divine humanity, to a time when the Earth herself will have changed in substance and in form. Is it possible to predict the far distant future? It is indeed possible, because all that has finally to become physical in the future, already exists in germ, in archetypal form. The plan of evolution is contained in archetypal thought. Nothing comes into being in the physical world which in its broad lines has not been foreseen and prefigured in the devachanic world. Individual freedom and power of initiative depends upon the manner of the realisation of this truth.

Esoteric Christianity is not based upon vague and sentimental idealism, but upon a realisation born of a knowledge of the higher worlds. Such was the knowledge possessed by the author of the Apocalypse, the Seer of Patmos, who gave a picture of the future of humanity.

Let us try to envisage this future in the light of the cosmological principles which we have been studying in these lectures. Certain visions of the past and also of the future were revealed to the pupils in the Rosicrucian Schools and then, in order that they might interpret these visions, they were told to study the Apocalypse. We will proceed in the same way and consider how man has gradually become what he is today and what lies before him in the future. We have spoken of the ancient continent of Atlantis, and of the Atlanteans who had only a primitive consciousness of the ‘I’ towards the end of their period. The Post-Atlantean civilisations were as follows:

1. Pre-Vedic civilisation in the south of Asia and in India—the beginning of Aryan culture.
2. The epoch of Zoroaster, comprising the civilisation of ancient Persia.
3. Egyptian civilisation (including the Chaldean and Semitic). The first germs of Christianity were laid down in this epoch among the Hebrew peoples.
4. Graeco-Roman civilisation, the era of the birth of Christianity.
5. A new epoch commenced at the time of the migrations of the peoples and of the invasions. The heritage of the Graeco-Roman civilisation was taken over by the races of the North: the Celts, the Germanic peoples and the Slavs. We ourselves are living in this epoch. It is a later transformation of the Graeco-Roman culture, brought about by the invigorating impulses of new races under the influence of Christianity mingled with the leaven of the East which was brought into Europe by the Arabs. The essential mission of this epoch of civilisation is to adapt man to the physical plane to develop reason and practical logic, to immerse intelligence in physical matter so that matter may be understood and finally mastered. In this hard and difficult task which is reaching its culminating point in our own day, man has temporarily forgotten the higher worlds whence he came. If we compare our intellectuality with that of the Chaldeans, for example, it is easy to see how much we have acquired and yet how much we have lost. When a Chaldean Magus looked at the sky—which for us simply presents problems of heavenly mechanics—his feelings were quite different from ours. Whereas modern astronomy is concerned with calculations and abstractions, the Magus of old Chaldea sensed the deep harmony of the heavens as that of a living and divine Being. When he looked at Mercury, Venus, Moon or Sun, he not only perceived the physical light of these celestial bodies; he perceived their souls and he knew that his own soul was in communion with these mighty souls of the heavens. Their forces of attraction or repulsion seemed to be a marvelous symphony of divine will; the music of the macrocosm sounded in his being. Thus the ‘Music of the Spheres’ was a reality uniting man to the heavens. The superiority of the scholar in our modern age lies in a knowledge of the physical world, of mineral matter. What was once spiritual knowledge has descended to the physical world, to the world we know so well. But from now onwards we must strive to reach a knowledge of the astral world and of the world of pure Spirit by true clairvoyance.

This descent into materialism was necessary in order that the fifth epoch might fulfil its mission. It was essential that astral and spiritual clairvoyance should grow dim in order that the intellect might develop by dint of precise, minute and mathematical observation of the physical world. Physical Science must be supplemented by Spiritual Science. Here is an example: Comparisons are often made between Ptolemy's chart of the heavens and that of Copernicus. It is said that Ptolemy's chart is erroneous. Now this in itself is not correct. Both are true from different points of view. Ptolemy's chart is concerned with the astral world where the Earth is seen in the centre of the planets, including the Sun. The map of the heavens given by Copernicus was prepared from the point of view of the physical world—the Sun is at the centre of the solar system. The significance of Ptolemy's system will be recognised again in ages to come.

Our fifth epoch will be followed by another, the sixth. This sixth epoch will see the development of brotherhood among men, clairvoyance and creative power. What will Christianity be in the sixth epoch? To the priest in the Mysteries before Christ, there was harmony between science and faith. Science and faith were one and the same. When he looked up to the heavens, the priest knew that the soul was a drop of water from the celestial ocean, led down to Earth by the great streams of life flowing through space. Now that the attention of men is wholly directed to the physical world, faith has need of a refuge, of religion. Hence the separation between science and faith. Faith in the Person of Christ, of the God-Man on Earth has temporarily replaced Occult Science and the Mysteries of antiquity. But in the sixth epoch, the two streams will again unite. Mechanical science will become spiritually creative. This will be Gnosis-spiritual consciousness. This sixth epoch which will be radically different from our own, will be preceded by mighty cataclysms. It will be as spiritual as ours has been material. But the transformation can only be brought about by physical catastrophes. The sixth epoch will prepare for a seventh epoch. This seventh epoch will be the end of the Post-Atlantean civilisations and conditions of earthly life will be entirely different from those we know. At the end of the seventh epoch there will be a revolution of the elements analogous to that which put an end to Atlantis, and the subsequent eras will know a spirituality prepared by the two preceding Post-Atlantean periods.

Thus there are seven great epochs of Aryan civilisation in which the laws of evolution slowly come to expression. At first, man has within him what he later sees around him. All that is actually around us now, passed out from us in a preceding epoch when our being was still mingled with the Earth, Moon and Sun. This cosmic being from whom the man of today and all the kingdoms of nature have issued, is referred to in the Cabala as Adam-Cadmon. Adam-Cadmon embraced all the manifold aspects of man as we know him today in the various races and peoples.

All that lives today in the inner being of man, his thoughts, his feelings, will find expression in the outer world and become his surroundings. The future lies within man. He is free to make it good or evil. Just as he has already left the animal kingdom behind him, so the evil in him today will form a race of degenerate beings. In our age man can to a certain extent hide the good or evil within him. But a time will come when he will no longer be able to do so, when the good and the evil will be written in indelible characters upon his countenance, upon his body, nay even upon the very face of the Earth.

Humanity will then divide into two races. Just as today we see rocks or animals, in that future age we shall encounter beings who are wholly evil, wholly ugly. In our time it is only the clairvoyant who is able to see moral goodness or moral ugliness in human beings. But when man's very features express his karma, human beings will divide into groups of themselves, according to the stream to which they manifestly belong, according to whether the lower nature has been conquered or whether it has conquered the Spirit. This differentiation is beginning to operate little by little. When we derive understanding of the future from the past, and strive to realise the ideal of this future, its plan begins to unfold before us. A new race will come into being to be the link between the man of the present and the spiritual man of the future.

It was taught in Manicheism that from our age onwards the souls of men would begin to transmute into good the evil which will manifest in full force in the sixth epoch. In other words: human souls must be strong enough to bring good out of evil by a process of spiritual alchemy.

When the Earth begins to recapitulate the previous phases of its evolution, there will first be a re-union with the Moon, and then of this Earth-Moon with the Sun. The re-union with the Moon will mark the culminating point of evil on the Earth; the re-union with the Sun will signify, on the other hand, the advent of happiness, the reign of the ‘elect.’ Man will bear the signs of the seven great phases of the Earth. The Book with the Seven Seals, spoken of in the Apocalypse, will be opened. The Woman clothed with the Sun who has the Moon under her feet, refers to the age when the Earth will once again be united with Sun and Moon. The Trumpets of Judgment will sound for the Earth will have passed into the Devachanic condition where the ruling principle is not light but sound. The hallmark of the end of earthly existence will be that the Christ-Principle permeates all humanity. Having become like unto Christ, men will gather around Him as the hosts around the Lamb, and the great harvest of evolution will constitute the new Jerusalem.

In the month of May, 1906, Rudolf Steiner came to Paris with a number of students to give a series of private lectures to a small circle of friends. I myself had never seen him and did not then even know of his existence, but I had entered into correspondence on the subject of one of my dramas (Les Enfants de Lucifer) with his friend Mademoiselle von Sivers, who later on became his wife and his most understanding colleague. It was she who brought her teacher to my house one happy morning.

I shall never forget the extraordinary impression made upon me by this man when he entered the room. As I looked at that thin, powerful face, at the black mysterious eyes flashing light as if from unfathomable depths, it was borne in upon me that for the first time in my life I was face to face with one of those supreme seers who have direct vision of the great Beyond. Intuitively and poetically, I had described such seers in The Great Initiates, but I had never hoped to meet one in this world. The impression was instantaneous, irresistible—of the unexpected as well as of the already known. Even before he opened his lips, an inner voice said to me: Here is a true master, one who will play an all-important part in your life.

Our subsequent relations were to prove that this first impression was not an illusion. The programme of the daily lectures, which was told me in advance by the speaker, aroused my keenest interest. The lectures were to cover the whole field of his philosophy although it was only possible to develop certain outstanding points. One would have said that the teacher's aim was to give a vista of the general plan from its own heights. His fervent, convincing eloquence, irradiated by invariable clarity of thought, struck me at once as possessing two outstanding and unusual qualities. First, its artistic power,—When Rudolf Steiner spoke of the phenomena and beings of the invisible world he seemed to be living in his own home. With striking details and in familiar terms he told of events in these unknown realms just as if he were speaking of the most ordinary things. He did not describe, he actually saw and made others see the objects, scenes and cosmic vistas in clear-cut reality. Listening to him, one could not doubt the power of his astral vision; it was as limpid as physical vision, only much more penetrating. Again, another characteristic, no less remarkable,—This philosopher-mystic, this thinker-seer related all experiences of soul to the immutable laws of physical Nature. These laws were used to explain and classify the super-physical phenomena which, to begin with, appear before the seer in overwhelming variety and almost bewildering abundance. Then, by a wonderful counterstroke, these subtle, fluidic phenomena, proceeding from cosmic Powers grouped in a mighty hierarchy, began to illumine the edifice of material Nature. The diverse parts of Nature were linked together, related to these cosmic Powers from the heights to the depths, from the depths to the heights, and a vista of the mighty architecture of the universe opened up from the inner world where the visible is ever coming to birth from the womb of the invisible.

I took no notes of the first lecture, but it made such a vivid impression upon me that when I reached home I felt impelled to write it down without forgetting a single link in the chain of these illuminating thoughts. I had absorbed the lecture so completely that I found no difficulty at all. By a process of involuntary and instantaneous transmutation, the German words, which had ingrained themselves in my memory, changed into French. The same thing, repeated after each of the eighteen lectures, gradually grew into a dossier which I keep as a rich and rare store of treasure. These lectures, never having been steno-graphed or revised by Rudolf Steiner, do not exist in the archives of his public lectures or in the collection of lectures duplicated for members of the Anthroposophical Society. They are, therefore, entirely unedited. A number of members of the French Group of the Society have expressed the desire to publish them in book form and Mademoiselle Rihouet, the editor of La Science Spirituelle, has kindly offered the pages of this magazine. I respond all the more readily to this desire because these priceless lectures mark a significant phase of Rudolf Steiner's thought—that of the spontaneous burst of his genius and its first crystallisation. And, furthermore, it gives me joy to pay this new tribute to the teacher to whom I owe one of the great revelations of my life.

1. The Origin of Esoteric Christianity

These lectures give a kind of summary of what Rudolf Steiner calls Anthroposophy. In this Foreword I do not pretend to give anything like a resume of this vast and all-embracing philosophy. Its principles are contained in a theogony, cosmogony and psychology complete in themselves. It lays down the basis of a moral philosophy, an art of education, a science of aesthetics. The teaching of this thinker-seer extends into all and every domain of life. His sweeping vision embraces the whole history of mankind and imbues modern science with spiritual conceptions without by one hair's breadth distorting it from its exactitude and pristine clarity. My only aim here is to draw my reader's attention to the most strikingly new chapters, for they lead us again to the very roots of this sublime thought.

At the time when he was delivering these lectures, Rudolf Steiner was still the General Secretary for Germany of the Theosophical Society, which has its Headquarters at Madras. The Theosophical Society, originally founded by H. P. Blavatsky, has as its present President, Mrs. Annie Besant. In spite of many gaps and ultimate digressions, this theoretical system of oriental thought which originated in India and derived its name Theosophy from Alexandrian tradition, served to recall to the uninitiated West, the two fundamental tenets of all esoteric tradition: (1) The plurality of the progressive lives of the human soul under the law of karma, and (2) The ascending evolution of man under the influence of spiritual Powers.

At the time when Rudolf Steiner entered the Theosophical Society—which he had chosen as his first field of action—he was already fully master of the doctrine he owed to his own Initiation. These lectures, given in the year 1906, are proof of this.

The essential difference between Indian Theosophy and Anthroposophy lies in the supreme rôle attributed by Anthroposophy to the Christ in human evolution and also in its connection with Rosicrucian tradition. This appears clearly in the first two lectures, entitled: The Birth of the Human Intellect and The Mission of Manicheism. More clearly than any other occultist, Rudolf Steiner has seen the profound change which has come about in the course of ages in man's constitution of body and soul and in his way of perceiving truth. In ancient, pre-Christian times, man was universally endowed with a faculty of atavistic clairvoyance. In the Atlantean period, he lived more in the ‘world beyond’ than in this world. Clairvoyance was his outstanding faculty and his chief mode of cognition, but his perception of higher worlds was confused and chaotic. This faculty weakened and gradually faded away in the course of subsequent evolution; reason and the mere observation of Nature came to the fore. The Yoga of the Indian Rishis—the source of Aryan mythology and religion—represents an effective endeavour to regain the lost power of clairvoyance and at the same time to regulate it according to cosmic laws. But shortly before the coming of Christ, humanity had reached the last stage of descent into matter and passed through a perilous crisis. The passions emanating from the animal stage, beyond which he had now passed, threatened to engulf man. Civilisation itself was in peril. The human Psyche—having freed herself from primitive darkness by dint of long struggle—threatened to be lost in the decadence of Greece and the orgies of Rome.

2. Jesus the Christ as the Axis of Human Evolution.
The Rosicrucian Initiation

This lecture deals with the dangers which necessitated the Incarnation of the “Word which was in the Beginning,” the Divine Logos Who became man. The mission of Jesus the Christ had long been foretold in the sanctuaries of India, Persia and Chaldea, proclaimed in the vision of the Risen Osiris and of the “Sun at Midnight” in the crypts of ancient Egypt. The human race had reached such a point of materialisation that salvation was only made possible by a manifestation of the Divine Spirit on the physical plane. And so the Light which up till then had not descended further than the Moon, this “Light of grace and truth” came down into the darkness of the lower earthly realms, to incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth and become the axis of human evolution.

A mighty revolution, a change of incalculable significance took place in the inner planes—one which was destined to transform the whole world. The result was a complete change in the mentality of man, the two poles of which were in a manner reversed. A separation took place between these two outstanding faculties: sensibility and intelligence, intuition and reason. Up to this time, intuitive seership had predominated and reason had played a secondary part; science had remained the docile hand-maiden of religion. Primordial wisdom had been a combination of the two. The conquest and mastery of the material world had now become the goal of humanity. Reason gained the upper hand and instinctive feeling was henceforward to live its life apart. On the one side there was the triumph of reason in Aristotelian thought; on the other, religious feeling reached its climax in contemplation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Science and religion became two separate powers and then—shortly afterwards—rivals and mortal enemies. In religion, the Cross of Christ was sufficient for salvation. By contrast, science was not long in proclaiming: that alone has reality which has passed through the sieve of physical observation and of syllogism. Hence the dualism which for two thousand years has divided and rent in twain the consciousness of man. The advantage has been the development—to their extreme points—of the two poles of the soul, the two dominating faculties of intelligence. But in our day, when pure reason has hunted intuition from science and insight from education, our materialistic civilisation has reached such a condition of anarchy that its very existence is threatened.

From the outset, the aim of Christian Esotericism was to heal this dualism, to cultivate ideas capable of reconciling the two enemy-powers of religion and science, of intuition and reason, the combined knowledge and operation of which can alone arrive at truth and ensure the healthy development of mankind.

Esoteric tradition has at all times been characterised by two fundamental principles. First, that of the plurality of progressive existences of the soul and, secondly, a knowledge of the origin of evil and the means whereby man may become its victor. All great teachers of esoteric doctrine have enjoined their pupils to tread two paths of Initiation simultaneously in order the more surely to arrive at truth: the path of mysticism or ecstatic contemplation of the spiritual world, and the path of rationalism, or the synthetic contemplation of the visible universe in the light of archetypal ideas which proceed from the spiritual hierarchies but are attainable by human intelligence through intuition, even when direct seership is not there. I think that everyone will be deeply interested to read the notes of Rudolf Steiner's eighth lecture where he describes how the Rosicrucians strove to unite themselves with the Christ by meditation upon the first fourteen verses of the Gospel according to St. John. In successive visions the Rosicrucians lived once again through the seven stages of Calvary from the scourging and crowning with thorns, the bearing of the Cross to the mystic Death and ineffable Resurrection. Bathed in an ocean of love, they heard the resounding Logos, the “Word which was in the Beginning,” radiating the spiritual Light which pervades the whole universe and is the Creator of souls. The cosmic meaning attached to these stations of the Cross is deeply moving and provocative of thought.

3. The Interior of the Earth and the Problem of Evil

Instead of lingering upon the Rosicrucian Initiation which reveals the axis of Christianity and carries us into the realms of the world invisible, let me specially call readers' attention to the 16th lecture, the novelty of which is no less striking. Rudolf Steiner there gives us a striking example of his mode of contemplating visible Nature in order to penetrate to her essential being. It is as though matter became translucent and the hidden Spirit suddenly revealed.

The highly suggestive title of this lecture is Earthquakes, Volcanoes and the Will of Man. The special significance is that the main theme is related to the very roots of the nature of man.

The mystery of the interior of the Earth, the basis and stage of human evolution, is one of the numerous problems which materialistic science has never been able to solve. Unceasing research has been of no avail. Many scholars think of the interior of the Earth as an igneous mass (which would be capable of bursting the crust of the Earth); others imagine that it is a compact mass of mineral substance (which explains neither the volcano nor the earthquake). Now the Earth is a living being like the planets and suns, endowed with an interior organism indispensable to its functions and its rôle in the Cosmos. Rudolf Steiner sees the constitution of the Earth in the form of nine layers—or rather nine layers embedded one within the other. The eight interior layers under the crust of the Earth represent, as it were, the physiological organs of our planet from which its life emanates and upon which this life depends. The substance of these eight inner spheres does not resemble the mineral matter of which the outer crust and—in a sense—the skin of the Earth is formed. The elements composing these layers are half-liquid and half-gaseous. The Fire principle, the air-fire, mobile and pregnant with life, reservoir alike of impulses of will and the cause of volcanic eruptions, is only one of the spheres which are embedded one within the other. It is the fourth, counting from the centre, the fifth, counting from the outer mineral crust. The interior fire communicates with the crust along paths which are veritably ‘ventilating tracts’—hence the volcanic eruptions on the surface of the Earth.

If we cast a momentary glance at this interior constitution of the Earth, one fact immediately strikes us. It comprises the forces which are concentrated in the planet and worked at its upbuilding, through successive metamorphoses from the nebula of Saturn, through the Old Sun and Old Moon periods on to its present state. These same forces have worked at the structure of man and are more active than ever in the present age. (1) Egoism and Black Magic constitute the opaque centre of the Earth, for the reason that egoism, love of self for its own sake—of which black magic is the exaggeration and excess—is indispensable to the development of human individuality. The fatal products of egoism are the hatred and strife represented by the two next layers of (2) division, and (3) the prism, where individualities multiply and differentiate in order to battle with each other.

This ternary may be said to represent the kernel of the Earth as it existed in the nebula of the Saturn period. This basis is indispensable to the whole of the Earth's subsequent evolution. It is the ‘spring-board’ from which the individuality can rise to higher worlds, if egoism (the principle of evil) is conquered and transformed by the higher forces proceeding from the Sun and the Firmament—forces of which Divinity is the wellspring and true human freedom the fashioner. The period when the Earth was still united with the Moon is indicated in the Earth's interior by the existence of three other elementary spheres. (4) The Fire principle which lies at the root of impulses of will and is the cause of volcanic eruptions when a path is forged to the mineral crust of the Earth. (5) Above this lies the level of organic plant-life and again (6) there is the still higher level of the vortex of animal forces, where the ethereal embryos of the living beings destined to crawl, to walk and to fly, germinate and quicken in a laboratory of ceaseless activity.

In this second ternary of forces constituting the interior of the Earth, we have the remains of the period when the Earth was still united with the Moon. In those times, the Earth's surface was a kind of porous substance, the home of hybrid beings, half-vegetable, half-mollusc, with gigantic tentacles, while the germs of terrestrial flora and fauna floated in the semi-liquid, semi-vaporous atmosphere. Wonderful words in the book of Genesis refer to this period: “Darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters.”

The third ternary of the inner organs of the Earth represents its actual form. The last metamorphosis occurs at the time of the separation of the Moon from the Earth and is indicated by the addition of two new elements which are, as it were, the ‘humanised’ replica of the centre of the Earth: (7) Consciousness inversed, where everything changes into its opposite; (8) Negative life, or death. Every living being descending into this realm must instantly perish. It is the Styx of the Greeks, cursed by the Gods of life and of beauty. (9) Above the sphere of death stretches the solid mineral envelope of the Earth, the theatre of humanity.

It must be admitted that this extraordinary description of the interior constitution of our planet cannot be verified by any means of observation adopted by natural science. None but a seer possessed of equal power could contradict or confirm. On the other hand, it is surely impossible to deny that this scheme of the Earth's constitution opens up amazing vistas of man's whole evolution. The seership itself bears a unique power of persuasion and its truth may in a measure be demonstrated by effects which reveal themselves in man. The parallelism between the cosmic fire and human passions, their close relationship, mutual action and reaction, throw a flood of light on the origin of evil. Many historians have stated that the great crises in history (wars, revolutions, social upheavals) are nearly always accompanied and followed by earthly cataclysms (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions). The passions of men have a magnetic action on the interior fire of the Earth, and this fire, when released from its chains, feeds human passions. Thus fire—which is destined to generate life—begets evil by means of the human will.

And yet the Earth, having as its kernel the egoism that is indispensable to the development of individuality, is nevertheless the solid, immutable base on which the soul can find support in order then to soar to the spiritual worlds which shelter and fashion her by the power of the solar Logos. Evil becomes a leaven of evolution, finally, however, to be conquered by Good. The man who has won through to freedom holds the balance between destiny and Providence from the moment he can chose between good and evil. His yearning for the Divine begets enthusiasm. By his own efforts he can draw near to the sublime truth reigning in the universe. Thus Satan-Ahriman—the demon of negation and hatred—is laid low by the genius of infinite Love radiating in the Logos, the Christ. And Lucifer, the Spirit of intelligence and of beauty, released from his sojourn in the lower world of matter, is on the point of taking flight to his star. Yet Ahriman, his dire companion, who is held in check by the Christ, strives to break his chains in order that Lucifer's flight may be stayed.

Anthroposophy is the most potent means in our present epoch to restore the severed harmony between the worlds of matter and of spirit, between science and religion. It is also the agent whereby peace may be established in social affairs.

In very truth the hour is grave. Mankind has never faced so great a danger. The forces of evil are mobilised; not so those of good. That is proved by the unprecedented ravages of Bolshevism which is the. relentless application of destructive materialism. A mustering of all the spiritual forces at the disposal of humanity will be required to combat this scourge. But a wide and high ideal is necessary. Man would fain know whither his feet are wending in this world and in the world beyond. He needs a sublime goal in the one and the beginnings of actual realisation of the other. “Evil can only be conquered by a high ideal” says Rudolf Steiner. “A man without an ideal is weak and powerless. In the life of man ideals play the part of steam in an engine—they are the driving force.”

The knowledge gained by Rudolf Steiner in the course of his life and during his apostolate of a quarter of a century, is scattered through his writings and numerous lecture-courses, most of which have been reported. The peculiar interest attaching to the lectures of 1906 is that they reveal the genius of this thinker-seer at the beginning of his career and the zenith of his inspiration, at the very moment when his all-embracing thought was coming, fully armed, into its own. Those who read these notes may catch, here and there, an echo of the power of the master's living words. A striking example of this impressed itself upon me during a lecture he once gave on Planetary Evolution and the Spiritual Hierarchies: “The thoughts of the Gods are not as the thoughts of men. The thoughts of men are images the thoughts of the gods are living beings.”

Revelations like this flash out into the Infinite. They are an echo from far away of the Word creative invoked by St. John at the beginning of his Gospel. Their vibrations thrill through us like the Sound Primordial whence shines the light—the Sound whose harmonies bring worlds to birth.

EDOUARD SCHURÉ

When these lectures were first translated into English and published in ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science in 1929, lecture 16 “Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and the Will of Man” was not published. Rene Querido translated this 16th lecture into English from the French and kindly furnished the diagram following lecture 16 which shows the interior of the Earth. Rene Querido also wrote the preface for this reprint edition.

The present cycle of lectures was given in 1906 in Paris and the report of it by Edouard Schuré now published in English in its entirety for the first time marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of Rudolf Steiner. Accompanied by Marie von Sievers (later Marie Steiner), Rudolf Steiner had been invited, by the famous French author and dramatist Edouard Schuré, to address a group consisting mainly of Russians in a small villa on the outskirts of Paris. Among them were writers of note such as Dimitri Merejkowski, his wife Zinaida Hippius, a poetess in her own right, and S. Minski. Originally it had been planned that the course be held on Russian soil but the revolution of 1905 had made that impossible.

At this time Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), a man of 65, stood at the height of his career. He had written more than a dozen major works including The Great Initiates (1889), A History of the German Lied, A Collection of Celtic Legends, two important works on Richard Wagner, and a number of dramas striving to recapture the lost ritualistic element of the ancient mysteries on the stage. He felt powerfully drawn not only to Richard Wagner the composer, but also to the man. He had met the maestro on three occasions and was present in Munich at the dramatic opening of Tristan and Isolde.

Schuré's interest in the occult was profound. He had written The Great Initiates (1889) as a result of his deep connection over a period of many years with Margherita Albana-Mignaty, who continued to inspire him even after her death. Rudolf Steiner often referred to the importance of this book and although it was written ten years before the end of Kali-Yuga (the Age of Darkness), he spoke of this work as a herald of the new Age of Light, when human beings would again seek for their spiritual connection with the great initiates of the past. For some time before their first meeting in Paris, Marie von Sievers and Schuré had corresponded. An unusual set of circumstances led to the fact that indirectly it was Schuré who had brought about the meeting between Marie von Sievers and Rudolf Steiner which was to prove so fruitful for the growth of the Anthroposophical movement. Unable to reply to a specific question related to the occult, Schuré advised the young Marie von Sievers to turn to Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. A little later Marie von Sievers wrote so enthusiastically to Schuré (in excellent French) of her meeting that he, too, wished to become acquainted with Steiner personally. This was to happen six years later in Paris on the occasion of these lectures. The recognition must have been immediate. Schuré, twenty years Steiner's senior, never tired of recounting this significant meeting: for the first time, he felt himself to be in the presence of an initiate. “Here is a genuine Master who will play a crucial part in your life.” Schuré recognized Steiner as one who stood fully in the world of today and yet could also behold in clear consciousness the boundless vistas of the super-sensible. A warm friendship quickly developed between the two men: vacations spent together in Barr (1906–1907) in Schuré's summer house in the Alsace; long walks over the Odilienberg, and an active correspondence (mostly on the part of Marie Steiner, who translated several of Schuré's dramas into German). The substance of a number of intimate conversations has been recorded by Rudolf Steiner in the “Document of Barr.”¹ In 1907 Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis was produced under the direction of Rudolf Steiner at the great Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. It was on this occasion that Rudolf Steiner said that from this time on, art and occultism should always remain connected. In 1909 the first performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer, was given using a German translation of the French text by Marie Steiner. The deeper connection now becomes obvious: Schuré the poet, a Celtic-Greek soul, devoted to the renewal of the ancient mysteries, and one of the first Frenchmen to recognize Richard Wagner's impulse towards the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a total ritualistic experience embracing all the art forms), now whole-heartedly supported Rudolf Steiner in the great Munich endeavors (1907–1913). This period saw the birth of the mystery dramas and the first performances of Eurythmy. It was also in Munich that plans had been made for the building of the First Goetheanum (the House of The Word) which was later erected on the Dornach hill near Basel in Switzerland.

The war years (1914–1918) brought an unfortunate clouding over of their friendship due to Schuré's stubborn chauvinism which nevertheless did not interfere with his continued championing of Richard Wagner. But with Rudolf Steiner, he broke his connection. A few years after the war the friendship was renewed and it must have been an amazing sight to have seen the old, still robust, white-haired Schuré in animated conversation with Steiner as they walked up and down on the terrace of the First Goetheanum in Dornach. Years later, Schuré would still speak of his profound indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner both for the personal help he had received from him and for his having brought the new mysteries clearly to expression in an age of materialism.

These lectures were given on the fringe of the International Theosophical Congress held in Paris and attended by delegates from many countries. Rudolf Steiner himself attached a distinct importance to this course in Paris where he formulated a basic view of Esoteric Christianity which a few years later was to separate him radically from the Theosophical Society. In the 37th chapter of Rudolf Steiner, The Story of My Life (written in 1924–25 shortly before his death) we find the following passage:²

In the Paris cycle of lectures I brought forward a perception which had required a long process of “ripening” in my mind. After I had explained how the members of the human being—physical body; etheric body, as mediator of the phenomena of life; and the “bearer of the ego”—are in general related to one another, I imparted the fact that the etheric body of a man is female, and the etheric body of a woman is male. Through this a light was cast within the Anthroposophical Society upon one of the basic questions of existence which just at that time had been much discussed. One need only remember the book of the unfortunate Weininger, “Geschlecht und Charakter,” (Sex and Character), and the contemporary poetry.

But the question was carried into the depths of the being of man. In his physical body man is bound up with the cosmos quite otherwise than in his etheric body. Through his physical body man stands within the forces of the earth; through his etheric body within the forces of the outer cosmos. The male and female elements were carried into connection with the mysteries of the cosmos.

This knowledge was something belonging to the most profoundly moving inner experiences of my soul; for I felt ever anew how one must approach a spiritual perception by patient waiting and how, when one has experienced the “ripeness of consciousness,” one must lay hold by means of ideas in order to place the perception within the sphere of human knowledge.

It is perhaps not without significance that it was in Paris, where Thomas Aquinas had elaborated some seven centuries earlier his Christ-oriented Scholasticism, that Rudolf Steiner gave his first course on an Esoteric Christian Cosmology appropriate to the dawn of the new Age of Light. Schuré's notes in French of the 18 lectures, published in French in 1928, constitute the only record of this course. They now appear for the first time in English translation in their entirety in book form, readily available to the modern student of the Science of the Spirit.

R. M. Querido

• 1. The “Document of Barr,” dated Sept. 9, 1907 and printed in English translation in the Golden Blade, 1966.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London and New York, 1928.

The human soul can develop; its present state can be changed by training, especially of the etheric body. People who are ahead of others in their inner development are called initiates. The path they walk and teach is that of secret discipleship. Our root race, the Aryan, descends from the most highly developed sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Proto-Semitic, which last inhabited approximately the area of present-day Ireland. The island of Poseidonis mentioned by Plato can be seen as the last remnant of the sinking Atlantis. Manu, a leader of the Atlanteans, led the most mature people to the east. From there they migrated to the area of present-day India. An ancient culture arose there. This primeval Indian culture antedates the time when the Vedas originated by a long way. It was still somewhat dream-like and purely inward-looking. The state of mind of the ancient Indian was quite the opposite of our own today. He regarded everything external and visible as maya, as illusion, and reality was only the Brahman and what could be grasped by the Brahman.

A next culture emerged further west. This second culture is the proto-Persian, whose inaugurator and main leader was the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster. The Persians already reconciled spirit and matter and began to transform and reshape the material world through the human spirit.

A third culture emerged even further to the west, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture. Here, people focused even more on the material world, the external sciences emerged, the study of natural forces and their laws. From time immemorial, this ancient science of our earth has said the following: The earth is also a being that is subject to re-embodiment. It has gone through earlier stages and will have further embodiments in the future. There are said to be seven planetary conditions or “planets” through which the earth develops. The names of these “planets” do not refer to our present planets, but to past or future states of the earth. These states are related to those of the planets from which they take their names. The first embodiment of the earth is called “Saturn”. Then follows the Sun, and after that the Moon. Mars and Mercury are the names given to the first and second halves of the development of the Earth. The remaining conditions are Jupiter and Venus. These seven embodiments of the Earth are intimately connected with the development of man and are therefore reflected even in everyday life in the names of the days of the week:

Thus, the world of stars was closely linked to everyday life. The ancient Egyptians were able to determine exactly when the Nile would flood and then recede after the Dog Star appeared, and they could organize their agriculture accordingly.

A fourth cultural epoch is the Greco-Latin one. The ancient Greeks and Romans not only believed in the laws of wisdom, but they also tried to impress this wisdom on things. This is how their works of art were created. The deed of Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha, takes place in the midst of this culture.

We ourselves live in the fifth cultural period of the fifth root race of the fifth Earth period. This is the Germanic-English-American culture. Its main task is the conquest of the physical plane. The subsequent sixth cultural period will have the task of leading the outer culture back to a higher spiritual life and that is what theosophy is working towards. The future task of the entire culture is to reconnect with the spirit. Each epoch has its special tasks. Present-day science has set aside Ptolemy's world system as false and recognized Galileo and Copernicus as true. For the astral plan, however, the Ptolemaic system is correct, since one has to start from completely different perspectives there. The sixth cultural period is still in a germinal state in Eastern Europe. It will be the bearer of the spiritual culture of the future.

There will come a time when man will have overcome the dualism of the sexes. Lower abilities, sexual drives, will be transformed into higher ones. It is not a matter of destroying the drives, but of ennobling them. For example, fantasy is a result of the ennobling of the spirit; it is an effect of the already purified passions. The higher development of the imagination leads to clairvoyant vision. As initiates can already do, so in the future all people will be able to perceive the soul content of their fellow human beings. Today, the word can pass on spiritual experiences through the air, later one will bring forth living beings through the word, and finally the word itself will be creative: then people will be magicians of the word.

The information about the occult training comes from a deeply rooted science. Two qualities are fundamental for this, which a person must have. He must be able to endure what is called great loneliness, and he must gain a certain basic mood of devotion. As for the first, loneliness in the midst of active life is meant for a few minutes a day, when one devotes oneself to meditation and concentration. This alone gives the soul inner strength. In the beginning, inner emptiness and sadness will arise, but these must be overcome. All people who have achieved a great deal have used this inner solitude for their concentration. The second main requirement is devotion, looking up with reverence to something higher. If you want to ascend, you must first be down and feel down. The Indian secret training requires complete submission of the disciple to his guru. The Rosicrucian initiation is the right one for the present-day man of the West. Before that, the Christian initiation arose. All three types of initiation are basically an expression of the same initiation, but the methods must change with the times.

Every person must be absolutely free to begin the occult development of the soul's powers. But anyone who wants to undergo higher spiritual development must also observe the necessary conditions and submit to them.

Sleep is the starting point for the consideration of the development of the spiritual senses. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies are in the realm of consciousness, while the astral body and I are outside of them. When a person begins to develop clairvoyance during sleep, the body is deprived of the forces that previously restored the physical and etheric bodies for a certain period of time. These forces must be replaced in some other way if the physical and etheric bodies are not to be seriously endangered. If this does not happen, they will lose a great deal of their strength and amoral entities will take possession of them. Therefore it may happen that people develop astral clairvoyance but become immoral beings. How long the preliminary exercises take depends entirely on the individual. It depends entirely on the level of development the person has already reached by the time he begins his training. Therefore the teacher must first see through the inner state of soul of the pupil. The preparation time is therefore often very different.

The following sentence is important: The more rhythm one has introduced, the more one can leave an entity and a thing to its own devices. Thus, the secret disciple must also develop a certain regularity, a rhythm, into his world of thoughts. To do this, it is necessary:

Firstly, control of thoughts, that is, the disciple may only allow those thoughts to enter into himself that he himself wants. These exercises require a lot of patience and perseverance. But if you do them for only five minutes a day, they are already of importance for the inner life.

Secondly: initiative in actions. These should be things that originally come from one's own soul.

Thirdly: inner composure. This helps one to develop a much finer sense of compassion.

Fourthly: to look for and find the positive side in all things and processes. I recall the beautiful legend of Christ and the dead dog.

Fifthly: to be impartial and unprejudiced. One should always keep the possibility open to recognize new facts.

Sixthly: inner balance and inner harmony.

When a person has developed all these qualities within himself, a rhythm comes into his inner life that the astral body no longer needs to perform regeneration during sleep. Because of these exercises, such an equilibrium comes into the etheric body that it can protect and restore itself. Those who begin occult training without developing these six qualities run the risk of being exposed to the worst entities at night. But once you have practised these six qualities for a while, you may begin to develop your astral senses and then you start to sleep consciously. Your dreams are no longer random, but they gain regularity; the astral world rises before you. Now you have the ability to perceive everything of a soul nature in your surroundings in pictures. You develop a relationship to the reality of the soul. This pictorial consciousness is called imagination. At first the pupil acquires imagination in sleep, but later on he must be able to evoke this state at any time of the day. He learns to transfer the experiences of sleep into the waking consciousness. But this ability is only valuable for the occultist when he can see the auras of living beings fully consciously.

The first step is therefore imagination. The development of the so-called lotuses, the sacred wheels or chakrams, which lie at very specific points on the body, is connected with this. There are seven such astral organs. The first, the two-petalled lotus flower, is in the region of the root of the nose; the second, the sixteen-petalled, is at the level of the larynx; the third, the twelve-petalled, is at the level of the heart; the fourth, the eight- to ten-leaved, near the navel; the fifth, the six-leaved, somewhat lower down; the sixth, the four-leaved, which is connected with everything that is fertilization, is even further down; the seventh cannot be spoken of without further ado. These six organs have the same significance for the spiritual world as the physical senses for the perception of the sensory world. An image for this is the so-called swastika. Through the above-mentioned exercises, they first become brighter, then they begin to move. In today's human beings they are immobile, in the Atlanteans they were still mobile, and in the Lemurians they were still moving very actively. But in those days they turned in the opposite direction to that of those who have occult development today, where they turn in a clockwise direction. An analogy to the dream-like clairvoyant state of the Lemurians is the fact that even today, with atavistic clairvoyance, the lotus flowers still turn in the same direction as they once did in Atlantean and Lemurian times, namely in an anticlockwise direction. The clairvoyance of mediums is unconscious, without thought control, but that of the genuine clairvoyant is conscious and precisely monitored by the thoughts. Mediumship is very dangerous, but the healthy secret training is completely harmless. (See appendix.)

You will remember that I explained to you how much depended on man's beginning to breathe through the lungs in the course of his development. His higher schooling is now also connected with a breathing process. In the training in yoga the pupil brings a certain rhythm into his breathing by bringing inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling into a certain number of seconds. But the way in which these breathing exercises are done can only be indicated to the pupil by the teacher. Through the exercises for consciously regulating the breathing process, nothing less is done than the beginning of alchemy; this is called “seeking the philosopher's stone”. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the Rosicrucians still knew something about it, and some of it could still be read in public. The occultist knows that man continually pollutes the air through his carbonic acid exhalations and kills life, even more than is killed through eating meat. And the more material the ages became, the worse the exhaled air became, and the more fresh air man needs. The Indian yogi exhaled less bad air. The bad air exhaled by people is restored by plants, which release oxygen and absorb carbon. Thus, animals and humans owe their lives to plants. In the anthracite coal, the plants then release the carbon back to humans. The plant, in turn, is designed to be built with the help of carbon. This process forms a complete and wonderful unity. Just as man was once a plant, so in the distant future he will also become a plant again in a certain sense, namely with full self-awareness. Then man will produce within himself what plants still do for him today, and he will consciously build his etheric body out of carbon. This is the goal of regulating the breathing process. Carbon is the philosopher's stone. The more a person breathes in accordance with wisdom, the purer and more useful the air around him becomes. Chemistry will soon address this issue. Those who have been breathing rhythmically for a while gain control over their astral senses. Europeans must be very careful with breathing exercises and only begin them after receiving appropriate instruction.

The second stage of Oriental training consists of shutting out external impressions for a time, concentrating and allowing one's soul to be filled with the eternal. There are certain eternal images and sentences for these exercises. Such wisdom sentences can be found in the Bhagavad Gita, in Egyptian wisdom books and in Christian scriptures, especially in the Gospel of John. When a person has come so far as to create an inner calm within himself, then by delving into such sentences new forces come to life in him. But he must not merely understand these sentences, a love for them must awaken in him. The same applies to magical figures such as pentagrams and so on. One can meditate on them.

At a certain high level of development, the student reaches the point where the experience arises: the function of thinking without thought content remains present in the complete emptiness of consciousness. The student learns to be conscious in meditation and to exercise this function in such a way that he does not give himself any content for his thinking. This is a beginning, and the spiritual world can then begin to flow into him. The inspiration process begins.

This is followed by the stage of intuition, but this can only be achieved after a correspondingly long occult training. Finally, the disciple consciously lives in the higher worlds. The oriental secret disciple must unconditionally submit to the strict discipline of the guru if he wants to undergo the secret training. He must organize his life accordingly and do many things that he only learns to understand later. When he has thus attached himself to the guru, the astral body begins to change; the astral sense organs, the lotuses, develop. Michelangelo depicted the two-petalled lotus flower as two horns on his Moses. At first, two rays of light become noticeable, which become wider and wider and then begin to move. The sixteen-petalled lotus flower is like a wheel with sixteen spokes; it is located at the larynx and turns to the right. The two-petalled lotus enables us to develop willpower; the sixteen-petalled lotus, to penetrate into other people's thoughts; the twelve-petalled lotus, to recognize the emotional life; the four-petalled lotus is related to the regenerative and productive power of the human being. (See appendix.)

The situation is different with the Christian form of initiation. Here one speaks of seven very specific stages: first, foot washing; second, flagellation; third, crowning with thorns; fourth, crucifixion; fifth, mystical death; sixth, entombment; seventh, resurrection.

The thoughts and images, the devoted meditation of which brings about Christian initiation, are contained in the Gospel of John. Those who experience the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of John in their soul over many months experience them as having a magical effect. Finally, the disciple experiences something very strange: everything in the Gospel of John appears as astral images. For it is written to be meditated upon.

The third form of training, but the most suitable for present-day humanity, because it is most suited to science, is the Rosicrucian. It is based on Christian Rosenkreutz, that great individuality who has been incarnated again and again since his initiation. Its training is the freest of all, and I have already described it in various places. In this way the teacher is only the inspirer, he gives only advice. But in this training there is the greatest danger that the disciple, through his complete freedom, may too easily lose the devotional mood and thereby place obstacles in his own way. Here the teacher is the servant of the disciple, and the disciple's devotion must be a free gift. In the present time, Rosicrucian training requires of the disciple especially a developed thinking, above all, a thinking free from sensuality. For this purpose, “The Philosophy of Freedom” and “Truth and Science” have been written. These books do not yet contain any actual Theosophy. But they can serve as a support and guide for the European disciple.

Today I would like to talk about Christian initiation and the interior of the Earth. It should be borne in mind that Christian initiation was undergone by all those who were to teach Christianity from an occult depth, for example, by the priests of the first Christian centuries. These initiations have been preserved for a long time, but they have gradually been somewhat modified, and only in certain narrow circles were these strict exercises still undergone. One should not think that the severity of these exercises can be expected of everyone, but those who submit to them will also attain a high level of knowledge by the Christian path. In this respect, Christ is, as it were, the original guru for all Christian disciples on this path. Angelus Silesius once said:

If Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem is born
And not in you, you will remain lost forever.

Something like this comes from inner experiences. Similarly, in the Gospel of John, where it says: “But Jesus went out of the temple.”

This is an astral experience and means that the astral body steps out of the physical body. In the Christian initiation, the demand for Christian humility is a substitute for the strict guru of the Orient, the submission not to a single human being, but to Christ Jesus.

The first step is the washing of the feet. One arrives at this step by having for months tried to live with the following ideas in mind: The plant cannot live without the mineral kingdom, which is beneath it. If it could speak, it would have to say: You mineral kingdom, you are admittedly lower than I, but I owe my higher existence to you. And when man looks around at life, he must admit to himself: If I have come far in the spiritual, then others must work for me. We must therefore bow down in humility and gratitude to those who stand below us. “Whoever wants to be first will be last in the kingdom of heaven,” is a word of the gospel. This practice eventually leads to the inner image of the washing of feet. Christ washes the feet of the apostles to offer them the tribute of his thanks. He who lives in these conceptions of humility will realize that the image of the washing of feet appears to him in the form of an astral dream. Thereby what is described in the Gospel of John becomes one's own experience.

Then one can proceed to the second step. The disciple must learn to bear all sufferings and obstacles in life uprightly and to remain calm even when everything rushes in on him. And again, in the dream, an image appears on the astral plane, that of the scourging. Not only does the disciple see the image, but he feels burning pain in his whole body, even in his nails and hair.

When this has been established, one proceeds to the third stage. Here the student must not only endure pain, but must be able to calmly endure mockery and ridicule. The crowning with thorns as a dream experience manifests itself as a peculiar, temporary headache.

It is very difficult to reach the fourth stage. The disciple must develop a feeling that his own body has exactly the same value for him as the things around him; he must learn to regard it as something alien, he must come to feel: Not I go there, but I carry my body there. The disciple then no longer lives in his body, but carries it like an object, like the wood of the cross. These exercises lead to the vision that the disciple sees himself crucified. And outwardly, this stage of initiation even manifests itself in the appearance of so-called stigmata. The disciple then receives, corresponding to the stigmata of the crucifixion, real stigmata at the respective places on his body, which may appear temporarily. These inner and outer experiences occur after appropriate contemplation.

The fifth step is mystical death. Now the disciple becomes truly clairvoyant on the astral plane. The other symptoms were at the beginning. The disciple experiences a moment when everything disappears, when he is faced with nothingness. This darkness is the opposite of the general darkness that fell over the whole country at the death of Christ. Then the darkness splits; this is the tearing of the curtain in the temple and Christ's descent into hell. This is also experienced at this level. Those who do not reach this point do not yet really know what evil is. The student of the fifth level descends into the depths of existence. This is the descent into hell.

In the sixth stage, the Entombment, he feels the entire earth as his body, and his own body as a part of it. He becomes one with the whole planet. The disciple is then as if laid into the whole earth, covered and buried in it, he himself now becomes one with the planetary spirit.

The seventh stage, the resurrection, cannot be described further, because no soul whose thinking is still bound to the brain can grasp all that it means in terms of grandeur and sublimity. When the secret disciple goes through these seven stages, Christianity comes to life in him. He experiences the Gospel of John as reality.

Finally, the formation of the earth's interior will be discussed. This exploration of the earth's interior is connected with the Christian stages of initiation. It is precisely through Christian initiation that one can gain a true understanding of the earth's inner states.

From the occult point of view, there is a connection between human life, layers of the earth, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so on. There are still tremendous changes to come in this direction. The view of science that the earth's interior is molten is not correct. The definite substance that you know from the outer view because you step on it, that is the outermost, physical-substantial layer of the earth. It is called the mineral earth. Natural science does not even reach the middle of this layer. Each experience of Christian initiation now leads to penetration into a certain layer of the earth's interior. The third degree of initiation, for example, allows penetration into the third layer, the seventh into the seventh layer, and so on.

What is in the second layer cannot be compared with any chemical substance in the uppermost layer; it is a completely different matter. The physical warmth increases only in the first layer. The substance of the second layer has properties that cause any living thing brought into contact with it to be killed immediately within that substance. Any plant would immediately become mineral in it; life would be driven out of it. This layer is also called the life-destroying layer.

The third layer is a substance that transforms the soul's perception into its opposite. It transforms joy into pain, and pain into pleasure. It reacts to the feelings of living beings, it has this property as matter and is called the layer of perception.

The fourth layer corresponds in some sense to the first region of Devachan, for there too physical things appear in their negative. In Devachan, instead of the physical thing, there is a kind of aura, a negative, a hollow light image in which nothing can be seen, and which emits a certain sound from within. The fourth layer of the earth's interior, on the other hand, is substantially what gives the earth's things form. There are, as it were, the inverted forms; it can be compared to a seal and its imprint. This fourth layer is therefore called the form layer.

The fifth layer is full of rampant life. Here life is not restricted to form.

The sixth layer, the water layer, is substantially impressionable and consists entirely of will and sensation. It responds to impulses of will, it cries out, as it were, when it is pressed. Because this inner life can be compared to fire, this layer is called the fire earth.

The seventh layer of the earth is then reached in the seventh stage of initiation. Just as the eye produces counter-effects within itself in response to certain influences, so it is also in the seventh layer. Its substance transforms all properties into their opposite by reversing them. This is why this layer is called “the earth reflector”.

The eighth layer, which also becomes perceptible at the seventh stage of initiation, does not only have physical properties, but also moral ones; it transforms all the moral qualities that people develop into their opposite. Everything that is connected on earth is separated and scattered there. All moral feelings, such as love and compassion, are transformed into their opposite there, into harshness, brutality, and so on. This layer is called the Shatterer.

The ninth layer is the Earth Brain. There, evil works magically. Black magic is connected with it. The white path turns black there.

It is much more difficult to explore the interior of the Earth than the astral and devachan planes. This exploration is truly one of the most difficult of all. What Sinnett says about the interior of the earth in his book “Esoteric Buddhism” is not correct. Instead of doing his own research as a clairvoyant, he used a medium. Only in the actual Rosicrucian school can one speak of the interior of the earth. And in the best times of Christianity, the interior of the earth was viewed similarly. The Nordic mysteries, the Trotten and Druid mysteries also spoke about it quite extensively. In a poetic way, Dante also speaks of the nine-part interior of the earth in his “Divine Comedy”. There you will find the eighth layer as the layer of Cain, because through Cain, evil and fragmentation came into the world.

In fact, occult facts are described in the great poems, such as the Odyssey, Parzival and so on. In the story of Poor Henry, for example, reference is made to the influence of the decaying astral substances of the decadent peoples of the early Middle Ages. The Secret Doctrine has always influenced great poets, both consciously and unconsciously. In the light of Theosophy, not only does the whole world become tremendously deep to us, but also the great poetry of humanity. There one can truly seek out and recognize the divine.

It was a characteristic of the Lemurian Age that the upper layers of the earth were only sporadically developed at that time, so to speak only as islands, so that much of the fiery layer penetrated to the outside. The fire layer is the foundation of the other layers. The will of the Lemurian people, which was still very strong at that time, was still able to magically influence this fire layer. The surging movements of the earth were still connected with the will of man. This is why the Lemurian continent was destroyed by the fire layer. People had sunk too low, especially in Late Lemuria. Fearful aberrations had spread. And so these destructive impulses of will affected the fire layer: Lemuria, like Sodom and Gomorrah, perished in a fire catastrophe, combined with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The will has an effect on the fire layer. Thus there is a connection between the inner being of man and the inner being of the earth. The layer of Cain, the layer of the earth shattering, will be transformed through a continuous moral development of man. Whatever man does on earth gradually transforms the entire planet. And when white magic has progressed to a high degree, the core of the earth will change as well. The black magicians will be ejected onto a moon when our planet perishes.

When very definite evil volitions combine today, they affect the layer of fire, and it may be that the shock from the layer of fire is transmitted to the layer of water and through the other layers to the uppermost one. This causes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, seaquakes and so forth. When humanity ensures that things improve morally on earth, things will slowly improve in relation to natural disasters. The progress of the planet earth is connected with the progress of humanity; what the earth's interior shows us is just one example of this. The relationship between the karma of the individual and the karma of the whole has been studied, and research has been conducted into how their future destiny might unfold. It has been found that such people [who die in an earthquake] usually appear in their next incarnation as particularly spiritual personalities, or at least bring with them a predisposition for spiritual life. They have experienced the vanity of material things forcefully and quickly; it was the last jolt they needed to turn to the spirit. Similarly, the fiery death of the martyrs results in particular idealism in the next incarnation. The connections between births and earthquakes are also interesting. In most cases, people born immediately after an earthquake occur, prove to be particularly materialistic people. The force by which man descends again from Devachan has something to do with the fire layer. Man sets the fire layer in motion in that his will, which leads him to embodiment, is particularly sensual at his birth. In the beginning of its development, the Earth was a being capable of transformation, and accordingly, it is humanity. Man has bound the Earth's fate to his own. You can imagine how, in view of this, the occultist's sense of responsibility grows in relation to the spiritual currents that are brought into humanity. The Theosophical movement is connected with a definite goal of the evolution of the Earth. It has to bring about the general fraternization of men. Its goal should therefore be to improve the Earth fragmenter, the eighth layer; it strives to save what can be saved from the center of the Earth. Here, constant dripping hollows out the stone. Even the smallest effect is not lost. The person who strives to transform his soul so that the power that comes from occultism becomes effective, is working on this work and will then also take everyday life quite differently. The true study of occultism consists in the fact that the spiritual student penetrates into ordinary, natural life. Occultism can bear fruit in all areas and have a beneficial effect. Every soul must and will eventually attain the truth. And so occultism relies on the response it will receive in the souls.