The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As you may imagine, it is a very complicated matter, when the Spirits of the different hierarchies have so to work together with their forces that the mission of the earth can be fulfilled; when they have so to work that finally a state of equilibrium comes about. Hence you will understand also, that statements such as those made in our last lecture can only be made when one takes a quite definite period in evolution, and that the whole presentation is immediately altered if one considers evolution at another period. Hence also, if you wish to arrive at a complete understanding of these very complicated matters you must always take one course of lectures in connection with the others.

I shall here draw attention to one point, and it should be taken as a sort of annotation. In the equilibrium of our earth the whole co-operation of the hierarchies is such, that we must look at what we described in our last lecture as the third hierarchy, the Spirits of Will, the Cherubim and Seraphim, as being something which, as regards this state of equilibrium, works from within the earth. You must naturally picture to yourselves this hierarchy as originally unfolding its powers from out of the universe towards the centre of the earth, and that the way in which man becomes aware of these forces does not correspond to their first direction, but the reverse direction they take when they are thrown back, reflected.

You will therefore only be able to form a complete idea of the very intimate processes which here take place, if you compare what was said in the last lecture with much that was said in my course of lectures given at Düsseldorf on the Hierarchies, in which a comprehensive idea was given of the heavenly part of the activity of the three hierarchies. These things are by no means so simple, and, to make the mission of the earth comprehensible, it is necessary to select the point of view in such a way that we may see the reflections of the Spirits of these hierarchies in what we call the elements of earth-existence.

But if you take this into consideration, you will then also acquire a feeling of the infinite wisdom contained in the whole harmony of the forces of the universe, in the forces of the cosmos. You will also to a certain extent have the feeling that knowledge must be continually extended, that there must be no limit to it, as things are so complicated that when we think we have grasped one point of view, we are immediately compelled to pass on to another, which then throws light on the matter from another aspect. We can only advance little by little in our knowledge; nevertheless, from the indications given in the last lecture, especially at the close, you will have become somewhat more closely acquainted with what may be called the cooperation of the abnormal and the normal Spirits of Form, which brings about in our life on earth that there should be not merely one kind of humanity spread over the whole earth, but that a humanity might arise which can be manifested in the different races. For that uniform humanity, which man can only attain to again in the course of the evolution of the earth, the pure activity of the normal Spirits of Form would have been necessary. These are the same spiritual Beings who in Genesis are called the Elohim, and we can really recognize seven of these normal Spirits of Form in the entire universe which surrounds our earth and together with it makes one whole.

There are seven Spirits of Form or seven Elohim. If we wish to form a conception of these seven with their various missions, and their vocation of establishing equilibrium or Love in the whole mission of the earth, we must clearly understand that these seven Spirits of Form so co-operate that what we have described in one of these lectures as ‘man in the second third of his life’ would actually be brought about. Thus if all these seven Spirits of Form could work in the way they have proposed among themselves, the essential ‘I’-man would express himself. But as other spiritual Beings co-operate with them, and vary this uniform humanity, a quite special arrangement was necessary in the cosmos. If to-day you wished to seek in the cosmos the locality from whence the normal Spirits of Form are active, those Beings who, as described in our last lecture, in our present cosmos shine towards us in the light, then you must seek for them in the Sun. You must always seek in the direction of the Sun for that Cosmic Lodge, that community in the universe, in which these Spirits of Form take counsel together for the establishing of the earthly equilibrium, for the fulfillment of the mission of the earth. One thing only was necessary so that the abnormal Spirits of Form should not by their activity produce too much disorder as far as man is concerned; it was necessary that one of the Spirits of Form should detach Himself from the community; so that, in reality, you have only to look for six Spirits of Form or Elohim in the direction of the Sun, one of these Spirits had to isolate Himself, in order that through the simultaneous activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form, who are really Spirits of Motion, the equilibrium should not be completely upset. He it was Who in the Bible, in Genesis, is called Jahve or Jehovah. If you wish to look for His activity in the universe, you must not seek for it in the direction of Sun, but in that in which Moon for the time being is to be found. This is also indicated in my Occult Science, although looked at there from another aspect, when it is shown that the Spirits of Form go away with the separation of Sun, but that only in the special arrangement that took place in the separation of Moon, were the preliminary conditions created for the further evolution of man. For if Moon had remained united with Earth, the evolution of man could not have taken place. This further evolution of man was only made possible through one of the Elohim, Jahve, going forth with Moon, while the other six Spirits remained in Sun; it was only made possible through Jahve's co-operative work with His six other companions.

Now it may be asked: Why was Sun split off at all? That was necessary for the following reasons: As soon as certain older Spirits of Motion—who possess greater power than the Spirits of Form, for they stand higher in the rank of the hierarchies—had decided to remain behind, the normal Spirits of Form had to weaken their activity by splitting off one of themselves. They would not otherwise have been able to bring about the equilibrium requisite for further evolution.

If we want to obtain a satisfactory conception of the activities of these normal Spirits of Form, it is best to think of them as streaming down to us in the sunlight. But if we want to obtain an idea of the abnormal Spirits of Form, and of how they act in combination with the normal Spirits of Form, who are centered in Sun as it were (for it was only in order that the equilibrium could be brought about that Jehovah split off towards Moon); then we must imagine that a certain sun-force, which streams towards us in the normal Spirits of Form, is altered by the force that streams to us from the abnormal Spirits of Form, who are really Spirits of Motion. These have their centre in the other five planets, speaking of the planets in the old way. You must therefore seek for the centre of these others, the abnormal Spirits of Form, in Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury.

You have now, when you look into the cosmos, a sort of distribution of the normal and the abnormal Spirits of Form. Six of the normal Spirits of Form are centered in Sun, one of them—Jahve or Jehovah—forms the equilibrium for them from Moon, by ruling and guiding the latter. The activities of this Spirit of Form are influenced by the activities proceeding from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. These forces stream down upon Earth, are stemmed there and ray up again from Earth, as was described at the close of our last lecture.

Thus if you have a part of Earth's surface upon which a certain activity is exercised from the Sun by the Elohim or normal Spirits of Form, then nothing would come into existence on that particular part of the Earth's surface but the entirely normal ‘I’, that which gives man his normal being, which produces the average general human nature. Now into these forces of the Spirits of Form, which through the state of equilibrium would otherwise dance here upon the surface, are intermingled the forces of Mercury. Hence in that which here unfolds as the force of the Spirits of Form, there dances and vibrates not only the normal, but also that which intermingles in the normal forces of the Elohim, in the normal forces of the Spirits of Form, that namely, which comes from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are centered in the several planets. From this we see, that through these abnormal Spirits of Form, there are five possible centers of influence, and these, in their reflection upon humanity from the centre of the Earth, really produce what we know as the five main races [from the German, Hauptrassen – e.Ed] who inhabit the Earth.

If we now more closely characterize the spot which in our recent statements we placed in Africa, by saying, that through the co-operation of the normal Spirits of Form with the abnormal ones centered in Mercury, the negro race came into existence, we are then, from an occult standpoint, quite correct in describing what appears in the black race, as the ‘Mercury race’.

Let us now follow on further along the line which we then drew through the central points from which the several races sprang. We then come to Asia and find there the Venus-race or the Malay race. We then pass on across the wide domain of Asia and in the Mongolian race we find the Mars-race. We then pass over into the domain of Europe and we find in the Europeans, in their basic character, in their racial character, the Jupiter men. If we cross over the ocean to America, where the place is at which the races or civilizations die, we then find the race of the dark Saturn, the original American-Indian race, the American race. The American-Indian race is the Saturn race.

In this way, if occultly you picture this matter more and more clearly, you find in these five planets the forces which have experienced their external manifestations in these five parts of the world.

If you form a more and more distinct and concrete conception of this, you will acquire an inner knowledge of these unique racial characters which are spread over the Earth, a knowledge of this peculiar co-operation of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. Thus we have, as it were, drawn the picture which holds good for a certain point. But what I have said about the different parts of the Earth, again only holds good for a quite definite epoch of evolution. It holds good for the epoch when, at a definite moment of the old Atlantean evolution, the migration of peoples started from a spot in Atlantis and wandered across to the right place where they could receive the corresponding racial cultivation. Hence in my Occult Science you will find it pointed out that in old Atlantis, in certain Mystery Places, named the Atlantean Oracles, the guidance of this distribution of mankind over the Earth was taken in hand, so that in fact that equilibrium, that state of balance could be brought about which led to the corresponding distribution of the races. In one such Mystery-Oracle the truths of which we are now speaking were always investigated, and originally man was entirely guided by them. In this manner, what happened on the Earth was correspondingly directed from such centers.

In the stream of peoples that traveled across Africa and crystallized into the Ethiopian race, we have to look for an impulse which could be given by the Mercury-oracle, in which one could clearly observe how the normal Spirits of Form, (the six Elohim and Jahve or Jehovah) co-operated, and how the abnormal Spirits of Form whose activities proceeded from the centre of Mercury also worked in. According to the astrological co-operation of these various centers of force, the point of equilibrium was sought for on our Earth, and in accordance with this the centre of balance was taken as the point of radiation for the race in question.

The formation of the other races was also directed in a similar way. In accordance with this, the great map is then drawn, into which are entered the influences with respect to peoples, families, etc. That is the great map, which is an image of the heavenly activity which originates through the forces of the heavenly powers flowing into man, radiating back from him, and forming his destiny. What may we now consider a man of the Mercury race, of the Ethiopian race as being? We may so look upon him that we say: This man is originally destined and organized by the Elohim to express in himself the whole human nature. But now from the Mercury centre the abnormal Spirits of Form worked with great power and caused man to be so varied that the form of the Ethiopian race arose; and it was the same with each of the other races. Thereby the streams of the peoples were guided in quite a definite way from the original centre, and thus the line which I drew for you a few days ago originated.

You must therefore imagine the Spirits of Form radiating from a centre. We have to suppose this centre as being at a definite period of time in old Atlantis. There we have that which sank down into the Atlantean continent and shaped it in such a way that the human spirits were brought under the ruler ship of the corresponding abnormal Spirits of Form.

Thus were the great foundations of the races created, and when man looks up into the infinite expanses of the heavens, he must there seek the forces which constitute him. They constitute him however in their rays which return from the Earth. When he looks up to the normal Spirits of Form, to the Elohim, he is looking up to that which really makes him into man; and when he looks up to what is centered in the several Planetary Spirits (with the exception of the Sun and Moon), he sees that which makes him belong to a particular race.

Now how do these Race-spirits work in and upon man? They work in a very unique way, so that, as one might say, they excite his forces first of all when they reach the physical body. You know that what we call the four fundamental parts of man, are projected and imaged in certain parts of the physical body, so that we may say, the ‘I’ images itself in the blood; the astral body in the nervous system; the etheric or life-body in the glandular system, and only the physical body stands for itself, it is an image of its own being, and for the man of the present day it has all its laws within itself. The ‘I’ reflects itself in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric body in the glandular system.

Those spiritual Beings, who there seethe and boil in man so that his racial character may come about, cannot at first work directly into his higher parts. They seethe first of all in these images of the higher parts in the physical body. They cannot as yet enter right into the physical body, but they seethe in the other three members, in that which is the image of the ‘I’, the blood; in the image of the astral body, the nervous system; and in that which is the image of the etheric body, the glandular system. In these three systems, which belong to the physical body but are reflections of the higher members, the Race-spirits, the abnormal Spirits of Form.

Here you see that the physical body of man is determined from within; so that these various spiritual Beings set to work in those parts of the physical body which are the projections, the shadows of the higher members. Now where for instance does Mercury set to work? I say Mercury, so as to include all the abnormal Spirits of Form to be found in Mercury. He intervenes by co-operating with others, especially in the glandular system. He seethes in the glandular system, and there are expressed the forces which originate through that preponderance of the Mercury forces, which work in the Ethiopian race. Everything which gives the Ethiopian race its special characteristics comes from the fact that the Mercury forces seethe and surge in the glandular system of this people. What modifies the universal human form into the special form of the Ethiopian race with black skin and woolly hair and so on, is the result of their activity. This modification of the common human form comes therefore from these forces.

If you now pass further over to Asia, you find there in a similar manner something we might describe as Venus forces, as an abnormal development of the Spirits of Form. These Venus forces operate by attacking principally that which we call the reflection of the astral body, the nervous system. They operate however in a peculiar way, and indeed not directly as Venus-spirits upon the nervous system. For the nervous system can be affected in two indirect ways; one way is through the respiration. When the breathing is specially worked upon, these activities establish themselves in man's respiratory and nervous system, and give it a definite form. This indirect way is selected by the abnormal Spirits of Form whom we may call Venus Beings, in the Malay race, in the yellow tinted races of Southern Asia, and towards the Malay Archipelago. Just as the glandular type of man is spread over the land of Ethiopia, so over these parts of Malaya there is spread the type of man in whom the abnormal Spirits of Form work upon the nervous system indirectly through the respiratory system. There the nervous system is worked upon indirectly through the respiratory system. In the nervous system is brewed that which, with special modifications, produces the more or less yellow-colored part of humanity. The transformation there brought about, certainly expresses itself more in that part of the nervous system which we sum up in the expression ‘Solar Plexus’, therefore not really in the higher nervous system but in that mysterious part of the nervous system which runs in two strands parallel with the spinal marrow and spreads out in various directions. This part of the nervous system, therefore, is worked upon indirectly through the respiratory system, this part which in our sense does not yet belong to the higher mental activity. These Venus-forces which work in this race, seethe deep down in the unconscious organism.

Now let us go up over the wide Mongolian plains. In those plains those Spirits of Form are principally active who work indirectly through the blood. There in the blood is brewed that which brings about a modification of humanity and produces the basic character of the race. There is, however, something very peculiar in this Mongolian race. There the Mars-spirits enter the blood: But they work in it in quite a definite way, viz., they are there able to work towards the six Elohim who are centered in the Sun. In the Mongolian race, therefore, they work towards these six Elohim, and in doing so they make a special attack in the other direction towards Jahve or Jehovah Who has separated His field of action from that of the six Elohim.

But besides this co-operation of the Mars-spirits with the six Elohim and Jahve, which results in the Mongolian race, there is still something quite special. Just as the six Elohim from the Sun and Jahve from the Moon act upon the Mongolians, whilst the Mars-spirits work towards them, so in another case we must imagine that from the direction of the Moon the Jahve forces again meet and co-operate with the Mars-spirits, and that thus a special modification arises. Here you have a special modification of humanity, viz., that which belongs to the Semitic race, explained from its most occult background. In the Semites you have a modification of collective humanity, in which Jahve or Jehovah shuts Himself off from the other Elohim and invests this people with a special character, by co-operating with the Spirits of Mars, in order to bring about the special modification of this people.

You will now perceive the special element contained in the Semitic people and its mission. In a certain deep occult sense the writer of the Bible was able to say, that Jahve or Jehovah had made this people His own, and when to this you add the fact that there was here a co-operation with the Mars-spirits who direct their attacks chiefly upon the blood, then you will also comprehend why the continuous action of the blood from generation to generation was of quite special importance to the Semitic Hebrew people, and why the God Jahve describes Himself in the Semitic people as the God Who comes down in the blood from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and so on. That is the important thing: how the blood runs through all these generations. By describing Himself as ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, Jehovah says: ‘I act in your blood’. That which always works in the blood, that which must be fought out in the blood,—the co-operation with the Mars-spirits,—that is one of the mysteries which lead us deeply into the wise guidance of the entire humanity of the Earth.

So you see, that the blood of mankind is acted upon in a twofold manner; that two races originate, by the blood of mankind being acted upon; on the one side we have that which we call the Mongolian race, on the other that which we may describe as belonging to the Semitic race. That is a great polarity in humanity, and we shall have to trace much that is of immense importance back to this polarity, if we wish to understand the depths of the Folk-souls.

We shall now go back still further and trace how the Spirits and Beings who have their centre in Jupiter seethe and boil in man. These select for themselves the second point of attack, so as to act indirectly upon the nervous system. The one point of attack is through the senses of man; the other point of attack which works into the nervous system, goes indirectly through the respiratory system into the solar plexus. The attack proceeding from Jupiter goes indirectly through the sense-impressions and streams out from thence upon those portions of the nervous system which are centered in the brain and spinal cord. Here flow in, in those races belonging to the Jupiter humanity, those forces which give the special stamp to the racial character. This is more or less the case in the Aryans, in the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe, those whom we reckon as belonging to the Caucasian race. In these arises that modification of universal humanity which comes from the abnormal Spirits of Form whom we may describe as Jupiter Spirits, working upon the senses. The Caucasians therefore are determined through the senses.

Now you will also understand that a people like the Greeks, who were quite specially and consciously under the influence of Jupiter or Zeus, who felt themselves to be a centre for the Zeus influence, were pre-eminently determined by what flows into the nervous system through the senses. Of course the Greeks were also influenced by the Elohim who stream in from Sun. But the case was such, that among the Greeks everything that acts upon the senses was devoted to the influence of Jupiter or Zeus, and by that means this people attained its greatness. Everything the Greeks saw in the way of external form, external life, contained important meanings for them. They saw the spiritual in their perceptions of the physical, and hence became the basic people for all sculpture, for all external form-giving. This indicates a very special mission of the Greek people, who are so eminently the people of Jupiter or Zeus, who even at the time when,—especially through the entrance of the star-constellation,—the co-operation of the Zeus or Jupiter-forces with the universal Elohim-forces took place, felt themselves to be the people of Zeus.

All the peoples of Asia Minor and especially the European peoples, are on the whole modifications of this Jupiter influence, and you may now divine that, as man has many senses, many modifications can come about, and that in the formation of the several peoples within this basic race which were formed by the senses working upon the nervous system, one or other of the senses may have the mastery. Through this the various peoples may assume different forms. According as the eye or the ear or one of the other senses has the upper hand, so will the different peoples be determined in this or that direction for the special national tendency within the racial character. Through this they get quite definite tasks. One task, which specially devolves upon the Caucasian race is, that it is to tread the path to the spiritual through the senses, for it is built especially upon the senses.

Herein lies something that leads one into the deeper starting-points of occultism and it will show you that in those peoples whose sign, so to speak, lies in the Venus-character, the principal starting-point, even in occult training, must be made where the breathing is the most important thing. On the other hand in the peoples living more to the West, the starting-point of their deepening and spiritualizing must be taken from what is in the sense world. This is possessed by peoples who occupy countries more towards the West, in their stages of higher cognition, in imagination, inspiration and intuition, in accordance with the way in which the Jupiter-spirit originally modified the character.

Hence there were always these two centers in the evolution of humanity, the one ruled more by the Spirits of Venus, and the other ruled more by the Spirits of Jupiter. The Spirits of Jupiter were specially observed in those Mysteries in which—as those of you will know who took part in my course of lectures at Munich¹ last year—the three Individualities met together, the three spiritual Beings, Buddha, Zarathustra or Zarathas in his later incarnation, and that great leader of humanity whom we describe by the name of Skythianos. That is the Council which, under the guidance of One still greater, set itself the task of investigating into the mysterious forces which must be developed for the evolution of humanity, whose starting-point was taken from that part which is originally connected with the Jupiter forces and which was preordained in the map of the Earth already mentioned.

Finally, what we may describe as the abnormal Spirits of Form who have their centre in Saturn, act upon the glandular system, but in a roundabout way through all the other systems. Therefore in all that we must describe as the Saturn-race, in everything to which we must attribute the Saturn-character, we must look for something which draws together and embraces that which leads again to the evening twilight of humanity, whose development brings humanity in a certain way to a real conclusion, to a dying away. The expression of this action on the glandular system is seen in the American-Indian race. From that action comes its mortality, its disappearance. The Saturn influence acts through all the other systems finally upon the glandular system. It separates out the hardest parts of man, and we may therefore say that this dying-out consists in a sort of ossification, and this may also clearly be seen in the outer form.

If you look at the pictures of the old American Indians, the process above described is palpable in the decline of this race. In a race such as this, everything which existed in the Saturn-evolution is now present in them, and that in a special manner; it has withdrawn into itself and left man alone with his hard bone system, and brought him into decline. One feels something of this truly occult activity, if one observes how, even in the nineteenth century, a representative of these old Indians speaks of how in him there dwells what formerly was great and mighty for man, but which could not possibly go along with further evolution. There is in existence a description of a beautiful scene, in which a leader of these Indians who are dying out, confronts a European invader.

Imagine what is felt in the heart when two such men confront each other, men who came across from Europe, and men who in the earliest ages, when the races were divided, went over to the West. The Indians then took over with them to the West all that was great in the Atlantean culture. What was the greatest thing of all to the Indian? It was that he was still able dimly to sense something of the ancient greatness and majesty of a period which existed in the old Atlantean epoch, in which the division of the races had hardly begun, in which men could look up to the Sun and perceive the Spirits of Form penetrating through a sea of mist. Through an ocean of mist the Atlantean gazed up at that which to him was not divided into six or seven, but which acted together. This co-operative activity of the seven Spirits of Form was called by the Atlanteans the Great Spirit who revealed himself to man in ancient Atlantis. The Atlantean had not taken into himself all that the Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter Spirits brought about in the East, through which were developed all the civilizations which reached their zenith in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. In all this the son of the brown race did not participate. He clung firmly to the Great Spirit of the primeval past. That which the others had done, those who in a primeval past had also received the Great Spirit, passed before his eyes when a paper was laid before him on which were many little signs, letters, of which he understood nothing. All that was foreign to him, but in his soul he still had the Great Spirit. His speech has been preserved to us; it is worthy of note because it points to what we have explained, and it runs somewhat as follows: ‘There, in the ground upon which walk the conquerors of our country, the bones of my brothers are buried. Why are the feet of our conquerors allowed to walk over the graves of my brothers? Because they are in possession of that which makes the white man great. The brown man is made great by something else; he is made great by the Great Spirit, Who speaks to him in the sighing of the wind, in the rustling of the forest, in the surging of the waves, in the gurgling of the spring, in thunder and lightning! That is the Spirit Who to us speaks truth. Oh, the Great Spirit speaks truth! Your Spirits, whom you have here on paper, and who express what to you is great, they do not speak truth.’ Thus spoke the Indian Chief, from his point of view. The brown man belongs to the Great Spirit; the pale man belongs to the spirits who, in black shapes, as little dwarf-like beings—he meant the letters—hop about on the paper and who do not speak the truth. That is a world-historic dialogue, which was carried on between the conquerors and the last of the great Chiefs of the brown men. Here we see what belongs to Saturn and his activity, and what originates on the earth from his co-operation with other Spirits, at such a moment as this, when two different directions meet.

Thus we have seen how humanity in general was brought to the surface of our Earth by the Elohim or the normal Spirits of Form, how then the five principal races of human evolution lift themselves out of the collective mass of mankind, out of the ocean of humanity, and how these five races are connected with the guiding Spirits belonging to the ranks of the abnormal Spirits of Form whom we must call by the names which we take from the live planets, whereas the normal Spirits of Form are to be sought for in the Sun and in the Moon. From this point we shall proceed further, and pass on to something that will be easier to us, because we shall be connecting on to something familiar to us, namely, to tribes and peoples.

• 1. The East in the Light of the West

If we wish to study the development of Germanic Scandinavian history and the spiritual impulses therein described, it will be necessary first of all to keep in mind the fundamental character of its mythology; and your attention was drawn in the last Lecture to the fact that this Germanic Scandinavian mythology, notwithstanding its many points of similarity to other mythologies and concepts of the gods, is nevertheless something quite unique. It is true that a very far-reaching fundamental kernel of mythological ideas extends over all the Germanic peoples and tribes in Europe so that, even far to the South, a uniform view of mythology, and on the whole a similar understanding of those relationships is possible. There must at one time have been a similar understanding of the unique character of the Germanic Scandinavian mythology throughout all the countries in which this mythology, in one form or another, was outspread. That which the mythologies of the Germanic Scandinavian peoples have in common, is very different from the essentials of the Greek mythology, to say nothing of the Egyptian; so that all that is similar in the Germanic mythology is interrelated, and is at the same time widely divided from what is the essential in the Greek and Roman mythology. But it is not at the present day easy to understand this essential element, because—on account of certain preconceived ideas, (to, speak of which here would lead us too far)—there is to-day a certain longing, a certain desire, simply to compare the religions of the various peoples with one another. There is at the present time great enthusiasm for comparative religion and comparative mythology, but it is a domain in which it is possible to do most foolish things. What happens as a rule when a person compares the mythologies and religions of the various peoples with one another? He compares the external details in the stories of the gods and tries to prove that the figure of one particular god appears in one mythology, and it appears in a like manner in another, and so on. To one who really knows the facts under consideration this comparing of religions is a most disquieting tendency in our present-day science, because everywhere only the mere externals are compared. The impression made by such comparisons of religions on one who knows the facts is somewhat as though someone said: ‘Thirty years ago I made the acquaintance of a man; he wore a uniform made in such and such a way, blue trousers, a red coat and such or such a covering on his head, and so on.’ And then he quickly goes on to say: ‘Then twenty years ago I became acquainted with a man who wore the same uniform, and ten years ago I met another who also wore the same uniform.’ Now if the person in question were to believe that because the men with whom he became acquainted thirty, twenty, and ten years ago wore the same uniform, they could be compared with one another as regards their essential nature, he might make a great mistake, for a person of quite different character might be wearing that uniform at those different times; and the essential thing is to know what sort of man is in the uniform. This comparison may seem far-fetched, and yet it is the same when in comparative religion one takes Adonis and compares him with Christ. That is comparing merely the outer uniform. The apparel and the qualities of the Beings in the various legends may be very similar, or even alike, but the point is to know what divine spiritual Beings are clothed in them; and if completely different Beings are in Adonis and in Christ, then the comparison has only the value of a comparing of the uniform. Nevertheless this comparison is extremely popular at the present day. Therefore in many cases it is not of the least consequence what the science of comparative religion, with its entirely external methods, can at the present time bring to light. The point is rather, that one should learn to know to some extent, from the differentiation of the Folk-spirits, the manner in which this or the other people arrived at its mythology or other teachings regarding the Gods, or even at its philosophy.

We can scarcely understand the fundamental character of the Germanic Scandinavian mythology, unless we touch once more upon the five successive ages of civilization in the post-Atlantean epoch. These five ages of civilization were brought about by the migrations which took place from the West to the East, so that after this migration was finished, the most mature, so to speak, the most advanced human beings passed into Indian territory and there founded the sacred primeval Indian civilization. Later, nearer our own age, the Persian civilization was founded, then the Egyptian-Chaldæan-Babylonian, then the Græco-Latin civilization, after which followed our own.

The essential nature of these five civilizations can only be understood when one knows, that the men who played a part in them, the Angels, the Folk-souls or Archangels, and Spirits of the Age were all quite different from one another in the ages that are past. To-day we shall pay special attention to the way in which the human beings who took part in these civilizations differed from one another. For instance, the men who in old India founded the ancient Indian civilization—which then acquired a literary form in the Vedas and the later Indian literature—were fundamentally different from the Græco-Latin peoples, they were even different from the Persian, from the Egyptian-Chaldæan, and most of all from those peoples who were growing up in Europe in preparation for the fifth age of civilization of the post-Atlantean epoch. In what way did they differ? The entire structure of the human beings who belonged to the ancient Indian peoples was absolutely different from that of the inhabitants of all the countries lying further West. If we wish to form an idea of what this difference consisted in we must realize that the peoples of ancient India had advanced very far in human evolution before they received the ‘I’. As regards everything else in human evolution they had made very great progress. A long, long human development lay behind them, but they had passed through it in a sort of twilight. Then the ‘I’ entered in,—the consciousness of the ‘I’. Among the Indians this came comparatively late, at a time when the Indian people was already to a certain extent mature, when it had already gone through what the Germanic Scandinavian peoples still had to go through when they already possessed their ‘I’. You must keep that well in mind.* The Germanic Scandinavian peoples had to experience, with their fully-developed ‘I’, what the inhabitants of ancient India had passed through in a dull state of consciousness, without the ‘I’ being present.

[* EDITORIAL NOTE: The Ego of the West awoke earlier and in a lower state of evolution. The old Indian took longer to develop the Ego, and remained longer in a state of dim clairvoyance, during which time he developed a richer soul life, and therefore awoke at a higher state than the Westerner, but this fact prevented the Easterner from interesting himself at the time of Christ in the Angels and individual Spirit, the Christ. The Indian obtained the subjective Ego long before the objective Ego. See further elucidation in Lecture 9.]

Now what was the nature of the development which humanity could undergo in the post-Atlantean epoch? In the old Atlantean epoch human beings were still endowed with a high degree of dim clairvoyance. With this old dim clairvoyance they saw into the divine spiritual world, they saw the events which took place in that world. Now transfer yourselves for a little while into the ancient land of Atlantis before the migrations towards the East had begun. The air was still permeated with water-vapor and clouds of mist. But the soul of man was different too. He could not yet even distinguish the various external sense-perceptions from one another; at that time it was as though he found the spiritual contents of the world spread out around him like a spiritual aroma, a spiritual aura. Thus there was a certain clairvoyance, and man had to get away from this clairvoyance. This was brought about by the action of the forces into whose domain the human beings came when they migrated from the West to the East. In the course of these migrations many different soul-developments took place. There were peoples who, during their wandering towards the East, at first slept as it were through the stepping-forth out of the old clairvoyance, and had already reached a higher stage of development while their ‘I’ was still in a dull state. They went through various stages of development, and yet their ‘I’ was still in a dull, dreamy condition. The Indians were the farthest evolved when their ‘I’ awoke to full self-consciousness. They were already so advanced that they possessed a very rich inner soul-life, which no longer showed any of those conditions that were still experienced for a long time by the peoples of Europe. The Indians had gone through those conditions a long time before. They awoke to self-consciousness when they were already furnished with spiritual forces and spiritual capacities by means of which they could penetrate to a high degree into the spiritual worlds. Hence all the work and activity of the various Angels and Archangels upon the human souls, and their exertions to lift them out of their old dim states of clairvoyance, had become a matter of complete indifference to those among the Indian people who had advanced. They had not directly observed the work of the Archangels and Angels and of all those spiritual Beings who worked particularly in the Folk-spirit. All that had been accomplished in their souls, their astral and etheric bodies, at a time when they were not consciously present. They awoke when their souls already possessed a very high degree of maturity; they awoke when the most advanced among them could, by going through a slight development, already read again in the Akashic Record all that had formerly taken place in the evolution of humanity; so that they gazed out into their surroundings, into the world, and could read in the Akashic Record what was taking place in the spiritual world, and what they had gone through in a dull, dim state of consciousness. They were unconsciously guided into higher domains; they had, before their ‘I’-consciousness awoke, acquired spiritual capacities that were much richer than the soul-capacities of the Western peoples.

Thus the spiritual world could be directly observed by these men. The most advanced among those who led the Indian people had arrived so far that, at the time when their ‘I’ awoke, they actually no longer needed to observe how human development sprang forth, so to speak, from the Spirits of Form or Powers, but they were more intimate with the Beings we call the Spirits of Motion or Principalities, and those above them, the Spirits of Wisdom. They were especially interested in these. The spiritual Beings beneath these were on the other hand Beings in whose domain they had already been formerly, and who were therefore no longer of such particular importance to them. Thus they looked up to what later on they called the sum-total of all the Spirits of Motion and of all the Spirits of Wisdom, to that which was later described by the Greek expressions: Dynamis and Kyriotetes. They looked up to these and called them ‘Mula-Prakriti’, i.e., the sum-total of the Spirits of Motion; and ‘Maha-Purusha’, the sum-total of the Spirits of Wisdom, that which lives as if in a spiritual Unity. They could attain to this vision because those who belonged to this people awoke to the consciousness of their ‘I’ at such a late stage of development. They had already gone through what the later peoples still had to look at with their ‘I’.

The peoples belonging to the Persian civilization were less highly developed. Through their peculiar capacity of cognition, and because their ‘I’ awoke at a lower stage, they were able to occupy themselves particularly with the Beings of the Powers or Spirits of Form. With these they were especially familiar; they could in a certain respect understand them, and they were pre-eminently interested in them. The peoples belonging to the Persian communities awoke one stage lower than did the Indians, but it was a stage which the peoples of the West had still to reach, still had to work up to. Hence the Persians were acquainted with the Powers or Spirits of Form, whom they thought of collectively as ‘Amshaspands’. They were the radiations which we know as Spirits of Form or Powers, and which, from their point of view, the peoples of the Persian civilization were specially well able to observe.

We then come to the Chaldean peoples. They already possessed a consciousness of what we know as Primal Forces, as directing Spirits of the Age. They were aware of the Beings who should be understood as Primal Forces, as Spirits of Personality.

In another way again the peoples of the Græco-Latin age also had a certain consciousness of these Primal Forces or Spirits of Personality, but in their case there was also something else, and that was what may lead us a little further in our studies. The Greeks were a little nearer to the Germanic peoples. But still in them the ‘I’ awoke at a higher stage than it did in the Germanic Scandinavian peoples. That which in the Northern peoples was still experienced as being the work of the Angels or Archangels, was not experienced directly by the Græco-Latin peoples; but they still possessed a distinct recollection of it. You must therefore think of it thus, that the difference between the Germanic and the Græco-Latin peoples is, that the latter still had a recollection of how the Angels and Archangels had taken part in their soul-life which they had developed within them. On the whole they had not experienced this very clearly; they had gone through it while still in a state of dim consciousness. But now it came up within them as a remembrance. The creation of the whole world, the way in which the Angels and Archangels, both normal and abnormal, played a part in the human soul was known to the Greeks. What they had gone through was in their souls as a mighty memory-picture. Now memory is much clearer, it has more distinct outlines than what one is still living through. It is no longer so fresh, no longer so young; but what appears as memory, as remembrance, has sharper contours; sharper outlines. The influence or impulse of the Angels and Archangels on the human soul was among the Greeks awakened in the memory in firm, sharp outlines. That is the Greek mythology. If we do not look at it thus, if we only compare one name with other names that appear elsewhere, if we do not take the special forces into consideration and realize what the figures are that appear as Apollo and Minerva and so on, then we are only making a superficial study of comparative religion, we are merely comparing the uniforms. The important point is, the way in which they saw in those days.

After we have realized this, we shall admit that the Greeks built up their mythology from memories. The Egyptians and Chaldeans had only a dark, dim recollection of the action of the world of the Angels and Archangels, but they could look into the world of Primal Forces. It was just as though the Egyptians and Chaldeans were beginning to forget something. In the Persian mythology or sacred teachings we find a complete forgetting of the world of the Angels and Archangels, but on the other hand they could look into the world of the Powers or Spirits of Form. That which is to be found in Greek mythology had been forgotten by the Persians and completely forgotten by the Indians. They saw the whole process over again in Akashic Records and created pictures of the earlier occurrences out of their own knowledge, which, however, was a divine knowledge, obtained by more highly developed spiritual powers. From this you will also recognize that just for those very peoples of the East it would be particularly difficult to understand the Western spiritual life. It is for this reason that the peoples of the East closed themselves to Western spiritual life. They will certainly accept the Western material civilization, but the spiritual culture of the West—unless they come to it indirectly through Spiritual Science—remains more or less closed to them. They were already at a high stage at a time when there was as yet no Christ Jesus upon earth. He only came in the fourth post-Atlantean age of civilization. That is an event which could no longer be grasped by means of the forces which had developed out of the Indian people. For that one also required forces which were connected with a rather lower position of the ‘I’, in which it was in more subordinate soul-forces.

In the Germanic and Scandinavian countries the action of the Angels and Archangels in the human souls did not exist as a recollection, but in such a way that, even at the time when Christ Jesus walked upon earth, the people could still see that this work was going on, they could perceive that they participated in the affairs of the Angels and the Archangels who were still working in their souls.

The Græco-Latin peoples could in these experiences of the soul, remember something they had gone through formerly. This the German peoples lived within, it was their own direct personal concern. Their ‘I’ had wakened at the stage of existence when the Folk-spirits and those spiritual Beings who even yet are under the Folk-spirits, were still at work in their souls. Hence these peoples were nearest to that which we know as the events that took place in old Atlantis.

In old Atlantis man looked up to the spiritual Powers and spoke of a sort of Unity of the Godhead, because he really looked up with direct perception into the old primal states of development of humanity. At that time one could still see, as it were, the ruling of the Spirits of Wisdom and the ruling of the Spirits of Motion, and this again was observed later by the old Indians in the Akashic Records. These peoples of the West had raised themselves about one stage higher than this standpoint, so that they experienced in the immediate present the transition from the old vision to the new. They looked into a weaving and life of real spiritual Powers, at a time when the ‘I’ was not yet awake. But at the same time they saw the ‘I’ gradually awaking and Angels and Archangels setting to work in the soul. They perceived this direct transition. They had a remembrance of an earlier weaving and an earlier life, of a time when they saw everything in an ocean of mist, as it were, and when out of this sea of mist there came forth to them what we have learnt to know as the divine spiritual Beings immediately above man. The old gods, those who were active before the gods intervened in the life of the human soul, who could then be seen, and with whom men felt themselves united, those Divine Beings who were active in a very far-distant past, in the time of old Atlantis, were called Vanas.

Man then passed on further from the old Atlantean epoch, and saw the weaving of the Angels and Archangels, whom they called the Asa. Those were the Beings who as Angels and Archangels busied themselves with the ‘I’ of man, which then awoke at its lowest stage; those Beings were placed at the head of these peoples. What the other peoples of the East slept through,—viz., seeing how the soul worked its way up by means of the various forces which were bestowed upon it by the normal and abnormal Angels and Archangels,—had to be gone through by the peoples of Europe beginning from the lowest stage; they had to be consciously present, in order that these soul-forces might gradually develop.

Thus, therefore, the figures of the gods, which placed themselves before the souls of the Germanic Scandinavian peoples, were the figures of the gods who worked directly upon his soul, and that which he could observe by direct perception, as the development of the human soul out of the cosmos, that was something which he directly experienced. He did not look back in remembrance at the manner in which the souls worked themselves into the bodies, he saw this more as though it were just happening then. It is his own evolution and he with his ‘I’ is present in it. He understood this down to the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries after Christ. He had preserved a comprehension of how the soul-forces gradually formed themselves, crystallized themselves into the body. At first he gazed upon the Archangel Beings who worked in his soul by giving him what were to become his soul forces, and he found there as the most predominant of these Archangels, Wotan or Odin, and he saw him at work upon his soul, he saw how he worked into his soul. What did he see there? How did he perceive Wotan or Odin? What did he recognize him to be? As what did he learn to love him, and above all to understand him? He learned to recognize him as being one of those Archangels who once upon a time reached the point of renouncing the ascent to higher stages. He learned to know Odin as one of the abnormal Archangels, as one of the great Renouncers of antiquity, who had assumed the office of an Archangel when undertaking the important mission of working into the souls of men. The Germanic Scandinavian experienced Odin in his activity at a time when he still went about the work of inoculating speech into the souls. The manner in which Odin himself worked upon his peoples in order to make speech possible to them has been preserved in a wonderful way It was described as a divine initiation. The way in which Odin gained the power to endow the souls of the Germanic and Northern peoples with languages is thus described Odin, before he had acquired this capacity, had gone through what is represented to us as the initiation by means of the Potion of the Gods, that divine Potion which once upon a time in the primeval past belonged to the giants. This Potion contained not merely abstract wisdom, but it represents to us the wisdom which expresses itself directly in sound. Odin at his initiation obtained power over the wisdom which expresses itself in sound, he learned how to use it when he went through a long initiation which lasted nine days, from which he was then released by Mimir, the ancient bearer of Wisdom. Thus Odin became Lord of the power of Speech. It was for this reason that the later sagas trace the language of the poets, the language of the skalds, back to Odin. The art of reading runes, which in olden times was thought of as being much more closely related to speech than the later kind of writing, was also traced back to Odin. Hence the way in which the soul—indirectly, through the etheric body, whilst making itself at home in the physical body—acquired speech through the corresponding Archangel, is expressed in the wonderful stories related about Odin.

In the companions of Odin we have similar Archangels: HSnir who gave the imaginative faculty, and LSdur who gave that which still touches the race most closely, the color of the skin, and the character of the blood. In these two Beings we have Archangels, belonging more to the normal side, so to speak. To the abnormal side belong the Beings appearing as Villy and Ve. These are Beings who work still more intimately, within the soul, as I explained in the preceding lecture. But the ‘I’ which is itself at an abnormal stage of evolution, where it is present even when the subordinate soul-powers are being developed, feels itself to be intimately related to an abnormal Archangel. Odin is not perceived as an abnormal Archangel, but rather as one whose remaining behind is somewhat like the way the Western souls remained behind, who experience more consciously in their ‘I’ that which remained behind when the migration through those countries took place,—whereas the Eastern souls passed beyond certain stages of soul-life, before they decided to awake. Hence there lived above all in the souls of the Germanic Scandinavians all that is bound up with those agitating and working Archangel-forces of Odin, which are at work in the primitive depths of the soul-life.

Whereas we have said that it is the Angels who carry down into the individual human beings that which the Archangels bring about, so also an ‘I’ which awakes at such an early elementary stage of soul-life, is above all interested in having the affairs of the Archangels carried into it, as it were. Hence the Germanic Scandinavians have an interest in an angelic figure who possesses special power, but who at the same time is closely related to the separate human being and his individuality. That angelic figure is Thor. Thor can only be recognized by knowing that in him one must recognize a Being who might indeed have been very advanced if he had evolved himself normally further, but who made the renunciation comparatively early, and remained behind at the stage of the Angel, in order that at the time when in the course of the soul's evolution the ‘I’ should awake, he might become Guide in the soul-world of the Germanic Scandinavian countries. What one feels so directly in Thor as being related to the individual human ‘I’ is, that that which was to be carried into every single ‘I’ from the spiritual world, could actually be so carried in. If we bear this in mind we shall also better understand many things that have been handed down. For us it is a question of being able to understand these individual Gods correctly. The Germanic Scandinavian man perceived and experienced this imprinting of the soul into the body. He was present when the ‘I’ membered itself into the body and took possession of each single human being.

Now we know that the ‘I’ pulsates in the blood of the physical body and that everything within corresponds to something without, everything microcosmic to something macrocosmic. The work of Odin who gave speech and Runic Wisdom, who worked indirectly through the breathing, corresponds to the movements of the wind outside in the macrocosm. The regular penetration of the air through our respiratory organs, which then transforms the air into word and speech, corresponds in the macrocosm outside to the movements and the currents of the wind. Just as it is true that we must feel the ruling of Odin within ourselves in the transforming of air into words, so it is true also that we must see him ruling and working in the wind outside. But one who still possessed the old Germanic Scandinavian capacities, to which especially belonged a certain degree of clairvoyance, really saw this. He could see Odin everywhere ruling in the wind, he saw how he formed speech by means of his breath. This the Northern man perceived as unity. Just as that which lives in us and organizes our speech,—that is to say, in the way speech existed among the Scandinavians,—just as that presses through into the ‘I’ and produces the pulsation of the blood, so does that which organizes itself into speech correspond outside in the macrocosm to thunder and lightning. Speech is there before the’I’ is born. Hence the ‘I’ is everywhere felt to be the son of that Being who gives speech. In the imprinting of the separate ‘I’ Thor is specially concerned, and that which in the microcosm corresponds to the event in the macrocosm, is the pulsation of the blood. That therefore which outside in the macrocosm corresponds to the pulsation of the blood in man, is what as thunder and lightning goes through the sighing winds and weaving clouds. That again is seen by the Germanic Scandinavian in his clairvoyance as unity, and he sees that the movement of the wind, the flashing of the lightning outside is inwardly connected with the weaving of the air he breathes in. He sees how that passes over into the blood and then causes the ‘I’ to pulsate. That is looked upon as a material occurrence at the present day, but it was still an astral one to the Germanic Norseman. He saw the inner relationship of fire and lightning, with that which goes through the blood. He felt the pulse-beat in his blood and he knew that it was the beating of the ‘I’; he knew: ‘That which thus beats I am able to perceive, and I shall be able to perceive it again in a little while;’ but he did not notice the outer material event. All that was clothed in clairvoyant perception. He perceived that which caused his pulse to beat and made him return again and again to the same places, as being the act of Thor. He felt the Thor-force in his ‘I’ as the constant returning of the hammer of Thor into the hand of Thor, he felt the force of one of the most powerful Angels that had ever been known and revered, because he was a mighty Being who was seen to have remained behind at the Angel stage.

The way in which the spiritual force holds the physical body together, is expressed in the Germanic Scandinavian mythology where it says, that the ‘I’ is that which, when the soul and body are woven, holds them both together. The Germanic Scandinavian man sees the weaving of the body and soul, from within; and later on he still understands the way in which, coming from the astral, his inner being unites itself with him; he understands how the inner answers, so to say, to the outer. He could also understand when Initiates told him how the world forms itself into man.

Then he understood how to go back to the earlier stages, to that which was told him about the events which represent the relation of the Angels to the Archangels, to the earlier stages when man was born out of the macrocosm in a physical-spiritual way. He was able to see how the individual human being was built up out of the macrocosm and how he rests in it.

He sought in the macrocosm for those occurrences which take place microcosmically in such a way, that out of the human North, out of the cool domain of the spirit, are woven the thoughts of man, and that from thence the human body is supplied with the twelve brain-nerves in the head. He sees this process which microcosmically have become the twelve brain nerves. He sees the weaving Spirit in what he calls ‘Nebelheim’ or ‘Niflheim’ (Home of Mist), he sees the twelve brain-nerves of man; he sees how that which comes from the human South, from the heart, works towards that which comes down from above; he seeks for it outside in the macrocosm and understands when he is told that it is called ‘Muspelheim’.

Thus even in the Christian centuries he still understood how to comprehend the microcosm from the whole macrocosm; and one can go back still further for him, by showing how man gradually originated out of the macrocosm as an extract of the whole world. He is able to look back into that time and he can understand that these events have a past, which he himself can still see as a working of Angels and Archangels into his soul. He can perceive that these events have a past, and the conceptions which he thus acquires are what we meet with in what is known as the old Germanic Scandinavian Genesis, as the origin of humanity from the entire macrocosm.

Where the Germanic Scandinavian Chaos begins, in Ginnungagap, is about the time when the earth begins to form itself anew after it has gone through the three earlier states, Saturn, Sun and Moon, when it emerges again from pralaya, when the kingdoms of nature are not yet differentiated, and men are as yet quite spiritual beings. Then the man of the North understands how the later conditions formed themselves out of that one.

Now it is interesting to see how in the Germanic Scandinavia mythology events which took place in those times, are depicted in pictures of imaginative form, events for which we, in our anthroposophical teachings, only make use of riper expressions, viz., concepts instead of those former pictures. The events which took place when the sun and moon were still united, are described to us. The going forth of the moon is described, and how evolution then passes over into what later becomes ‘Riesenheim’ (Home of Giants). Everything which existed during the Atlantean epoch is described to us as a continuation of what had happened formerly and which were the affairs of the Germanic Scandinavian people themselves.

I only wanted to-day to give an idea of how the Northern ‘I’ awoke while it was still at a lower stage of evolution, and how the Northern man looked into the Folk-soul, into the soul of Thor and so on. I wanted to call forth a feeling of how the ‘I’ was then present, of how it was able to acquire a direct interest in the inweaving of still higher Beings, who, however, came from quite another quarter than those we find among Eastern peoples. We shall tomorrow try to find access to the more remote parts of the Germanic mythology. We shall recognize how those remote parts are precursors of that which dwells in the Folk-souls, and we shall see what is the nature of our Western Folk-souls.

Before we enlarge upon what will emerge from any further elaboration of the significant image of the Twilight of the Gods, it will be well to establish a firm foundation from which to proceed. For we shall deal with the nature of the Germanic and Scandinavian Folk Soul, and from the results of our investigation describe it in greater detail. We shall discover how the whole spiritual life of Europe works in concert, how the activity of the various Folk Spirits has furthered the development of mankind in the remote past, in the present and will continue to do so in the future. Every single people, even isolated fragments of peoples, have their special contribution to make to this great collective task. You will realize from what has been said that, in certain respects, the task, the mission of educating the ‘I’ through the evolutionary stages of the human being, of shaping it and of gradually developing it, devolved upon the Christian and post Christian cultures of Europe in particular. In primitive times, as we have shown in the case of the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples, the ‘I’ was revealed clairvoyantly to man. According to tradition this ‘I’ was bestowed upon man by an Angelic Being, Donar or Thor, who stands midway between man and the Folk Soul. We have seen that the individual still felt himself to be ego-less, devoid of personality; he looked upon the ‘I’ as a gift from the spiritual world.

In the East, when the ‘I’ really awoke, it was not of course experienced in the same way. There man had already reached subjectively such a high degree of perfection that he did not feel the ‘I’ as something extraneous, but as his own property. At the time when man became ego-conscious in the East, Eastern culture was already so far advanced that it was capable of gradually developing that finely-spun speculation, logic and wisdom which is reflected in Eastern wisdom. The East, therefore, no longer experienced the whole process of receiving the ego as if it were bestowed by a higher spiritual world through the instrumentality of a divine-spiritual Being such as Thor. That was the experience of Europe; hence the European felt this gradual unfolding of the individual ‘I’ as the emergence out of the Group Soul. The Germanic-Scandinavian man still felt himself attached to a Group Soul, to be a member of a closely-knit unit or family, that he belonged to an integrated community. For this reason, nearly a hundred years after Christ, Tacitus could describe the Teutons of Central Europe as apparently belonging to separate tribes and yet as members of an organism, and belonging to the unity of the organism. Thus each individual still felt himself at that time to be a member of the tribal ‘I’. He felt his individual ‘I’ gradually emerging from the tribal ‘I’ and be recognized in the God Thor the bestower of the ‘I’, the God who really endowed him with his individual ‘I’. But at the same time he felt that this God was still united with the collective spirit of the tribe with that which lives in the Group Soul. To this Group Soul was given the name “Sif “. This is the name of the spouse of Thor. Sif is related linguistically to the word Sippe, kinship, although the relationship is veiled or concealed. Occultly, however, Sif signifies the Group Soul of the individual community from which the individual emerges. Sif is the Being who unites herself with the God of the individual ‘I’, with Thor, the bestower of the individual ‘I’. The individual perceives Sif and Thor as the Beings who endowed him with his ‘I’. It was in this way that Nordic man experienced them at a time when the peoples in other regions of Europe had already been given other tasks in preparing man's ego-development.

Each individual people had its appointed task; chief amongst them was that homogeneous group of peoples, that widely distributed folk community whom we know by the name of Celts. It was the responsibility of the ancient Celtic Folk Spirit, who, as we know from earlier lectures, was later given quite different tasks, to educate the still youthful ‘I’ of the peoples of Europe. To this end it was necessary that the Celts themselves should receive an education and instruction which was mediated directly from the higher world. Hence it was entirely appropriate that through their Initiates, the Druid priests, the Celts should transmit to other nations instruction received from higher worlds and which they could not have acquired of themselves.

The whole of European culture is a legacy of the European Mysteries. The progressive Folk Souls are always the leaders of the collective culture of mankind as it unfolds. But at the time when these European Folk Spirits enjoined upon men to act more on their own initiative it was necessary that the Mysteries should gradually withdraw. Hence with the withdrawal of the Celtic element there followed a gradual withdrawal of the Mysteries into more secret places. At the time of the ancient Celts the Mysteries established a much more direct relationship between the spiritual Beings and the people, because the ‘I’ was still attached to the group-soul-life and yet the Celtic element was to bring the gift of the ‘I’ to the other Germanic tribes. Thus in the period preceding the evolution proper of the Northern and Germanic peoples, the Mystery teachings could be given to European civilization only by the ancient Celtic Mysteries. These Mystery teachings allowed just so much to be revealed as was necessary in order to establish a basis for the whole culture of Europe. Now the most diverse Folk Souls and Folk Spirits were able to draw nourishment from this old culture by mingling with the widely diverse racial fragments, national communities and folk elements, and they brought the ‘I’ into ever new situations in order to nurture it, the ‘I’ which was struggling to free itself from its attachment to the group-soul.

After the old Greek culture had to a certain extent reached its high point in the fulfillment of its special mission, we see a totally different aspect of this same mission in the spirit of ancient Rome and its various stages of culture. We have already mentioned that the several post-Atlantean civilizations follow upon one another in strict sequence. If we wish to have an overall picture of the successive stages of post-Atlantean civilization we may summarize them as follows: the old Indian culture worked upon the human etheric body. Hence the remarkable wisdom and clairvoyant insight of the ancient Indian culture, because—after the development of special human capacities—it was a culture reflected in the human etheric body. We may envisage the ancient Indian Culture somewhat as follows:

Between the Atlantean epoch and the later post-Atlantean epoch the Indian Folk Spirit developed to the full his inner soul-forces without developing ego-consciousness. He then returned to his activity in the etheric body. The essential element in the ancient Indian culture is that the ancient Indian was able to return again to the etheric body with his highly developed, highly refined faculties of soul and within that body he developed those marvelously delicate forces the later reflection of which we can still see in the Vedas, and in a still more refined form in the Vedanta philosophy. This was only possible because the Indian Folk Soul had achieved a high degree of development before it was conscious of the ‘I’, and this again at a time when man could perceive by means of the forces of the etheric body.

The Persian Folk Soul had not developed so far; its organ of perception was limited to the sentient body or astral body. The Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture was again different. Here the organ of perception was the Sentient Soul; and the characteristic of the Egypto-Chaldean culture was the ability to work in the Sentient Soul. The Graeco-Latin Folk Spirit was related to the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in which he was active. He himself was only able to work upon this Intellectual Soul because the Intellectual Soul, in its turn, had a kind of psychic counterpart in the etheric body. But the form of cosmogony that now emerged in Greece was, to some extent, less real, less clear-cut; it had less the stamp of reality. Whilst the form of cognition in the ancient Indian culture was directly related to the activity of the etheric body, the Greek culture presented a blurred, pale, lifeless image of reality; as I have already said, it was like the memory of what these people had once experienced, like a memory reflected in their etheric body.

In the other peoples who followed the Greeks we are chiefly concerned with the use of the physical body for the progressive development of the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness-Soul). Hence the Greek culture was a culture that we can only understand from within, if we realize that in this culture what is important in external experience is that which springs from the inner life of the Greeks. On the other hand, the peoples living more towards the West and the North had, under the guidance of their Folk Souls, to turn increasingly towards the external world, towards the phenomena of the physical plane, and to develop whatsoever has a part to play on that plane. This was the special task of the Northern and Germanic peoples which they alone could fulfil, because they still enjoyed the gift, the supremely important gift of the old clairvoyance which enabled them to see into the spiritual world and to incorporate the primeval spiritual experiences which were still vital in their souls into that which was to be established upon the physical plane.

There was one people who, at its later stage, no longer possessed this gift, who had not undergone such preliminary evolution and who had incarnated suddenly on the physical plane before the birth of the human ‘I’ and was only able therefore to attend to whatsoever furthered the development of this ‘I’ on the physical plane, to whatsoever was necessary for its well-being there under the guidance of its Folk Soul, its Archangel. This was the Roman people. Everything that the Roman people had to accomplish for the collective mission of Europe under the guidance of its Folk Spirit was directed to winning recognition for the ‘I’ of man. Hence the Roman people was able to develop human and social relationships. They were the founders of civil law and jurisprudence which are built up purely on the ‘I’. The relation of human ‘I’ to human ‘I’ was the great question in the mission of the Roman people. The Western peoples whose civilizations grew out of the Roman civilization already possessed more of that which, coming from the Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul and from the Spiritual or Consciousness-Soul itself, fructifies the ‘I’ in some way and projects it outward into the world. Therefore all the mingling of races which external history records and which is found in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, in France and Great Britain today, was necessary in order to develop the ‘I’ on the physical plane in accordance with the different nuances of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Spiritual Soul. Such was the great mission of those peoples who gradually developed in the most diverse ways in Western Europe.

All the individual shades of culture, all the particular missions of the peoples of Western Europe can finally be explained by the fact that in the area of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas was to be developed that which could be formed in the ‘I’ through the impulses of the Sentient Soul. If you study the individual folk characters in their positive and negative aspects you will find that the peoples of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas reflect a peculiar fusion of the ‘I’ with the Sentient Soul. You will be able to understand, however, the peculiar characteristics of those peoples who, until recent times, lived on the soil of France, if you study the growth and fusion of the Intellectual Soul with the ‘I’. The great worldwide achievements of a country such as Great Britain can be attributed to the fact that the impulse of the Spiritual Soul has penetrated into the human ‘I’. With the world mission of the British Empire is also associated parliamentary forms of government and the founding of constitutional rights. The union of the Spiritual Soul with the human ego had not yet been realized inwardly. If you recognize how this union between the Spiritual Soul and the ‘I’ that was oriented outwards originated, you will find that the great historical conquests of the inhabitants of that island proceed from this impulse. You will also find that the establishment of parliamentary forms of government at once becomes comprehensible if one realizes that, in consequence of this, an impulse of the Spiritual Soul was to find expression on the plane of world-history.

Thus cultural diversities were a necessity, for the individual peoples had to be guided through the many stages of ego development. If we had sufficient time to enlarge upon these matters we could find examples from history which show the ramifications of these basic forces and how they manifest in the most diverse ways. Thus the peculiar constitution of soul influenced the Western peoples who had not preserved the direct, original memory of the old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world of former times. In the Germanic and Northern regions in later times, that which proceeded directly from a gradual, continuous evolution of the original clairvoyance with which the Sentient Soul had already been imbued, had to develop in a wholly different way. This accounts for that characteristic trait of inwardness which is only the after-effect of a clairvoyant insight experienced in a former age. The task of the Southern Germanic peoples lay primarily in the domain of the Spiritual Soul. The Graeco-Latin age had to develop the Intellectual Soul (or Mind-Soul). But not only this; it had also to include a wonderful development still working in from prehistoric times and imbued with clairvoyant insight. All this was then poured into the Spiritual Soul of the Central European and Scandinavian peoples and its after-effects lived on as an inner disposition of soul. It was the task of the Southern Germanic peoples to develop first of all what pertains to the inward preparation of the Spiritual Soul, imbuing it with spiritual substance of the old clairvoyance, transposed now on to the physical plane.

The philosophies of Central Europe represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the nineteenth century seem far removed from the sphere of mythology. Nevertheless they are simply the products of the highest sublimation of the old clairvoyant insight, of the cooperation of the divine-spiritual Beings within the heart of man. Otherwise it would not have been possible for a Hegel to have looked upon his ideas as realities; it would have been impossible for him to make the strange remark, so characteristic of the man, when, in answer to the question, “What is the abstract?” he replied: “The abstract is for instance an individual who fulfils his daily duties—the carpenter, for example.” What is concrete to the purely abstract theorist was therefore abstract to Hegel. What to the purely abstract theorist are mere thoughts, were to him great, mighty architects of the world. Hegel's philosophy is the final, the most highly sublimated expression of the Spiritual Soul and embodies in the form of pure concepts that which Nordic man still saw as sensible-super-sensible, divine spiritual powers associated with the ‘I’. The ‘I’ of Fichte's philosophy was simply the precipitation of what the God Thor had given to the human soul, only viewed from the standpoint of the Spiritual Soul and clothed seemingly in the barest of thoughts, the thought of “I am”, which is the starting-point of Fichte's philosophy. From the gift of the ‘I’ by the God Thor or Donar to the ancient Nordic peoples from the spiritual world, down to this philosophy, evolution follows a straight line. Thor had to prepare this development for the Spiritual Soul in order that this Soul might have the content appropriate for its task which is to turn towards the external world and to work within that world. But this philosophy is aware not only of the external world of crude empiric experience, but finds in the external world the content of the Spiritual Soul itself and regards nature simply as the idea in its other aspect. The mission of the Nordic Germanic peoples in Central Europe is to ensure that this impulse lives on.

Now since all evolution is a continuous process we must ask ourselves what form it takes. When we look back into ancient times we observe a remarkable phenomenon. We have already said that the first manifestations of ancient Indian culture were expressed through the etheric body after the spiritual forces of soul had been adequately developed. There are however other civilizations which have also preserved the old Atlantean culture and carried it over into the post-Atlantean epoch. Whilst, on the one hand, the ancient Indian was able to return to the etheric body with highly developed faculties of soul and out of the forces of this body created his great civilization and lofty spiritual life, we have, on the other hand, a culture which originated in Atlantis and continued to work on in the post-Atlantean epoch, a culture which owes its origin and development to its emphasis upon the other aspect of the consciousness of the etheric body. This is the Chinese culture. If you bear this connection in mind and remember that the Atlantean culture was directly related to what in our earlier lectures we called the “Great Spirit”; you will understand the peculiarities of Chinese culture. This culture was directly connected with the highest stages of world-evolution. But it still works into the bodies of men today and from an entirely different angle. It seems very likely, therefore, that these two civilizations, the two great polarities of the post-Atlantean epoch, will clash at some future time—the Indian which, within certain limits, is capable of development, and the Chinese that isolates itself and remains static, repeating what existed in the old Atlantean epoch. One literally receives an occult, scientific, poetic impression if one follows the evolution of the Chinese Empire, if one thinks of the Great Wall of China which sought to exclude completely everything which originated in primeval times and had been developed in the post-Atlantean epoch. Something like an occult, poetic feeling steals over one if one compares the Wall of China with what had once existed in former times. I can give only the barest indications about these matters. If you compare them with the existing findings of science you will find how extraordinary illuminating they are. Let us consider clairvoyantly the old continent of Atlantis which will be found where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, between Africa and Europe on the one side and America on the other. This continent was encircled by a warm stream which, strange as it may seem, was seen clairvoyantly to flow from the South through Baffin Bay towards the North of Greenland, encircling it. Then, turning eastward, it gradually cooled down. Long before the continents of Russia and Siberia had emerged, it flowed past the Ural mountains, changed course, skirted the Eastern Carpathians, debauched into the region now occupied by the Sahara and finally reached the Atlantic Ocean in the neighbourhood of the Bay of Biscay. Thus it followed a strictly delimited course. Only the last remaining traces of this stream are still extant. This stream is the Gulf Stream which at that time encircled the Atlantean continent. Now you will recall that in their psychic life the Greeks experienced a memory of the spiritual worlds. The picture of Oceanus which is a memory of that Atlantean epoch arose within them. Their picture of the world, their cosmogony, was very near the truth because it was derived from the old Atlantean epoch. The stream that flowed southward via Spitzbergen as a warm current and gradually cooled, etc. followed a strictly delimited course. This circumscribed course was unmistakably echoed in the Chinese culture, a culture circumscribed by the Great Wall and which had been brought over from Atlantis. The Atlantean civilization had as yet no history; hence the Chinese civilization also has preserved an element of the unhistorical. It preserves something of the pre Indian culture, something surviving from old Atlantis.

Let us now describe the further progress of the Germanic and Nordic Folk Spirit. What consequences will ensue when a Folk Spirit so directs his people that the Spirit Self in particular can develop? Let us remember that the etheric body was developed in the ancient Indian epoch, the sentient body in the Persian, the Sentient Soul in the Egypto-Chaldean, the Intellectual Soul (or Mind-Soul) in the Graeco-Latin, the Spiritual Soul (or Consciousness-Soul) in our present epoch which is not yet concluded. The next epoch will see the invasion of the Spiritual Soul by the Spirit Self, so that the Spirit Self shall irradiate the Spiritual Soul. This is the task of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization and must be prepared for gradually. This civilization which must be preeminently a receptive one, for it must reverently await the influx of the Spirit Self into the Spiritual Soul, is being prepared by the peoples of Western Asia and their outposts in Eastern Europe, the Slavonic peoples. The latter with their Folk Souls were the outposts of the coming sixth post-Atlantean epoch for the very good reason that future contingencies must to a certain extent be prepared beforehand, must already be anticipated in order to prepare the ground for future development. It is extremely interesting to study these outposts of a Folk Soul who is preparing himself for future epochs. This accounts for the peculiar character of the Slavonic peoples who are our immediate Eastern neighbours. In the eyes of the Western European their whole culture gives the impression of being in a preparatory stage and in a curious way, through the medium of their outposts, they present that which in spirit is wholly different from any other mythology. We should give a false impression of these Eastern outposts as a future’ civilization if we were to compare them with the culture of the Western European peoples who enjoy a continuous, unbroken tradition which is still rooted in, and has its source in the old clairvoyance. The peculiarity attaching to the souls of these Eastern European peoples is reflected in the whole attitude they have always shown when the question of their relations to the higher worlds arose. In comparison with our ‘mythology’ in Western Europe with its individual deities, their (i.e. the Slavonic peoples) relation to the higher worlds is totally different. What this Slavonic ‘mythology’ presents to us as the direct outpouring of the inner being of the people may be compared to the anthroposophical conception of successive planes or worlds through which we prepare ourselves to understand a higher spiritual culture. We find in the East, for example, the following conception: the West has been moulded by the influence of successive and related cultures. In the East we find, in the first place, a distinct consciousness of a world of the Cosmic Father. Everything that is creatively active in air and fire, in all the elements in and above the Earth, is embodied in the concept of the Heavenly Father, in one seemingly great, all-embracing idea which is at the same time an all-embracing feeling. Just as we think of the Devachanic world as fructifying our Earth, so this Divine world, the world of the Father, draws nigh from the East, fructifying that which is experienced as the Mother, the Spirit of the Earth. We have no other expression and can think of no other way of picturing the whole Spirit of the Earth than in the fertilization of Mother Earth. Instead of individual deities we have then two contrasting worlds. And confronting these two worlds as a third world is that which we feel to be the Blessed Child of these two worlds. This Blessed Child is not an individual being, not an emotional feeling, but something that is the creation of the Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother. The relation of Devachan to the Earth is perceived in this way from the spiritual world. The birth of new life, the coming of springtime, and that which grows and multiplies in the material body is felt as something wholly spiritual; and that which grows and multiplies in the soul is perceived as the world which at the same time is felt to be the Blessed Child of the Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother. Universal as these conceptions are, we find them among the outposts of the Slavonic peoples who have advanced westwards. In no Western European mythology is this conception so universal. In the West we find clearly defined deities; but they are not the same as those which we depict in our spiritual cosmogony; these are more nearly represented by the Heavenly Father, the Earth Mother and the Blessed Child of the East. In the conception of the Blessed Child there is again a world which permeates another world. It is a world that is envisaged as a separate world because it is associated with the physical sun and its light. The Slavonic element also recognizes this Being—though different, of course, in conception and feeling—which we have so often met with in Persian mythology; it recognizes the Sun Being who sheds his blessings upon the other three worlds, so that the destiny of man is woven into creation, into the Earth, through the fertilization of the Earth Mother by the Heavenly Father and through that which the Sun Spirit weaves into both these worlds. A fifth world is that which embraces everything spiritual. The Eastern European feels the spiritual world underlying all the forces of nature and all animate beings. We must think of this as a wholly different sentient response, as associated more perhaps with the phenomena, creations and beings of nature.

We must think of this Slavonic soul as being able to see entities in natural phenomena, to see not only the physical and sensory aspects, but also the astral and spiritual. Hence the Slavonic soul conceived of a vast number of Beings in this strange spiritual world which we can at best compare with the world of the Elves of Light. The spiritual world which is looked upon in Spiritual Science as the fifth world is approximately the world which dawns in the hearts and minds of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Whatever name we attach to it is of no importance; what is of importance are the subtle shades and gradations of feelings of the Slavonic peoples and that the concepts which characterize this fifth plane or spiritual world are to be found in Eastern Europe. In this frame of mind this world of Eastern Europe was preparing for that Spirit which is to pour the Spirit Self into man in anticipation of the epoch when the Spiritual Soul shall be uplifted to receive the Spirit Self in the sixth post Atlantean age which is to succeed our own. We meet with this in a unique manner not only in the creations of the Folk Souls who are as I have just described them, but we find it remarkably anticipated in the diverse manifestations of Eastern Europe and its culture.

It is most interesting to observe bow the Eastern European expresses his natural receptivity to pure Spirit by assimilating Western European culture with great devotion, thus looking forward prophetically to the time when he will be able to unite something even greater with his being. Hence also his limited interest in isolated aspects of this Western European culture. He absorbs what is offered him more in broad outlines, ignoring the details, because he is preparing himself to assimilate that which is to enter mankind as the Spirit Self. It is particularly interesting to see how, under this influence, it has been possible for Eastern Europe to develop a much more advanced conception of the Christ than Western Europe, except in those areas of the West where the conception of the Christ has been introduced by Spiritual Science. Amongst those who do not accept the teachings of Spiritual Science the most advanced conception of Christ is that of the Russian philosopher, Solovieff. His conception of Christ is such that it can only be understood by students of Spiritual Science because he lifts it to ever higher planes and reveals its infinite potentialities, showing that our understanding of Christ today is only a beginning, because the Christ Impulse has only been able to reveal to mankind a fraction of what it holds in store. But if we look at the conception of Christ as presented by Hegel, for example, we find that Hegel understood Him as only the most refined, the most sublimated Spiritual Soul could understand Him. But Solovieff's conception of Christ is very different. He fully recognizes the dual nature of this conception. He rejects the endless theological polemics which in reality rest upon deep misunderstandings, because ordinary conceptions are inadequate for an understanding of the dual nature of Christ, and because they fail to develop in us any realization that the two aspects, the Human and the Divine, must be clearly distinguished. The concept of Christ rests upon a clear realization of what took place when the Christ Spirit entered into the man Jesus of Nazareth who had already developed all the necessary attributes. We must first of all understand the two natures of Christ and the union of both at a higher stage. As long as we have not grasped this duality, we have not understood the Christ in all His fullness. Only that philosophical understanding can achieve this which foresees that man himself will participate in a culture in which his Spiritual Soul will be able to receive the Spirit Self, so that in the sixth epoch of civilization man will feel himself to be a duality in whom the higher nature will curb the lower.

Solovieff carries this duality into his conception of Christ and emphasizes that this conception can be meaningful only if one accepts the existence of a divine and human nature which can only be understood if one recognizes that their cooperation is a reality, that they form not an abstract, but an organic unity. Solovieff already recognizes that we must think of this Being as possessing two centres of will. If you accept the teachings of Spiritual Science concerning the true significance of the Christ Being in their original form which stemmed, not from an imaginary, but from a spiritually real Indian influence, you will then have to think of Christ as having developed in His three bodies the capacities of feeling, thinking and willing. It is a human feeling, thinking and willing into which the Divine feeling, thinking and willing descends. The European man will only assimilate this completely when he has risen to the sixth stage of civilization. This had been prophetically expressed in Solovieff's anticipatory conception of Christ which announces the dawn of a later civilization. This philosophy of Eastern Europe therefore reaches far beyond that of Hegel and Kant, and in the presence of this philosophy one suddenly senses the first stirrings of a later development. It is far in advance because this conception of Christ is felt to be a prophetic anticipation, the dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization. Consequently the whole Christ Being, the whole significance of Christ occupies a central place in philosophy and thus becomes totally different from the Western European conceptions of it. The conception of Christ, in so far as it has been developed outside Spiritual Science and is conceived as a living substance, as a living spiritual entity which shall permeate all social life and social institutions—which is felt as a Personality in whose service man finds himself as ‘man endowed with Spirit Self’—this Christ-Personality is portrayed in a wonderfully concrete manner in Solovieff's various expositions of St. John's Gospel and its opening words. Only if we stand upon the ground of Spiritual Science can we comprehend Solovieff's profound interpretation of the sentence, “In the Beginning was the Word or Logos”, and how differently St. John's Gospel is understood by a philosophy which in a remarkable way anticipates the future.

If, on the one hand, Hegel's philosophy marks a high point, something that is born out of the Spiritual Soul as the highest philosophical achievement, this philosophy of Solovieff, on the other hand, provides the seed in the Spiritual Soul for the philosophy of the Spirit Self which will be incorporated in the sixth cultural epoch. There is perhaps no greater contrast than that eminently Christian conception of the State which hovers as a great ideal before Solovieff as a dream of the future, that Christian conception of the social State which takes everything implicit in that conception in order to present it as an offering to the in-streaming Spirit Self, in order to hold it up as an ideal of the future to be Christianized by the powers of the future—there is indeed no greater contrast than this idea of Solovieff's of a Christian community in which the Christ conception lies wholly in the future and the Divine State of St. Augustine who accepts, it is true, the Christ idea, but whose Divine State is simply the Roman State with Christ incorporated in the Roman idea of the State. What provides the knowledge for the emergent Christianity of the future is the decisive question. In Solovieff's State Christ is the blood which circulates in the body social, and the essential point is that the State is envisaged as a concrete personality so that it will act as a living spiritual entity, but at the same time will fulfil its mission with all the idiosyncrasies of a personality. No other philosophy is so deeply permeated by the Christ idea—the Christ idea which is anticipated in Spiritual Science at a higher level—and yet at the same time has remained so long in the germinal stage. Everything that we find in the East, from the make-up of the people to its philosophy, appears to us as something which contains only the germinal beginning of a future evolution and which, therefore, had also to submit to the special education of the Time Spirit of ancient Greece, the guiding Spirit of exoteric Christianity who was entrusted with the mission of becoming later on the Time Spirit for Europe. The make-up of this people whose task will be to develop the seed of the sixth culture-epoch had from the very beginning to be not only educated, but nursed and nurtured by that Time Spirit. And so we can literally say—and here Father concept and Mother concept lose their dual aspect—that the make-up of the Russian people which is destined to evolve gradually into the Folk Soul, was not only educated, but was nursed and nurtured by that which as we have seen, had been developed out of the old Greek Time Spirit and had then assumed externally another rank.

Thus the various missions are distributed between Western, Central, Northern and Eastern Europe. I wished to give you an indication of these various missions. On the basis of these indications I propose to add further observations and show what the Europe of the future will be like, a future that will ensure that we must form our ideals on the basis of such knowledge. I propose to show how, through this influence, the Germanic and Nordic Folk Spirit is gradually transformed into a Time Spirit.

We have seen that there is a significant difference between knowledge of the spiritual world such as has existed through all the ages and the particular form of knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual to which the organic constitution of the Hebrews enabled them to aspire. Through their progenitor Abraham they had inherited a physical constitution in which there had been implanted an organ whereby, to, the extent possible through knowledge transmitted by way of the senses, men were to be able to have actual experience of the Divine-Spiritual, not merely vague inklings. Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual has existed everywhere and at all times, but this knowledge of the Eternal was attained in the Mysteries, on the path of Initiation. A distinction must be made between knowledge acquired as the result of individual development through specially devised methods and knowledge of the spiritual world that is normal in some particular epoch and connected with the fulfilment of a definite mission in the evolution of humanity.

In Atlantis the normal form of knowledge was astral-clairvoyant perception of the Divine-Spiritual. But in the times of the ancient Hebrews the normal form of exoteric knowledge of the spiritual world became dependent upon a particular physical organ. It has already been said that in the people of Abraham this knowledge arose in the form of a feeling that the Divine was united with their inmost being. It was therefore inner knowledge, a realisation of the Divine in the deepest core of being that had been made possible.

But this inner realisation of the Divine-Spiritual did not immediately enable a man to say: When I sink into my own being, striving to fathom its depths, I find the drop of the Divine Spirit that can give me knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual by which the outer world too is permeated.—This experience was not immediately possible—not, indeed, until the appearance of Christ in the evolution of humanity. The Hebrew people could experience the Divine only through participating in their Folk-Spirit. When a man felt himself to be a member of his people as a whole, as distinct from a separate individuality, when he felt that through his blood he belonged to a sequence of generations—then he became aware of the presence of the Divine; his consciousness of Jahve lay in the Folk-consciousness, in the very blood of his people. Hence in the spiritual-scientific sense it is not correct to speak of the God Jahve or Jehovah merely as the God of Abraham. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—he is the Being who passes on from generation to generation, manifesting himself in the Folk-consciousness in and through individual men.

The great advance of this form of knowledge to thc Christian form lies in the fact that the latter recognises in each single individual what ancient Hebrew knowledge could reach only by contemplation of the Folk-Spirit, of the Spirit flowing in the blood of the generations. Thus Abraham might have said: According to the covenant that has been made with me, I shall be the founder of a people through my descendants; in the blood flowing down the generations descending from me there will live the God we venerate as the Highest, who reveals himself to us in our Folk-consciousness.—This became the normal experience of that time.

As already said, at all times and through all the epochs there has existed higher knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual. This knowledge, acquired in the Mysteries, is not dependent upon any of the other, special forms of cognition. In ancient Atlantis every human being was endowed with a certain astral-etheric clairvoyance enabling him to gaze into the divine-spiritual ground of existence; by developing his inner faculties he could then acquire knowledge that was. available in the Mysteries or Oracles. Also during the epoch when the spiritual knowledge characteristic of the Hebrews was the normal form, it was still possible in certain sanctuaries for man to experience the Divine while out of the body but not while in the body as in the case of the people of Abraham; in the eternal part of his being a man could rise to vision of the Divine-Spiritual.

You can readily imagine that one thing was essential for Abraham. He had experienced the Divine-Spiritual in his own special way, through knowledge acquired by means of a physical organ; this was how he had learnt to know the supreme God. To become a living power in evolution, however, it was infinitely important for him to know that the God revealed in the Folk-consciousness of the Hebrew people was identical with the God venerated in the Mysteries of all ages as the creative Deity. It was therefore necessary for Abraham to be able to identify his God with the God revealed in the Mysteries, and that was only possible upon one very definite premise. Upon one very definite premise the certainty could be given him that the powers manifesting themselves in thc Folk-consciousness were identical with those manifesting in a higher form in the Mysteries. To understand what this certainty implied, we must turn our minds to a fact closely connected with the evolution of humanity.

In the book Occult Science you can read that in ancient Atlantis there were Initiates known as “Priests of the Oracles”—the actual names are not of essential significance. One of these great Initiates was the leader of all the Atlantean Oracles; he was the Initiate of the Sun-Oracle, in contrast to the subordinate Oracle-centres to which the Mercury-, Mars-, Jupiter-, Initiates, and so forth, belonged. I have said too that this great Initiate of the Sun-Oracle was also the leader of the civilizing colony which, having moved from the West across to the East, from Atlantis to the interior of Asia, spread out from there to inaugurate post-Atlantean culture and civilization. This mighty Initiate—for such he was, already at that time—withdrew to secret centres in the heart of Asia, and made it possible for the wise men known as the holy Rishis to become such illustrious Teachers of their people. And it was he, this great and mysterious Initiate, who conferred Initiation upon Zarathustra.

The Initiation conferred upon Zarathustra was not the same as that received by the Rishis, for their tasks were different. Through their Initiation the Rishis were able, when their inner faculties had further developed, to give utterance as it were out of themselves to the great secrets of existence. Thereby they became the illustrious Teachers of pre-Vedic, ancient Indian culture. Though their powers were awakened by means specially devised, they were otherwise on a par with the old Atlantean clairvoyant faculties, but they were distributed among the seven Rishis individually. Like the leaders of the several Oracle-centres, each of the seven Rishis had his own particular sphere and task. But a whole collegium spoke when any one of the seven voiced what he knew of the primeval wisdom. The great Sun-Initiate who brought the old Atlantean wisdom from the West across to the East passed it on in a particular form to those who were to become the bearers of post-Atlantean culture. He imparted it to Zarathustra in a different form, enabling him to speak in the way I have already indicated.

The Rishis declared that in order to reach the highest realm of divine-spiritual existence, everything in the surrounding world, everything presented to the outer senses, must be regarded as maya or illusion; man must turn away from this outer world and sink into his inner being: then there will dawn in him a world entirely different from the one out-spread before him in everyday life.—To ascend into the spheres of divine-spiritual existence by turning away from the illusory world of maya, by developing the inner life—such was the teaching of the Rishis of ancient India.

In contrast to this, Zarathustra did not teach men to turn away from what is outwardly manifest. He did not say: everything external is maya and we must turn away from it. He said : this maya is the revelation, the actual garment of divine-spiritual existence. We may not turn away from it—on the contrary, it is our duty to fathom it. We must conceive of the Sun's body of light as thc outer texture in which Ahura Mazdao lives and weaves!

In a certain sense, therefore, the gist of Zarathustra's teaching was the opposite of that given by the ancient Rishis. The essential significance of post-Indian civilization lay in the fact that its task was to impress upon the outer world the fruits of man's spiritual activity. As we heard, Zarathustra transmitted to Hermes and to Moses the greatest gifts that were his to bestow. In order that the wisdom of Moses might become fruitful in the right way and work as a seed, it had to take root in the people who were the descendants of Abraham. Abraham was the first into whom was implanted the organ for acquiring consciousness of Jahve; but it was essential for him to know that the God who could announce his presence inwardly to physical faculties of cognition, was speaking with the same voice as the eternal, all-pervading God of the Mysteries, save that he was revealing himself here in the form in which Abraham was able to understand him. It is not possible for a Being of such lofty rank as the great Atlantean Sun-Initiate to speak without more ado in words that are intelligible to those who live at some particular time and have a special mission. An Individuality as exalted as the great Sun-Initiate is one who leads an eternal existence, of whom it was truly said—indicating the hallmark of eternity—that he was without name or age, ‘without father, without mother, having neither beginning of days nor end of life’. (Heb. VII, 3). A figure of this eminence in the evolution of humanity is only able to manifest by assuming a form whereby he can establish relationship with those to whom he is to reveal himself. Thus in order to impart the necessary enlightenment to Abraham, the great Teacher of the Rishis and of Zarathustra assumed a form in which he bore the etheric body of Abraham's original forefather; it was the etheric body of Shem, the son of Noah, and it had been preserved as the etheric body of Zarathustra had been preserved for Moses. The great Initiate of the Sun-Mystery used the etheric body of Shem in order to reveal himself to Abraham and be understood by him. This meeting between Abraham and the great Sun-Initiate is referred to in the Old Testament as the meeting of Abraham with Melchisedek, or Malek-Zadek as it has become customary to call him—the ‘king and priest of the most high God’. (Gen. XIV, 18; Heb. V, 6, 1o ; VII, 1-3). It was a meeting of supreme, world-embracing significance. In order that Abraham should not be utterly dumbfounded, the great Sun-Initiate manifested himself in the etheric body of Shem, the progenitor of the Semites. And the Bible points, most significantly, to something that is unfortunately all too little understood, namely, to the source of that which Melchisedek was able to impart to Abraham. What was this? He could impart the mystery of Sun-existence which Abraham could naturally only under-stand in his own way. The same mystery lay behind the revelation that had been announced, as a prophecy, by Zarathustra.

To his chosen pupils Zarathustra spoke of Ahura Mazdao, the spiritual Being behind the Sun's body of light, saying in effect: Direct your gaze to a power that is behind the Sun, that is not yet united with the Earth but will onc day descend to the Earth and pour into Earth-evolution!—Realising that Zarathustra could only make a prophetic announcement that Christ, the Sun-Spirit, would come in a human body, we shall be aware that even greater profundities of the Sun-Mystery had to be revealed to those who were to prepare for and subsequently be instrumental in bringing about the incarnation of Christ on the Earth. This deeper revelation was made possible because, at the meeting referred to, the same Being who had been Zarathustra's Teacher brought influence to bear upon Abraham from the same source as that from which Christ's influence was eventually to pour. This again is indicated symbolically in the Bible where it is said that Melchisedek, king of Salem, this ‘priest of the most high God’, brought to Abraham bread and wine. (Gen. XVI, 18). Bread and wine were dispensed on another, later occasion—when for those who were believers the Christ-Mystery was given expression in the institution of Holy Communion. The emphasis laid upon the similarity of the sacrificial acts points to the fact that the source of the impulses given by Melchisedek and by Christ was one and the same.

Thus through Melchisedek an influence emanating from a Power that would subsequently come down to the Earth was to be brought to bear in advance upon Abraham, the great preparer of the later event. As the result of this meeting the realisation dawned upon Abraham that the source of the power he felt within him and venerated under the name of Jahve or Jehovah as the loftiest reality of which he could conceive, was also the source of the consciousness of the supreme, all-pervading Godhead—consciousness such as was gained by Initiates in the realm of earthly knowledge too. Abraham was now able to carry this consciousness to a further stage.—A new and different experience came to him. He realised that in actual fact the blood flowing through the generations of the Hebrew people was to contain something only to be compared with what was revealed in the Mysteries when clairvoyant vision was directed to the secrets of cosmic existence and the language of the Cosmos understood.

I have already spoken of how, in the Mysteries, secrets of the Cosmos were expressed in terms derived from the stars and constellations. There were times when the teachers in the Mysteries made use of words and images taken from the courses of the stars and their mutual relationships. Such images were a means of expressing what man experiences spiritually when he attains consciousness of the Divine-Spiritual.

What was it that the Mystery-wisdom was able to read in this stellar script? The secrets of the Godhead pervading the world! The order of the stars was the visible expression of the Godhead. Men turned their gaze to the heavens, saying: There the Godhead reveals himself; the order and harmonies of the stars are for us the manifestation of the Divine. According to this view, therefore, the God of all the worlds was made manifest in the order of the stars.

Thus if the same God were to be made manifest in a special way in the mission of the Hebrew people, the manifestation must necessarily be an expression of the same order as that governing the courses of the stars in the Cosmos. Through the blood of the generations as the outer instrument of the Jahve-revelation, there must be expressed the same order as that made manifest in the courses of the stars. To put it differently: in the sequence of the generations, in the blood-kinship of Abraham's descendants, there must be a mirror-image, a reflection, of the stellar script in the heavens. Hence the promise made to Abraham: The ordering of thy descendants shall be that of the stars in heaven! (Genesis, XXIII, 17.) Such is the correct version of the sentence that is usually rendered to mean that the descendants would be as numerous as the stars in heaven.—This implies number only and is not the true meaning. The true meaning is that the line of the descendants was to be in accordance with an order perceptible in the groupings of the stars, which in turn arc an expression of the speech of the Gods. Looking upwards, men beheld an order such as is manifest in the Zodiac. The positions and relation-ships of the planets in the Zodiac formed constellations from which was drawn the language used to proclaim the deeds of the Gods in the Universe. The firm bond demonstrated in the Zodiac and in the relations of the planets to the twelve constellations was to come to expression in the blood-kinship of the descendants of Abraham.

The twelve sons of Jacob, also the twelve tribes of the Hebrew people are therefore images of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. Just as the language of the Gods is pressed in these twelve constellations, so does Jahve manifest himself in the blood flowing through the generations of the Hebrew people, divided into thc twelve tribes descending from the twelve sons of Jacob. Conditions established in the Zodiac are designated by the name of the planet concerned—Venus, Mercury, Sun, as the case may be. And we have heard how certain parallelisms can be drawn between particular periods in the historical life of the Hebrew people and the paths of the planets through the Zodiac. Thus there is a parallelism between the age of David, the royal minstrel, and Hermes or Mercury; similarly, between the period of the Babylonian captivity—when we see the form taken by the Jahve-revelation six centuries before our era as the result of a new impulse—and the planet Venus.

It was to be indicated to Abraham that there is a parallelism between the place of a personality such as David in the line of generations, and the position of Mercury in the Zodiac. The tribe of Judah corresponds to the constellation of Leo and the advent of David into that tribe would correspond, in the history of the Hebrew people, to the cosmic phenomenon of the occultation of Leo by Mercury (Mercury in Leo). Such occultations are indicated in many places: in the actual succession, in the conferments of kingly or priestly offices, in the battles or victories of one tribe or another, indeed in the whole history of the Hebrews. All this was implicit in the momentous words: Thy descendants shall be ordered in accordance with the harmony of the stars in heaven.—We must never accept the trivial interpretations so often placed upon records founded on occultism but realise their immense profundity.

Thus there is actual evidence of order prevailing in the generations enumerated in the Gospel of St. Matthew. This evangelist has shown how the blood of the body that was to receive the Zarathustra-Individuality was prepared in a very special way to be instrumental in bringing about the manifestation of Christ on the Earth.

What bad been achieved through the forty-two generations from Abraham to Joseph was that blood, blended in accordance with the laws of the stars and of the holy Mysteries, had finally been produced. In the composition of this blood—which was needed by the Zarathustra-Individuality for the fulfilment of his great mission—there was inner order and harmony, reflecting one of the most beautiful and significant principles manifest in the heavenly constellations. The blood available for Zarathustra was therefore an image of the Cosmos, having been prepared through generations in accordance with cosmic law. The basis of the record we now possess in a modified form in the Gospel of St. Matthew is this profound mystery of the evolution of a people as the image of cosmic evolution.

Those who were the first to know something of the sublime Christ-Mystery felt that the very blood of Jesus of Nazareth of whom the Gospel of St. Matthew tells was a reflected image of the Cosmos, of the Spirit holding sway in the Cosmos. And they expressed this secret by saying: The Spirit of the whole Cosmos lived in the blood wherein was to dwell the Ego who then became Jesus of Nazareth.—This physical body must therefore have been an imprint of the ruling Spirit of the Cosmos. Hence it was said originally that the power underlying the composition of the blood in the body of Zarathustra when incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth, was the Spirit of our whole Cosmos, the Spirit which, in the primal beginning, after the Sun had separated from the Earth, brooded over and permeated with warmth what had emerged into manifestation in the course of the evolution of worlds. From the lectures given in Munich to which reference has already been made, we know that the sentence with which Genesis begins—B'rescht bara elohim et haschamayim v'et et ha'aretz'—should not be translated into the trivial words of modern language which no longer convey the ancient meaning. Instead of ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, the rendering should convey the following meaning: In what has come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon, the Elohim pondered, in cosmic soul-activity, the outwardly manifesting and the inwardly active, throughout which darkness prevailed; but there spread out and into this, brooding over it, permeating it with warmth—as a hen radiates warmth into the egg—the creative Spirit of the Elohim, Ruach-Elohim.—This same Spirit created the heavenly order that is expressed in a certain way in the constellations of the stars. The original Initiates of the Christ-Mystery felt that the blend of blood in Jesus of Nazareth was an image of the work accomplished by Ruach-Elohim throughout the Cosmos. And of the blood that had been prepared in this way for the great event, they said: it was ‘created by the Spirit of the Universe, the spiritual Being called “Ruach” in that significant passage in Genesis beginning "B'reschit bara ...” ’.¹

Such is the sacred meaning, infinitely greater than any superficial interpretation, of ‘the conception by the Holy Spirit of the Universe’; it is also the basis of the saying: ‘And she who gave birth to this Being was filled with the power of the Spirit of the Universe.’—If we feel the sanctity of such a Mystery we shall realise that in this way of presenting it there is something infinitely higher than any of the exoteric interpretations of the Virgin Birth. Consideration of just two points in the Bible will enable us to avoid trivial interpretations of this ‘immaculate conception’. The one point is this: Why should the writer of St. Matthew's Gospel have enumerated the whole sequence of generations from Abraham to Joseph if he had wished to indicate that the birth of Jesus of Nazareth had no connection with this line of descent ? He is at pains to show how the blood was led down the generations from Abraham to Joseph; how, then, could he possibly have intended to indicate that the blood of Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with this blood? And the other point of which account must be taken is that in the Hebrew language the gender of ‘Ruach-Elohim’—rendered ‘Holy Spirit' ’ the Bible—is feminine.—We shall speak further of this. I only wanted now to call up a feeling of the sublimity and grandeur of the thought originally underlying this Mystery.

What took place at the beginning of our era, known only to wise men who were initiated into the secrets of cosmic existence, was expressed in the Aramaic language in the original record upon which the Gospel of St. Matthew is based. And it is possible to prove, not only through occultism but through actual philological investigation, that this record was already in existence in the year 71 A.D. The actual way in which the Gospels originated is set forth in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.² By proceeding with exactitude, however, it is possible to show, even through philology, that statements attributing a later date to the Gospel of St. Matthew are not correct, for there is evidence that an original Aramaic script of this Gospel was already extant in the year 71 A.D. comparatively short time, therefore, after the events in Palestine. But as I am concerned here with facts of spiritual science, not of philology, I will quote only one reference in Talmudist literature, the authenticity of which is accepted by Hebrew scholars.

There is a passage in this literature to the effect that Rabbi Gamaliel II was involved in a dispute with his sister over the estate left by their father who had been killed in a fight with the Romans in the year 7o. It is narrated that Rabbi Gamaliel II appeared at the time before a judge who, according to the account, was a so-called Jewish Christian. (Such men not uncommonly occupied offices in the judiciary courts set up by the Romans for the Jews.) A strange incident occurred during the proceedings. The dispute between the Rabbi and his sister was over the inheritance of their father's estate. And before a judge who certainly had some knowledge of Christianity, Rabbi Gamaliel insisted that according to Jewish Law it was only a son, not a daughter, who could inherit, and that the estate therefore passed to him. The judge replied that in the circle where he officiated, the Thora had been set aside, and that as Gamaliel was seeking justice and a verdict from him, he would not give judgment in accordance with Jewish Law but with the Law that had superseded the Thora. As already said, this happened in the year 71—the year after the death of the father of the litigants during the persecution of the Jews. Rabbi Gamaliel's only loophole now was to bribe the judge. This he did, and the following day the judge quoted from the original Aramaic script of St. Matthew's Gospel, to the effect that ‘Christ did not come into the world to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfil it’. The judge believed he could still his conscience for deflecting the Law by maintaining that in allotting the estate to Gamaliel his judgment was in accordance with Christian tenets.

Here we have evidence that in the year 71 A.D. there existed an original Christian script from which words now contained in the Gospel of St. Matthew were taken. The passage in question was actually quoted in Aramaic and thus we have external proof that this original text of St. Matthew's Gospel, part of it at any rate, was then in existence. We have yet to consider the findings of occult investigation on the subject. The above episode has been quoted merely in order to show that when the aid of external scholarship is sought, it is not right to adopt the usual procedure which is to collect all the literature available for academic study but leave out of account the Talmudist writings which are exceedingly important for knowledge even of the exoteric aspect of these things.

Thus there are very good grounds for affixing a comparatively early date to the Gospel of St. Matthew. This alone provides certain exoteric proof that the men who participated in its compilation were living at no great distance of time from the actual happenings in Palestine; the outer circumstances in themselves, therefore, are evidence that nobody could simply have lied to people, saying that Christ Jesus did not live at the beginning of our era. For as not even half a century had yet elapsed, it was a matter of speaking to those who had been actual eye-witnesses and therefore could not be persuaded that certain events had never happened. Exoterically these things are important and they are mentioned here merely as evidence of that aspect of the subject.

We have seen how measures founded on mysteries of cos-mic existence were taken in the evolution of humanity in order to prepare from the 'filtered' blood of the Hebrew people—blood in which the order of the Cosmos itself prevailed—a body in which the great Initiate Zarathustra could reincarnate. For it is of the Zarathustra-Individuality, of him and no other, that the Gospel of Matthew speaks in the first place.

It must not be imagined that everything brought to light here from profound secrets of world-evolution took place quite openly, before thc eyes of all men. Even for contemporaries the events were veiled in deep mystery and comprehensible only to a very few Initiates. Hence it is understandable that such complete silence should have been maintained concerning what came to pass at that time as the greatest of all events in the evolution and history of humanity. And when historians to-clay, basing their views on the records available to them, point out that no mention whatever is made of this event, we shall not be at all surprised but on the contrary regard it as a matter of course.

Having characterized the part played by Zarathustra in the preparation of this great event, we must now consider the many other currents and influences at work immediately before and also immediately after the coming of the Christ, and all the happenings that took place around Him. Preparation for the event had been in process for a long time. We have heard that preparation for the development of the outer sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth had been made by Hermes and Moses as the emissaries of Zarathustra, and by Melchisedek, the bearer of the Sun-Mystery, but there had also been preparation in a different form, constituting as it were a subsidiary stream. But subsidiary though it was, it nevertheless played a part in the wider stream of happenings originating with Zarathustra. This contributory stream came slowly into existence in centres of which external history informs us by calling attention to certain religious sects where men, named by Philo the `Therapeutae', were endeavouring by inner paths to purify and develop their souls, to expel any elements cor-rupted by outer concerns and external knowledge, in order thereby to rise into the sphere of pure Spirit. An offshoot of the sect of the Therapeutae, where this subsidiary stream undenvent still further development, was the community of the Essenes in Asia. All these men in the sects both of the Therapeutae and the Essenes were under a common spiritual guidance. A brief account of them is contained in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.³ To have any exoteric knowledge of this spiritual guidance we must remind ourselves of the lectures given last year on the Gospel of St. Luke and published with that title.⁴ Reference was there made to the mystery of Gautama Buddha, the exoteric aspect of which is also presented in oriental writings, and it was said that one who is to attain Buddhahood in the course of evolution must, to begin with, be a Bodhisattva, as in the case of the Being known in history as the Buddha. He too was a Bodhisattva until the twenty-ninth year of his life as the son of King Suddhodana, and it was not until then that through his inner development he rose to Buddhahood. Many Bodhisattvas work in the course of the evolution of humanity and the Bodhisattva who became Buddha six hundred years before our era is one of those who guide and direct evolution. An individuality who rises from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha does not again incarnate in a physical body on the Earth. From the same lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke we have heard how from the day of the birth of the Jesus of the Nathan line of descent, the power of the Buddha radiated into the etheric body of this child. And we heard that this is not the same Jesus as the Jesus with whom the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily concerned.

An ancient phase of evolution came to a conclusion svith this attainment of Buddhahood by the Bodhisattva, the son of King Suddhodana. In point of fact, this phase of evolution belonged to the same stream as that of the holy Rishis of India; but it was brought to a certain culmination when that Bodhisattva attained the rank of Buddhahood.

When a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, his successor takes his place. This is also narrated in the old Indian legend where it is said that in the spiritual realms, before descending to his final birth, the Bodhisattva who was born as the son of Suddhodana and then rose to Buddhahood, handed to his successor the crown belonging to the office of Bodhisattva. Thus since that time the Bodhisattva who then became Gautama Buddha has been succeeded by the new Bodhisattva who had a particular mission to fulfil in the history of mankind. The task allotted to him was the spiritual guidance of the movement represented in the doctrines of the Therapeutae and Essenes and it was in these communities that his influence worked. During the reign of King Alexander Jannaeus (about 103 to 76 B.c.), a certain Individuality was sent by this Bodhisattva into the communities of the Essenes to be their guide and leader. This Individuality—he is well-known in occultism and also in exoteric Talmudist literature—was the leader of the Essenes about a hundred years before the appearance of Christ Jesus on the Earth.⁵

Thus a hundred years before our era there lived a personality who is not to be confused either with the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel or with the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel; he was a leading figure in the Essene communities and is known in occultism as a herald of Christianity among them. He is also known in Talmudist literature under the name of Jesus, the son of Pandira, Jeshu ben Pandira. He was a great and noble personality, about whom inferior Jewish literature has woven all kinds of fables that have been recently revived, and he must not be confused, as some Talmudists have confused him, with the ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ of whom we are speaking in these lectures. This herald of Christianity among the Essenes is known to us too as Jesus, the son of Pandira; we also know that he was accused of blasphemy and heresy by those to whom the teachings of the Essenes were anathema, and after being stoned was hanged on a tree, in order to add to the punishment the stigma of infamy. This is an occult fact, also recorded in Talmudist literature.

In Jeshu ben Pandira we have to see a personality stand-ing under the guardianship of the present Bodhisattva. The facts are therefore clear.—A stream, as it were accessory to the main Christian stream, originated from the Buddha's successor, from the present Bodhisattva who later on will become the Maitreya Buddha and who sent his emissary into the Essene communities, where in executing his mission he achieved what we shall come to know in the following lectures.

The name ‘Jesus’ is that of the Individuality of whom the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke tell; but it was also the name of that noble personality—regarding whom everything contained in inferior Jewish literature is calumny—who worked in the Essene community a hundred years before our era, was accused of blasphemy and heresy, stoned and finally hanged on a tree.

• 1. See Genesis. Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation. Study of this cycle, particularly of the first two lectures, is indispensable in connection with the above passage.
• 2. Chapter VII.
• 3. Chapter X.
• 4. Notably Lectures Two and Three.
• 5. Appendix II, p. 236.

To link Richard Wagner¹ with mysticism, as we shall do in today's consideration, will easily give rise to objections based on the misconception that to speak about an artist from a particular spiritual-scientific viewpoint is impermissible. Other objections will be directed against mysticism as such.

Today we shall look at Richard Wagner's relation to art on the one hand and mysticism on the other. The objection can be made that Wagner never spoke, or even hinted at, some of the things that will be mentioned. Such an objection is so obvious that anyone would have thought of it before speaking. It must be borne in mind that when a cultural phenomenon such as Richard Wagner is to be considered, one cannot be limited to say only what Wagner spoke about. That would make a discussion on any issue from a higher point of view impossible.

No one would suggest that a botanist or a poet should refrain from expressing what he discovered, or what he felt about plants and other phenomena. When discussing issues, whether cultural or natural, one cannot be limited to say only what the phenomenon conveys. In that case the plant should be able to convey to the botanist the laws of its growth; and the feelings and sentiments it aroused in the poet would be unjustified. The reality is that in the human soul, precisely what the external world is unable to say about itself is revealed.

It is in this sense that what I have to say about the phenomenon that is Richard Wagner must be taken. Certainly a plant knows nothing of the laws, however, it nevertheless grows and develops. Similarly, an artist need not be aware of the laws inherent in his nature of which the observer with spiritual insight is able to speak. The artist lives and creates according to these laws as the plant creates according to laws that are subsequently discovered. Therefore, the objection should not be made that Wagner did not speak about things that will be indicated today.

As regards other objections concerned with mysticism, the fact is that people, educated and uneducated alike, speak of mysticism as of something obscure. In comparison with what is known as the scientific world view, they find it nebulous. This has not always been so. The great mystics of the early Christian centuries, the Gnostics, have thought otherwise, as does anyone with understanding of mysticism. The Gnostics have called it “mathesis,” mathematics, not because mysticism is mathematics, but because genuine mystics have striven for a similar clarity in the ideas they derive from spiritual worlds. Properly understood, mysticism, far from being obscure or sentimental, is in its approach to the world crystal clear. Having now shown that the two kinds of objections are invalid, let us proceed with today's considerations.

Richard Wagner can indeed be discussed from the highest spiritual scientific viewpoint. No seeker after Truth of the nineteenth century strove, his whole life long, more honestly and sincerely to discover answers to the world-riddles than Richard Wagner. His house in Bayreuth he named, “Inner Peace” (Wahnfried), saying that there he found peace from his “doubts and delusions” (sein Wähnen Ruhe fand). These words already reveal a great deal about Richard Wagner.

What is meant by error and delusion is all too well-known to someone who honestly and sincerely pursues the path to higher knowledge. This happens irrespective of whether the spiritual realm a person believes he will discover finds expression through art, or takes some other form. He is strongly aware of the many deluding images that come to block his path and slow his progress. That person knows that the path to higher knowledge is neither easy nor straightforward—that truth is reached only through inner upheavals and tribulations. Moreover, he is aware that dangers have to be met, but also that experiences of inner bliss will be his. A person who travels the path of knowledge will eventually reach that inner peace that is the result of intimate knowledge of the secrets of the world. Wagner's awareness and experience of these things comes to expression when he says: “I name this house ‘Inner Peace’ because here I found peace from error and delusions.” (“Weil hier mein Wahnen Ruhe fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus genannt.”)

Unlike many artists who attempt to create out of fantasy that lacks substance, Wagner saw from the start an artistic calling as a mission of world historical relevance; he felt that the Beauty created by art should also express truth and knowledge. Art was to him something holy; he saw the source of artistic creativity in religious feelings and perceptions. The artist, he felt, has a kind of priestly calling, and that what he, Richard Wagner, offered to mankind should have religious dedication. It should fulfill a religious task and mission in mankind's evolution. He felt that he was one of those who must contribute to their era something based on the fullness of truth and reality.

When spiritual science is properly understood, it will be seen that, far from being a gray theory remote from the real issues, it can help us to understand and to appreciate on his own terms a cultural phenomenon such as Richard Wagner.

Wagner had a basic feeling, an inner awareness, that guided him to the same Truth about mankind's origin and evolution as that indicated by spiritual science. This inner awareness linked him to spiritual science and to all genuine mysticism. He wanted a unification of the arts; he wanted the various branches of art to work together, complementing one another. He felt that the lack, the shortcomings, in contemporary art forms was caused by what he called “their selfishness and egoism. Instead of the various art forms going their separate ways, he saw their working together as an ideal, creating a harmonious whole to which each contributed with selfless devotion. He insisted that art had once existed in such an ideal form. He thought to recognize it in ancient Greece prior to Sophocles,² Euripides³ and others. Before the arts separated, drama and dance, for example, had worked together and had selflessly created combined artistic works. Wagner had a kind of clairvoyant vision of such combined endeavor. Although history does not speak of it, his vision was true and points back to a primordial time when not only the arts but also all spiritual and cultural streams within various people worked together as a harmonious whole.

Spiritual science recognizes that what is known today as art and science are different branches originating from a common root. Whether we go back to the ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, India or Persia, or to our own Germanic origin, everywhere we find primordial cultures where art and science are not separated. However, this is a past that is beyond the reach of external research, and is accessible only to clairvoyant vision.

In the ancient civilizations, art and science formed a unity that was looked upon as a mystery. Mystery centers existed for the cultivation of wisdom, beauty and religious piety before these became separated and cultivated in different establishments.

We can visualize what took place within the mysteries, with in these temples, which were places of learning and also of artistic performances. We can conjure up before our mind's eye the great dramas, seen by those who had been admitted to the mysteries. As I said, ordinary history can tell us nothing of these things. The performances were dramatic musical interpretations of the wisdom attained within the mysteries, and they were permeated with deep religious devotion. A few words will convey what took place in those times of which nothing is known save what spiritual science has to say. Those admitted to the Mysteries came together to watch a drama depicting the world's creation. Such dramas existed everywhere. They depicted how primordial divine beings descended from spiritual heights and let their essence stream out to become world-substance that they then shaped and formed into the various creature's of the kingdoms of nature: the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and that of humans. In other words, divine essence streamed into and formed everything that surrounded us, and it finally celebrated a kind of resurrection within the human soul.

Thoughtful people have always felt that the world is of divine origin, that the divine element attains consciousness in the human soul, and, as it were, looks out through human eyes observing itself in its own creation. This descent and resurrection of the divine element was enacted in Egypt, in the drama of Osiris, and dramatized also at various places of initiation in Greece. Those who were permitted to watch saw how art and knowledge combined to depict in dramatic form the creation of the world. Deep feelings of religious piety were called up in the onlooker by this drama, which might be said to be the archetypal drama. With reverence and awe the onlooker watched the gods descend into matter, to slumber in all beings, and resurrect within human beings. Filled with awe, the onlooker experienced a mood described once by Goethe in the following significant words: “When man's whole being functions as a healthy entity, and he feels the world to be a great, beautiful, worthy and estimable unity; when pleasure in the harmony gives him pure delight, then, had it self-awareness, the whole universe, feeling it had reached its goal, would shout for joy, and admire the pinnacle of its being and achievement.” A wondrous, deeply religious mood filled the hearts of those who watched this drama of the creation of the world.

And not only was a religious mood created, but the drama also conveyed the kind of knowledge that was later imparted in scientific concepts to explain the creation of the world and its beings. However, at that time one received, in the form of pictures, a knowledge that was both scientific and religious. Science and religion were one.

Richard Wagner had a dim feeling that such harmony had once existed. He looked back to a very old culture in ancient Greece that still had a religious character. He saw that in gray antiquity music, drama, dance and architecture did not operate as separate undertakings; they all functioned in conjunction with one another: Knowledge, art and religion were a unity. He concluded that as they separated the arts became self-seeking, egoistical. Wagner looked back as it were to a far distant past when human beings were not so individual, when a person felt as a member of his dass, of his whole tribe, when the folk spirit was still regarded as a concrete reality. In that ancient time a natural selflessness had existed. And the thought came to him that man, in order to become an individual, a personality, had to leave the old clan-community to enable the personal element to assert itself. Only in this way could man become a free being, but the price was a certain degree of egoism.

Wagner looked back to what in a primordial past had held people together in communities, a selflessness that had to be left behind so that human beings could become more and more conscious. He had an intuitive presentiment about the future; he felt that once individual freedom and independence had been attained, humans would have to find the way back to fellowship and caring relationships. Selflessness would have to be consciously regained, and loving kindness once more would have to become a prominent factor of life.

For Wagner the present linked itself with the future, for he visualized as a distant ideal the existence of selflessness within the arts. Furthermore, he saw art as playing a significant role in evolution. Human development and that of art appeared to him to go hand in hand; both became egoistical when they ceased to function as a totality. As we see them today, drama, architecture and dance have gone their independent ways. As humanity grew more and more selfish, so did art. Wagner visualized a future when the arts would once more function in united partnership. Because he saw a commune of artists as a future ideal, he was referred to as “the communist.”

He aimed to contribute all he could to bring forth harmony among the arts; he saw this as a powerful means of pouring into human hearts the selflessness that must form the Basis for a future fraternity. He was a missionary of social selflessness in the sphere of art; he wanted to pour into every soul the impulse of selflessness that brings about harmony among people. Richard Wagner was truly possessed of a deep impulse of a kind that could only arise and be sustained in someone with a deep conviction of the reality of spiritual life. Richard Wagner had that conviction.

Already his work The Flying Dutchman bears witness to his belief in the existence of a spiritual world behind the physical. You must bear in mind that I do not for a moment suggest that Wagner himself was conscious of the things I am indicating. His artistic impulse developed according to spiritual laws, as a plant develops according to laws of which it is not conscious, but which are discovered by the botanist.

When a materialist observes his fellowmen, he sees them as physical entities isolated from one another, their separate souls enclosed within their bodies. He consequently believes that all communication between them can only be of an external physical nature. He regards as real only what one person may say or do to another. However, once there is awareness of a spiritual world behind the physical, one is aware also of hidden influences that act from person to person without a physical agent. Hidden influences stream from soul to soul, even when nothing is outwardly expressed. What a person thinks and feels is not without significance or value for the person towards whom the thoughts and feelings are directed. He who thinks materialistically only knows that one can physically reach and assist another person. He has no notion that his inner feelings have significance for others, or that bonds, invisible to physical sight, link soul to soul. A mystic is well aware of these bonds. Richard Wagner was profoundly aware of their existence.

To clarify what is meant by this, let us look at a significant legend from the Middle Ages that to modern humans is just a legend. However, its author, and anyone who recognizes its mystical meaning, is aware that this legend expresses a spiritual reality. The legend, which is part of an epic, teils us about Poor Henry who suffered from a dreadful illness. We are told that only if a pure maiden would sacrifice herself for him could he be cured of his terrible infliction. This indicates that the love, offered by a soul that is pure, can directly influence and do something concretely for another human life.

Such legends depict something of which the materialist has no notion, namely, that purely spiritually one soul can influence another. Is the maiden's sacrifice for Poor Henry ultimately anything else than a physical demonstration of what a large part of mankind believes to be the mystical effect of sacrifice? Is it not an instance of what the Redeemer on the Cross had bestowed on mankind; is it not an instance of that mystical effect that acts from soul to soul? It demonstrates the existence of a spiritual reality behind the physical that can be sensed by man, and led Wagner to the legend of The Flying Dutchman—the legend of a man so entangled in material existence that he can find no deliverance from it. The Flying Dutchman is with good reason referred to as the “Ahasverus of the sea,” that is, The Wandering Jew of the sea.

Ashasverus' destiny is caused by the fact that he cannot believe in a Redeemer; he cannot believe that someone can guide mankind onwards to ever greater heights and more perfect stages of evolution. An Ashasverus is someone that has become stuck where he is; human beings must ascend stage by stage if they are to progress. Without striving, he unites himself with matter, with external aspects of life, and becomes stuck in an existence that goes on and on, at the same level. He pours scorn on Him that leads mankind upwards, and remains entangled in matter. What does that mean? Existence keeps repeating itself for someone who is completely immersed in external life. Materialistic and spiritual comprehension differ, because matter repeats itself, whereas spirit ascends. The moment spirit succumbs to matter, it succumbs to repetition.

That happens in the case of The Flying Dutchman. Various peoples related this idea to the discoveries of foreign lands; the crossing of oceans and reaching foreign shores was seen as a means of attaining perfection. He who lacked the urge, who did not sense the spirit's call, became stuck in sameness, in what belongs solely to matter. The Flying Dutchman, whose whole disposition is materialistic, is abandoned by the power to evolve, by the power of love, which is the means to ascend to ever greater perfection. He becomes entangled in matter and consequently in the eternal repetition of the same. Those who suffer inability to ascend, who lack the urge to evolve, must come under the influence of a soul that is chaste and pure. Only an innocent maiden's love can redeem the Flying Dutchman.

A certain relationship exists between a soul that is as yet untouched by material life and one that has become entangled in it. Wagner has an instinctive feeling for this fact, and portrays it with great power in his dramas. Only someone with his mystical sense, and perception of the spirit behind the physical, would have the courage to take on a cultural mission of the magnitude Richard Wagner has assigned to himself. It has enabled him to visualize music and drama in ways no one has thought of before. He has looked back to ancient Greece, to a time when various art forms still played an integral part in performances, when music expressed what the art of drama could not express, and eternal universal laws were expressed through the rhythm of dance.

In older works of art, where dance, rhythm and harmony still collaborated, he recognized something of the musical-dramatic element of the artistic works of antiquity. He acquired a unique sense for harmony, for tonality in music, but insisted that contributions from related arts were essential. Something from them must flow into the music. One such related art was dance, not as it has become, but the dance that once expressed movements in nature and movements of the stars. In ancient times, dance originated from a feeling for laws in nature. Man in his own movements copied those in nature. Rhythm of dance was reflected in the harmony of the music. Other arts, such as poetry, whose vehicle is words, also contributed, and what could not be expressed through words was contributed by related arts. Harmonious collaboration existed among dance, music and poetry. The musical element arose from the cooperation of harmony, rhythm and melody.

This was what mystics and also Richard Wagner felt as the spirit of art in ancient times, when the various arts worked together in brotherly fashion, when melody, rhythm and harmony had not yet attained their later perfection. When they separated, dance became an art form in its own right, and poetry likewise. Consequently, rhythm became a separate experience, and poetry no longer added its contribution to the musical element. No longer was there collaboration between the arts. In tracing the arts up to modern times, Wagner noticed that the egoism in art increased as human beings egoism increased.

Let us now look at attempts made by Wagner to create something harmonious within the artistic one-sidedness he faced. This is the sphere that reveals his greatness as he searched for the true nature of art.

To Richard Wagner, Beethoven⁴ and Shakespeare⁵ represented artists who one-sidedly cultivated the two arts he particularly wanted to bring together, music and drama. He only had to look at his own inner being to recognize the impossibility of conveying, merely through words, the whole gamut of human feelings, particularly feelings that do not manifest externally through gestures or words. Shakespeare was in his view a one-sided dramatist because dramatic words on their own are incapable of expressing things of deeper import. Only when inner impulses have become external action, have become part of space and time, can they be conveyed through dramatic art. When watching a drama, one must assume the impulses portrayed to be already experiences that are past. What one witnesses is no longer drama taking place within the. person concerned; it has already passed over into what can be physically seen and heard. Whatever deeper feelings and sensations are the basis for what is portrayed on the stage cannot be conveyed by the dramatist.

In music, on the other hand, Wagner regarded the symphonist, the pure instrumentalist, to be the most one-sided, for he conveyed in wonderful tone and scales the inner drama, the whole range of human feelings, but had no means of expressing impulses once they became gestures, or became part of space and time. Thus, Wagner saw music as able to express the inner life, but unable to convey what came to expression outwardly. Dramatic art, on the other hand, when refusing to collaborate with music, only conveyed impulses when they became externalized.

According to Wagner, Shakespeare conveyed one aspect of dramatic art, and Mozart,⁶ Haydn⁷ and Beethoven another. In Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Wagner sensed something that strove to break away from the one-sidedness of this art form, strove to burst the Shell and become articulate, strove to permeate the whole world and envelop mankind with love. Wagner saw it as his mission not to let this element remain as it was in the Ninth Symphony, but to bring it out still further into space and time. He wanted it not only to be an external expression of a soul's inner drama, but also to flow into words and action. He wanted to present on the stage both aspects of dramatic art: in music, the whole range of inner sensations, and in drama, the aspect of those inner sensations that come to external expression. What he sought was a higher unity of Shakespeare and Beethoven. He wanted the whole of humanity represented on the stage.

When we watch some action taking place on the stage, we should become aware of more than can be perceived by eyes and ears. We should be able to be aware also of deeper impulses residing in the human soul. This aspect caused dissatisfaction in Wagner with the old type of opera. Here the dramatist, the poet and the musician worked separately on a production. The poet wrote his part, the musician then came along and interpreted what was written through music. But the task of music is rather to express what poetry by itself cannot express. Human nature consists of an inner as well as an outer aspect. The inner cannot be portrayed through external means; the outer aspect can indeed be dramatized, but words are incapable of conveying impulses that live within human beings. Music should not be there to illustrate the poetry, but to complete it. What poetry cannot express should be conveyed by music.

That was Wagner's great ideal and the sense in which he wanted to create. He assigned to himself the mission to create a work of art in which music and poetry worked together selflessly. Wagner's basic idea was of mystical origin; he wanted to understand the whole human being, the inner person as well as what he revealed outwardly. Wagner knew that within human beings a higher being resides, a higher self that was only partially revealed in space and time. He sought to understand that higher entity that rises above the everyday. He felt that it must approached from as many sides as possible. His search for the superhuman aspect of man's being, for that which rises above the merely personal, led him to myths. Mythical figures were not merely human, they were superhuman: They revealed the superhuman aspect of a person's being. Characters like Siegfried and Lohengrin do not display qualities belonging to a single human being, but to many. Wagner turned to the superhuman figures portrayed in myths because he sought understanding of the deeper aspects of the human being.

A clear look at his work reveals how deep an insight he had attained into mankind's evolution. In The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal we witness, powerfully presented, great riddles of humanity's existence. They reveal his intuitive perception, his deep feelings for all mankind.

We can do no more than turn a few spotlights on Wagner's inner experiences as an artist. In so doing we soon discover his strong affinity with what could be called "man's mythical past." His particular interest in the figure of Siegfried can easily be understood when seen in connection with his concept of mankind's evolution. Looking back to ancient times, Wagner saw that formerly the bond between human beings was based on selfless love within the confines of a tribe. Human consciousness at that time was duller; he did not yet experience personal independence. Each one felt himself, not so much an individual, but rather as a member of his tribe. He experienced the tribal soul as a reality.

Wagner felt that especially traits in European culture can be traced back to the time when natural instinctive love united human beings in interrelated groups, a time of which spiritual science also speaks when showing that everything in the world evolves, and that today's clear consciousness gradually evolved from a different type, of which there are still residues. In pictures of dream-consciousness Wagner recognized echoes of a former picture-consciousness that had once been the normal consciousness of all mankind. The waking consciousness of today replaced a much duller type; while it lasted, human beings were much closer to one another. As Wagner recognized, those related were bound together by natural love connected with the blood. Not until later did individuality, and with it egoism, assert itself. However, this constitutes a necessary stage in man's evolution.

The subject I shall now bring up will be familiar to those acquainted with spiritual science, but others may find it somewhat strange. The lucid day-consciousness now existing in Europe evolved from the very different consciousness of a primordial human race that preceded our own—a humanity that existed on Atlantis, a continent situated where the Atlantic Ocean is now. Those who take note of what goes on in the world will be aware that even natural science speaks of an Atlantean continent. A scientific journal, Kosmos, recently carried an article about it. Physical conditions on Atlantis were very different; the atmosphere in which the ancestors of today's European lived was a mixture of air and water. Large areas of the continent were covered with huge masses of dense mist. The sun was not seen as we see it, but surrounded by enormous bands of color due to the masses of mist. In Germanic legends a memory is preserved of that ancient country, and given descriptive names such as Niflheim or Nibelungenheim. As the Hood gradually submerged the Atlantean continent, it also gave shape to the German plains. The Rhine was regarded as a remnant of the Atlantean "Being of Mist” that once covered most of the countries. The water of the Rhine was thought to have originated in Nibelungenheim or Nebelheim (Nebel means “mist”), to have come from the dense mist of ancient Atlantis. Through a dreamlike consciousness, full of premonition, all this is told in sagas and myths wherein is described how conditions caused the people to abandon the area and how, as they wandered eastwards, their dull consciousness grew ever more lucid while egoism increased.

A consequence of the former dull consciousness was a certain selflessness, but with the clearer air, consciousness grew brighter and egoism stronger. The vaporous mist had enveloped the people of Atlantis with an atmosphere saturated with wisdom, selflessness and love. This selfless, love-filled wisdom flowed with the water into the Rhine and reposed beneath it as wisdom, as gold. But this wisdom, if taken hold of by egoism, provides it with power. As they went eastward, the former inhabitants of Atlantis saw the Rhine embracing the hoard of the gold of wisdom that had once been a source of selflessness. All this is intimated in the world of sagas that took hold of Wagner. He had such inner kinship with that lofty spiritual being who preserves memory of the past, whose spirit lives in sagas and myths, that he extracted from myths the whole essence of his view of the world. We therefore witness, dramatized on the stage and echoing through his music, the consequences of human egoism.

We see the Ring closing, as Alberich takes the gold of the Rhine from the Rhine Maidens. Alberich is representative of the Nibelungs, who have become egoistic, of the human being that forswears the love through which he is a member of a unity—a dan or tribe. Wagner links to the plan that weaves through the legend the power of possession—that the ancient world arises before his mind's eye, the world that has produced Walhalla, the world of Wotan, and of the ancient gods. They represent a kind of group-soul possessing traits that a people have in common. But when the Ring cioses around man's “I,” the individual too is taken hold of by greed for gold.

Wagner sensitively portrays what lives in Wotan as group-soul qualities, and in human beings become egoistic craving for the Rhine-gold. We hear it in his music; how could one fail to hear it? It should not be said that something arbitrary is at this point inserted in the music. No human ear could fail to hear in that long E-flat major in the Rhine-gold the impact of the emerging human “I.” Wagner's deep mystical sense can be traced in his music.

We are shown that Wotan has to come to terms, not with the consciousness that had become individualized, but with that which had not yet become so, and still strongly acts as group-consciousness. When he tries by stealth to take away the Ring from the giant, he meets this consciousness in the figure of Erda. She is clearly representing the old all-encompassing consciousness through which knowledge is attained clairvoyantly of the whole environment. The words spoken at this point are most significant:

To thee is known
What lies hidden in the deep,
What weaves in air and water
Through mountain and valley.
Thou breathest through The wele of existence;
When heads ponder Thy sense emerges.
It is said that to thee All things are known.

The old consciousness that held sway in Nebelheim cannot be better described than in the words:

My sleep is a dreaming
My dream is a musing
My musing is ruled by wisdom.

The old consciousness was a dreaming consciousness, but in this dream human beings knew of the whole surrounding world. The dream encompassed the depth of nature and spun its wisdom from person to person, whose musing and actions all stemmed from this dreaming consciousness. Wotan meets it in the figure of Erda with the result that a new consciousness arises.

What is of a higher order is always depicted in myths and sagas as a female figure. In Goethe's Faust it is indicated in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on.” Various peoples have depicted a person's inner striving towards a higher consciousness as a union with a higher aspect of the being that is seen as feminine. What is depicted as a marriage is a person's union with the cosmic laws that permeate and illumine his soul. For example, in ancient Egypt we see Isis, and as always the female figure that is looked up to as the higher consciousness has characteristics that correspond to those of the particular people. What a people feels to be its real essence, its true nature, is depicted as a female figure corresponding to this ideal—a feminine aspect with which the individual human being becomes united after death, or also while still living.

As we have seen, man can rise above the sensual, either by leaving it behind, and in death uniting with the spirit, or he may attain the union while still living by attaining spiritual sight. In either case, this higher self is depicted in Germanic myths as a female figure. The warrior who fought courageously and died on the battlefield is regarded by ancestors of today's Middle European as someone who, on entering the spiritual world, would be united with this higher aspect of his being. Hence, the Walkyries are shown to approach the dying warriors and carry them up into spiritual realms. Union with the Walkyrie represents union with the higher consciousness. The Walkyrie Brunnhilde is created through the union of Wotan and Erda. Siegfried is to be united with her and guided into spiritual life. Thus, the daughter of Erda represents the higher consciousness of initiation. Siegfried represents the new, the different human being that has come into existence. Because of the configuration and higher perfection of his inner being, he is united with the Walkyrie already in life.

The hidden wisdom in Germanic legends comes to expression in Wagner's artistic creation. He shows that through the Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the old group-soul consciousness must die out as the new individual consciousness develops in Siegfried. Wagner had a deep awareness of the great mysteries connected with mankind's evolution. A human being's inner experiences he expressed through music, his action through dramatic art.

His sense for the mystical aspect of evolution enabled him to portray a person's higher development. It made him place at the centre of one of his dramas the figure of Lohengrin. Who is Lohengrin? He can be understood only when seen an the background of the momentous upheavals taking place all over Europe at the time when the legend was living reality. Only then can we understand what Wagner had in mind when he depicts Lohengrin's relationship with the Lady he names as Elsa von Brabant. Throughout Europe a new epoch was dawning; An individual's striving personality was coming to the fore. Though described in prosaic terms, these phenomena hide events of greatest significance. In France, Scotland, England and as far away as Russia, a new social structure was developing, in the form of the “Free City.” In rural districts, people still lived in groups, in clans; those who wanted to escape flocked to the cities. The urban environment promoted individual consciousness and feelings of independence. People in the city were those who wanted to strip off the bonds of clan or tribe; they wanted to live their own lives in their own way.

In reality a mighty revolution was taking place. Up till then a person's name decided where he belonged and his status. In the City, a person's name was of no importance, family background of no concern. What counted was personal ability; in the city individuality developed. The evolution from selflessness to individuality became an evolution from individuality to brotherhood. The legend depicted this. In the middle of the Middle Ages the old social structure was being replaced with a new structure, within which each person contributed according to his individual capacity.

Formerly, Leaders and rulers, were always descended from priestly and aristocratic families. The fact that they came from such a background was what mattered; they must have the “right” blood. In the future that would be of no account; someone chosen as leader might be completely unknown as regards descent, and it would be regarded as irreverent to link him with a particular name. The ideal was seen in the great individuality, in the anonymous sage who continued to grow and develop; he was not significant because of his descent, but because of what he was. He was a free individual acknowledged by others just because his achievements were his own.

In this sense, Lohengrin comes before us as representative of man, leading men to freedom and independence. The lady who becomes his wife represents the consciousness described as that of city-dweller of the Middle Ages. He who mediates between the Lofty Being that guides mankind and the people is always associated with great individuality, and is always known by a specific name. Through spiritual knowledge he is known by the technical name “Swan,” which denotes a particular stage of higher spiritual development. The Swan mediates between ordinary people and the Lofty Being that leads humanity. We see a reflection of this in the legend of Lohengrin.

If we are to do justice to the wisdom found in legends, to things revealed through Wagner's artistry, we must bring to it an open mind and mobile ideas. If taken in a narrow, pedantic sense, we are left with empty words instead of being inwardly fired with enthusiasm by the far-reaching vistas opened up through his work. I must be permitted to bring these things before you in concepts that point to a greater perspective. A figure like Lohengrin must be presented in light of its world-historical background and significance. And we must recognize that an understanding of this significance dawned in Wagner, enabling him to give it artistic
form.

The same also applies to Wagner's comprehension of the Holy Grail. We concerned ourselves with the Holy Grail in the previous lecture: “Who are the Rosicrucians?” It is indeed a remarkable fact that at a certain moment there arose in Wagner an inkling of the great teaching that flourished in the Middle Ages. Before that happened, another idea, as it were, prepared the way, but first it led him to create a drama called The Victor; this was in 1856.

The Victor was never performed, but the idea it embodied was incorporated into his Parsifal. The Victor depicted the following:

Ananda, a youth of the Brahman caste, was loved by a Tschandala maiden; because of the caste system he cannot reciprocate the love. Ananda became a follower of Buddha, and he eventually conquered his human craving: He gained victory over himself. To the maiden was then revealed that in a former life she was a Brahman and had overcome her love for the youth who was then of the Tschandala caste. Thus, she too was a victor. She and Ananda were spiritually united.

Wagner renders a beautiful interpretation of this idea, taking it as far as reincarnation and karma in the Christian-Anthroposophical sense. We are shown that the maiden herself, in a former life, brought about the present events. Wagner has worked on this idea in 1856.

On Good Friday, 1857, he was sitting in the Retreat, “the sanctuary on the green hill.” Looking out over the fields watching the plants come to life, sprouting from the earth, an inkling arose in him of the Power of the germinating force emerging from the earth in response to the rays of the sun: a driving force, a motivating force that permeates the whole world and lives in all beings; a force that must evolve, that cannot remain as it is; a force that, to reach higher stages, must pass through death. Watching the plants, he felt the force of sprouting life, and turning his gaze across the Lake of Zürich to the village; he contemplated the opposite idea, that of death—the two polar concepts to which Goethe gives such eloquent expression in his poem, Blessed Longing.

And until thou truly hast,
This dying and becoming,
Thou are but a troubled guest
O'er the dark earth roaming.

Goethe rewrote the words in his hymn to nature saying: “Nature invented death to have more life; only through death can she create a higher spiritual life.”

On Good Friday, as the symbol of death came before mankind in remembrance, Wagner sensed the connection between life, death and immortality. He felt a connection between the life sprouting from the earth and the Death on the Cross, the Death that is also the source of a Christian belief that life will ultimately be victorious over death, will become eternal life. Wagner sensed an inner connection between the sprouting life of spring and the Good Friday belief in Redemption, the belief that from Death on the Cross springs Eternal Life. This thought is the same as that contained in the Quest for the Holy Grail, where the chaste plant blossom, striving towards the sun, is contrasted with human desire filled nature. On the one hand Wagner recognized that human beings steeped in desires; on the other he looked towards a future ideal—the ideal that human beings shall attain a higher consciousness through overcoming their lower nature, shall attain a higher fructifying power, called forth by the Spirit.

Looking towards the Cross, Wagner saw the blood flowing from the Redeemer, the symbol of Redemption, being caught in the Graul Chalice. This picture, linked itself within him to the life awakening in nature. These thoughts were passing through Wagner's soul on Good Friday, 1857. He jotted down a few words that later became the basis from which he created his magnificent Good Friday drama. He wrote: "The blossoming plant springs from death; eternal life springs from the Death of Christ." At that moment Wagner had an inner awareness of the Spirit behind all things, of the Spirit victorious over death.

For a time other creative ideas pushed those concerned with Parsifal into the Background. They came to the fore once more near the end of his life, when, clearer than before, they conveyed to him a person's path of knowledge. Wagner portrayed the path to the Holy Graul to show the cleansing of a human beings' desire nature. As an ideal this is depicted as a pure holy chalice whose image is the plant calyx's chaste fructification to new creation by the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. The sunbeam enters matter as Amfortas' lance enters sinful blood. But there the result is suffering and death. The path to the Holy Grail is portrayed as a cleansing of the sinful blood of lower desires till, on a higher level, it is as pure and chaste as is the plant calyx in relation to the sunbeam. Only he who is pure in heart, unworldly, untouched by temptation, so that he approaches the Holy Grail as an "innocent fool" filled with questions of its secret, can discover the path.

Wagner's Parsifal is born out of his mystical feeling for the Holy Grail. At one time he meant to incorporate the idea into his work Die Wibelungen, an historical account of the Middle Ages. He wanted to elevate the concept of Emperor by letting Barbarossa journey to the East in search of the original spirit of Christianity, thus combining the Parsifal legend with history of the Middle Ages. This idea led to his wonderful artistic interpretation of the Good Friday tradition, so that it can truly be said that Wagner has succeeded in bringing religion into art, in making art religious.

In his artistic new creation of the Good Friday tradition, Wagner had the ingenious idea of combining the subject of faith with that of the Holy Grail. On the one hand stands the belief that mankind will be redeemed, and on the other, that through perfecting its nature humanity itself strives towards redemption; the belief that the Spirit permeating mankind—a drop of which lives in each individual as his higher self—in Christ Jesus foreshadowed humanity's redemption. All this arose as an inner picture in Wagner's mind already on that Good Friday in 1857 when he recognized the connection between the legend of Parsifal and Redemption through Christ Jesus.

We can begin to sense the presence of the Christ within mankind's spiritual environment when, with sensitivity and understanding, we absorb the story of the Holy Graul. And it can deepen to concrete inner spiritual experience when we sense the transition from the midnight of Maundy Thursday—events of Maundy Thursday—to those of Good Friday, which symbolize the victory of nature's resurrection.

Wagner's Parsifal was inspired by the festival of Easter. He wanted new life to pour into the Christian festivals, which originally were established out of a deep understanding of nature. This can be seen especially in the case of the Easter festival, which was established when it was still known that the constellation of sun and moon affected human beings. Today people want Easter celebrated an an arbitrarily chosen date, which shows that the festival is no longer experienced as it was when there was still a feeling for the working of nature. When the spirit was regarded as a reality it was sensed in all things. If we could still sense what was bequeathed to us through traditions in regard to the festivals, then we would also have a feeling for how to celebrate Good Friday. Richard Wagner did have that feeling, just as he also perceived that the words of the Redeemer: “I am with you to the end of the world,” called human beings to follow the trail that led to the lofty ideal of the Holy Grail. Then people who lived the Truth would become redeemers.

Mankind is redeemed by the Redeemer. But Wagner adds the question: "When is the Redeemer redeemed?" He is redeemed when He abides in every human heart. As He has descended into the human heart, the human heart must ascend. Something of this was also felt by Wagner, for from the motif of faith he lets sound forth what is the mystical feeling of mankind in these beautiful words from Parsifal:

Greatest Healing Wonder
Redemption for the Redeemer!

These words truly show Wagner's deep commitment to the highest ideal a person can set himself: to approach that Spiritual Power that came down to us and lives in our world. When we are worthy, we bring what resounds at the dose of Richard Wagner's Parsifal: Redemption for the Redeemer.

• 1. Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a major German opera composer.
• 2. Sophocles (c. 495 B.C.–406 B.C.) was a great Athenian dramatist and one of the founders of Greek tragedy
• 3. Euripides (c. 480 B.C.–406 B.C.), a Greek dramatist.
• 4. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer born in Bonn.
• 5. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor-manager of the Globe Theatre.
• 6. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Austrian composer.
• 7. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Austrian composer who established the accepted classical forms of the Symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata.

Myths are stories containing great truths, which great initiates have related to men. The Trojan War, for instance, is the narrative of the battle waged between the third and the fourth sub-race of the fifth root-race. The representative of the former is Laocoon, priest of an ancient priest-kingdom, who was at the same time a king.¹ The representative of the latter is Odysseus, the personification of cunning and of the force of thinking which developed within the fourth subrace.

We find that initiates lead the course of evolution also in the North. In Wales we come across a brotherhood of initiates of the pagan period, a priesthood and knighthood culminating in King Arthur and his Round Table. They are faced by the brotherhood of the Holy Grail and its knights, working on behalf of the spreading of Christianity. Art and the development of politics are all connected with great initiates belonging to these two brotherhoods, representing a pagan and a Christian civilisation. The influence of the Holy Grail gradually begins to increase toward the end of the thirteenth century. This is a special turning-point in the civilisation of Europe: cities begin to be founded. The ancient rural civilisation, based on the possession of landed property, is replaced by a city-civilisation, a bourgeois civilisation. This implies a radical change in the whole life and thinking of men.

It is therefore not devoid of meaning if just at the time of the meister-singers' contest on the Wartburg a legend from Bavaria should have come to the fore—the legend of Lohengrin. What was the significance of this legend during the Middle Ages?

At the present time we no longer have the slightest idea of how a medieval soul was constituted; it was particularly receptive for spiritual currents flowing below the surface of things. We find to-day that the Lohengrin legend specially emphasizes the Catholic standpoint. But this element which may disturb us today should make us consider the fact that during the Middle Ages this legend could only have influenced men if clothed in something which was really able to stir human souls. This garment had to be supplied by the ardent religious feeling of that period, so that the legend contained something of what lived within the human hearts. What was the significance of the legend?

An initiation—the initiation of a disciple who advances to the degree of a Teacher.

Such a disciple must first of all become a man who has no country and no home; that is to say, he fulfils his duties just like other men, but he must strive to look beyond his own Self and develop his higher Ego.

What are the characteristics of a disciple?

1. He must overcome everything that is personal and develop the God within him.

2. He must be free from every doubt. The things pertaining to the spiritual world stand before his soul as true facts.

   He must also be free from every superstition since he himself is able to control everything he can no longer fall a prey to illusions.

   Upon a still higher stage the key of knowledge will be delivered to him. He is then said to have acquired the power of speech and becomes a messenger of the super-sensible world. The depths of the spiritual world are then revealed to him. This is the second stage.

3. The third stage is reached when he says “I” to every being in the world, just as he says “I” to himself. At this stage he has risen to the capacity of encompassing the universe. In mysticism a disciple who has reached the third stage is designated as a Swan, he is then a mediator between the Teacher and human beings.

The Swan-Knight therefore appears to us as an emissary of the great White Brotherhood. Thus Lohengrin is the messenger of the Holy Grail. A new impulse, a new influence was destined to enter human civilisation. You already know that in mysticism the human soul, or human consciousness, always appears as a woman. Also in this legend of Lohengrin the new form of consciousness, the civilisation of the middle classes, the progress made by the human soul, appears in the vestige of a woman. The new civilisation which had arisen was looked upon as a new and higher stage of consciousness. Elsa of Brabant personifies the medieval soul. Lohengrin, the great initiate, the Swan of the third degree of discipleship, brings with him a new civilisation inspired by the community of the Holy Grail. He must not be asked any questions, for it is a profanation and a misunderstanding to place questions to an initiate concerning things which must remain occult.

The influence of great initiates always brings about the promotion to new stages of consciousness. As an example illustrating how these initiates work, I will remind you of Jacob Böhme. You already know that Jacob Böhme proclaimed great, profound truths. Whence did he obtain his wisdom? He relates that when he was still an apprentice, he was one day sitting alone in his master's shop. A stranger entered and asked for a pair of shoes. Jacob, however, was not allowed to sell shoes during his master's absence. The stranger spoke a few words with him and then he went away. After a while, however, he called the boy Böhme out of the shop and told him: “Jacob, now you are still small and humble, but one day you will be quite another person, and the world will marvel at you!” What is implied in this?

It is an initiation, the description of a moment of initiation. At first, the boy does not realize what has happened to him, but he has received an impulse.

Also in the legend of Lohengrin we come across such a moment of initiation. These legends are important indications, which can only be understood by those who possess an Insight into the connections of things.

The Lohengrin legend (as explained, it is connected with the legend of the meister-singers) has a decidedly Catholic character. Richard Wagner used it for his Lohengrin poem. This reveals Richard Wagner's high inner calling.

Wagner used another ancient legend-theme in his Ring of the Nibelungs. These ancient Germanic legends set forth the destiny of the Aryan tribe. We must seek the origin of the Ring legends in a period which followed the great Atlantean flood, when the surviving peoples began to migrate over Europe and Asia. These legends are a reminiscence of the great initiate Wotan, the god of the Aesir. Wotan is an initiate of the Atlantean period, and all the other Aryan gods are only great initiates.

We can clearly distinguish three stages in Wagner's treatment of the Siegfried legend.

The first stage is a description of modern civilisation. In Richard Wagner's eyes modern men have become mere day-labourers of civilisation. He sees the great difference between modern human beings and those of the Middle Ages. Modern achievements are in part produced by machines, whereas during the civilisation of the Middle Ages everything was still an expression of the soul. The house, the village, the city, and everything it contained, was full of significance and men rejoiced in it. What do our storehouses, warehouses and cities mean to us to-day? In the medieval period the house was the expression of an artistic idea; the whole street-picture, with the market and the church in the middle, was the expression of the soul.

Wagner felt this contrast, and what he wished to achieve through his art was to place before man something which would make him appear complete and perfect at least in one sphere. In his Siegfried he wished to portray a perfectly harmonious human being in contrast to the labourers of industry. Our great men have always felt this: Goethe had the same feeling, and also Hölderlin, who said: “There are labourers in this world, but no men”, and so forth. Every great man has longed after truly great human beings.

A change could not take place in an external form, for the course of evolution cannot be turned backward. A temple was therefore to arise in which art in a complete and perfect form was to raise human beings above the ordinary level of life. The modern period of civilisation needed this temple, just because modern life is so torn and splintered. This was the first idea in Wagner's mind in connection with the Siegfried-poem.

But a second idea rose up before Wagner's soul as he descended into still more profound depths of the soul.

At the beginning of the Middle Ages an ancient legend found its way into German poetry—the legend of the Nibelungs. This kind of legend contained the deepest feelings of the folk-soul. Only those who really study the folk-soul can conceive what lived at that time within the heart of the German nation. These legends were the expression of deep inner truths, of great truths; for instance, the legends of Charlemagne. These tales were not related as they are related today, they were not connected with the historical Charlemagne, for people possessed a deeper insight into the historical connections. The Frankish kings took on the aspect of ancient Aryan ancestors; the Nibelungs were priest-kings who ruled over their kingdoms and provided at the same time the spiritual impulses. These legends were the reminiscence of a great time which had past. In this light Charlemagne's coronation in Rome was looked upon as something special. The Nibelungs were consecrated priest and kings during a remote past of the Aryan sub-race, and their memory was handed down in the legends of the German emperors. Wagner's attention was attracted by these legends and a character appeared to him which seemed to represent the contrast between the modern period of material possession and the medieval period which was still connected with the ancient spiritual culture. Wagner occupied himself with the legend of Barbarossa. Also in Barbarossa we find a great initiate. We are told of his journeys to the Orient; from there he brings back from the holy initiates a higher wisdom—knowledge, or the Holy Grail.

According to the myth of the 12th and 13th century the emperor is under a spell and dwells in the interior of a mountain; his ravens are the messengers informing him of what takes place in the world. The ravens are an ancient symbol of the Mysteries; in the Persian Mystery-language they symbolize the lowest stage of initiation. Hence they are the messengers of the higher initiates. What was this initiate (Barbarossa) supposed to bring? Richard Wagner wished to set forth how an ancient period is replaced by a new one, with its changed conditions of property. What once existed has withdrawn like Barbarossa. The influence of the initiates becomes crystallized for Wagner in Barbarossa.

This thought transpires in the Nibelungs. Taken at first from a more external aspect, but now upon a deeper foundation, it becomes the expression of the profound views of the Middle Ages, setting forth the dawn of a new civilisation. Once more Wagner seeks a still more profound description of this thought. Guided by an infinitely deep and intuitive comprehension of the Germanic sagas, he finally chooses the figure of Wotan, instead of Barbarossa. These sagas describe the setting of the Atlantean period and the rise of the fifth root-race out of the fourth. This is, at the same time, the development of the intellect. The human intellect, or self-consciousness, did not exist among the Atlanteans. They lived in a kind of clairvoyant condition. We find the first traces of a combining intellect in the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the primordial Semitic race, and this intellect continued to develop within the fifth root-race. Self-consciousness arises in this way. The Atlantean did not say “I” to himself as forcefully as a human being belonging to the Aryan race. After the fall of Atlantis this ancient civilisation was brought over into the new one; the Europeans are a surviving branch of Atlantis. A contrast now arises between the Germanic spiritual civilisation and the initiates who work in an occult way and inspire the intellect in its external form.

The dwarfs of Nifelheim are the bearers of the Ego consciousness. Richard Wagner makes Wotan, the ancient Atlantean initiate, oppose Alberich, the bearer of egoism, who belongs to the dwarf-race of the Nibelungs and is an initiate of the Aryan period. When similar new impulses arise something entirely new is born. The bearer of intellectual wisdom is gold. Gold is deeply significant in mysticism, for gold is light, and out-streaming light becomes wisdom. Alberich brings the gold, the wisdom which has become hardened, out of the waters of the Rhine. Water always symbolizes the soul-element, the astral element. The Ego, gold, wisdom, come forth out of the soul. The Rhine is the soul of the new root-race out of which arises the understanding, the Ego consciousness.

Alberich takes possession of the gold, he captures it from the Daughters of the Rhine, the female element characterising the original state of consciousness.

This connection lived in the profound depths of Wagner's soul. He deeply felt what was connected with the rise of the new root-race, of the Ego-consciousness, and he characterised it profoundly in the first E flat major chords of Rhinegold. This streams and weaves musically throughout Wagner's Rhinegold. Wagner's themes were poems originating from ancient myths. In these legends lived something which, filled with force and life, is able to permeate the soul with a spiritual rhythm. What we experience and what we ourselves are, this comes to life and resounds through us in these ancient sagas.

• 1. Laocoon's struggle with the Serpent, the symbol of cunning.

It is important that we should speak about the higher degrees of Freemasonry, because this manner of instruction sets itself special tasks, certain aspects of which will be discussed in the near future. We are dealing, in the main, with a special rite, that is called the combined rite of Memphis and Misraim.¹ I have already mentioned that the Memphis and Misraim rite possesses a great number of degrees, that ninety-five degrees must be undertaken, and that usually the Supreme Leaders of the Grand Orients—i.e. those of Germany, Great Britain and America possess the ninety-sixth degree. These degrees are so arranged that up to the end of about the eightieth to eighty-ninth degree they are divided up in the way I shall presently describe to you.

From about the eight-seventh degree onwards start the real occult degrees into which no one can be initiated who has not made a thorough study of the subject. I always make the reservation that in Europe there is nobody who has undertaken all these degrees or who has really undergone an occult Freemasonry training. But that is of no particular concern as far as Freemasonry goes, because its renewed task still awaits it in the future, and, when the time comes, the Organisation will be available; the vessel will be there which is needed to carry out what has to be achieved.

Now I must mention the various branches of Freemasonry and their tendencies, even if I am only to indicate some thing briefly. First of all, it is to be borne in mind that the whole of the masonic higher degrees trace back to a personality often spoken about but equally very much misunderstood. He was particularly misunderstood by nineteenth century historians, who have no idea of the difficult situations an occultist can meet in life. This personality is the ill-famed and little understood Cagliostro. The so-called Count Cagliostro,² in whom an individuality concealed itself which was recognised in its true nature only by the highest initiates, attempted originally to bring Freemasonry in London to a higher stage. For during the last third of the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had fairly well reached the state that I have described. He did not succeed in London at that time. He then tried in Russia, and also at The Hague. Everywhere he was unsuccessful, for very definite reasons.

Then, however, he was successful in Lyons, forming an occult masonic lodge of the Philalethes [Searchers after Truth] out of a group of local masons, which was called the Lodge of Triumphing Wisdom. The purpose of this Lodge was specified by Cagliostro. What you can read about it is, however, nothing but the work of ignorant people. What can be said about it is only an indication. Cagliostro was concerned with two things: firstly, with instructions enabling one to produce the so-called Philosopher's Stone; secondly, with creating an understanding of the mystic pentagram. I can only give you a hint of the meaning of these two things. They may be treated with a deal of scorn, but they are not to be taken merely symbolically, they are based on real facts.

The Philosopher's Stone has a specific purpose, which was stated by Cagliostro; it is meant to prolong human life to a span of 5,527 years.³ To a freethinker that appears laughable. In fact, however, it is possible, by means of special training, to prolong life indefinitely by learning to live outside the physical body. Anyone, however, who imagined that no death, in the conventional sense of the word, could strike down an adept, would have quite a false view of the matter. So, whoever imagined that an adept could not be hit and killed by a falling roof slate, would also be wrong. To be sure, that would usually only occur if the adept allowed it. We are not dealing here with physical death, but with the following. Physical death is only an apparent occurrence for him who has understood the Philosopher's Stone for himself, and has learned to separate it. For other people it is a real happening, which signifies a great division in their life. For he who understands how to use the Philosopher's Stone in the way that Cagliostro intended his pupils to do, death is only an apparent occurrence. It does not even constitute a decisive turning point in life; it is, in fact, something which is only there for the others who can observe the adept and say that he is dying. He himself, however, does not really die. It is much more the case that the person concerned has learned to live without his physical body; that he has learned during the course of life to let all those things take place in him gradually, which happen suddenly in the physical body at the moment of death. Everything has already taken place in the body of the person concerned, which otherwise takes place at death. Death is then no longer possible, for the said person has long ago learned to live without the physical body. He lays aside the physical body in the same way that one takes off a raincoat, and he puts a new body on just as one puts a new raincoat on.

Now that will give you an inkling. That is one lesson which Cagliostro taught—the Philosopher's Stone—which allows physical death to become a matter of small importance.

The second lesson was the knowledge of the Pentagram. That is the ability to distinguish the five bodies of man one from another. When someone says: physical body, etheric body, astral body, Kama-Manas body, causal body, [higher Manas or spirit self] these are mere words, or at best, abstract ideas. Nothing, however, is achieved by that. A person living today as a rule hardly knows the physical body; only one who knows the Pentagram learns to know the five bodies. One does not know a body by living in it, but by having it as an object. That is what distinguishes an average person from one who has gone through such a schooling that the five bodies have become objects. The ordinary person does indeed live in these five bodies: however, he lives in them, he cannot step outside [of himself] and look at them. At best he can view his physical body when he looks down at his torso, or sees it in a mirror. Those pupils of Cagliostro who had followed his methods would thereby have achieved what some Rosicrucians achieved, who had basically undergone a training with the same orientation. They were in a school of the great European adepts, who taught that the five bodies were realities, and not to remain as mere concepts. That is called ‘Knowing the Pentagram’ and ‘Moral Rebirth’.

I will not say that the pupils of Cagliostro never achieved anything. In general they went as far as comprehending the astral body. Cagliostro was extremely skilful in imparting a view of the astral body. Long before the catastrophe broke over him, he had succeeded in starting schools in Paris, Belgium, St. Petersburg and a few other places in Europe, in addition to the one in Lyons, out of which later emerged at least a few people who had the basis for some to proceed to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth higher degrees of Freemasonry. Thus, Count Cagliostro at least had an important influence on occult masonry in Europe before ending his days in the prison in Rome. The world should not actually pronounce judgment on Cagliostro. As I have already indicated, when people speak about Cagliostro, it is as though Hottentots were to speak about the erection of an overhead railway, because the relationship of apparently immoral outward acts to world happenings is not understood.

I remarked earlier that the French Revolution arose out of the secret societies⁴ of the occultists, and if these currents were investigated further, they would lead back to the school of the adepts.

It may be that what Mabel Collins depicted in her novel Flita⁵ is hard to understand. In it she describes, rather grotesquely, how an adept has the World Chessboard in front of him in a secret place, and lets the pieces play, and how he, so to speak, controls the Karma of a continent upon one very simple little board. It does not quite take place as it is described there, but something on a much greater scale than that does actually happen, of which what is described in Flita gives only a distorted picture.

Now the French Revolution certainly proceeded from such things as this. There is a well-known story contained in the writings of the Countess d'Adhémar. It related that, before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Countess d’Adhémar, one of the ladies-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, received a visit from the Count of St. Germain.⁶ He wanted to be presented to the Queen and to beg audience of the King. Louis XVI's minister, however, was the enemy of the Count of St. Germain, who therefore was not allowed into the King's presence. But he described to the Queen with great accuracy and detail the major perils which were looming ahead. Regrettably, however, his warnings were ignored. It was on that occasion that he uttered the great saying which was based on truth: ‘They who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind’⁷ and he added that he had uttered this saying millenia previously, and it had been repeated by Christ. Those were words which were unintelligible to the ordinary person.

But the Count of St. Germain was right. I will only add a few more touches which are quite correct. In books about the Count of St. Germain you can read that he died in 1784⁸ at the court of the Landgrave of Hessen,⁹ who later became one of the most advanced German Freemasons. The Landgrave nursed him until the end. But the Countess d'Adhémar recounts in her memoirs¹⁰ that he appeared to her long after the year 1784, and that she saw him six more times long after that. In reality he was at that time, in 1790, with some Rosicrucians in Vienna¹¹ and said, which is perfectly true, that he was obliged to retire to the Orient for the span of 85 years, and that after that time people would again become aware of his activity in Europe. 1875 is the year of the founding of the Theosophical Society. These things are all connected to ether in a certain way.

In the school founded by the Landgrave of Hessen, also, there were two main concerns: the Philosopher's Stone and the Knowledge of the Pentagram. The Freemasonry founded by the Landgrave of Hessen at that time continued to exist in a rather diluted form. In fact, the whole of Freemasonry, as I have described it, is called the Egyptian rite, the rite of Memphis and Misraim. The latter traces its origin back to King Misraim who came from Assyria—from the Orient—and, after the conquest of Egypt, was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries. These are indeed the mysteries which originate from ancient Atlantis. An unbroken tradition exists from that time. Modern Freemasonry is only a continuation of what was established then in Egypt.

Before I go into details I would like to say that Freemasonry which extends to the higher degrees is something which, in its more intimate aspect, is quite different from the normal craft masonry. The ordinary craft masonry rests on a kind of democratic principle, and if the democratic principle is to be applied to matters of knowledge, it is obvious that it will lead to a state of affairs in which the brothers who have congregated together will mainly do nothing but bring forward their own views. Truth, however, is something about which one cannot hold one's own views. One either knows a truth or one is ignorant of it. No one can say that the three angles of a triangle add up to 725 degrees instead of to 180 degrees.

When people sit together and have a discussion they talk about their own views, sometimes also about the most elevated things. But all of this exists on the level of illusion, and is just as irrelevant as what a person says who is ignorant of the true sum of the angles of a triangle and only gives his own opinion about it. Just as one is unable to discuss whether the sum of the angles of a triangle have this or that many degrees, so one is also unable to have a discussion about higher truths. That is why the democratic principle is not applicable to matters of knowledge, for there is no basis of argument on which to discuss them. What distinguishes masonry of the higher degrees from craft masonry is that one learns to know the truth step by step. Whoever has recognised a thing can no longer hold more than one opinion about it. One has either recognised it, or one has not done so. The ninety-six degrees have, therefore, a certain justification

At the head is the so-called Sovereign Sanctuary, who is identical with what is known as the Grand Orient in Freemasonry, and is in possession of the real occult knowledge.¹² He knows the path and the speech of that which can be picked out in the masonic manifesto,¹³ and which makes it possible to hear the voice of the Wise Men of the East. When he has reached this step, he is certainly in a position to hear the voice of the Wise Masters. So far, however, must one have worked one's way up, that one is in possession of very definite knowledge, and also of definite inner qualities and inner capacities which by no means purely cover themselves with the conventional bourgeois virtues, but are something more meaningful and intimate. I would note that [compared with] what we have been speaking about here, what theosophical literature reveals of a theoretical or practical nature forms only an elementary part. So that the theoretical side of the higher degrees of Freemasonry far surpasses what can be divulged in popular theosophy. What can be disclosed there is dependent upon the permission given by the adepts to allow these things to be popularised up to a certain grade. But it is not possible to make all knowledge public.

It is correct to say that humanity will be astonished by some of the discoveries which will be made in the near future. But they will be rather premature discoveries and will thereby cause some havoc. The task of the Theosophical Society consists mainly in preparing people for such things. For instance, what I described at the beginning as the knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone was formerly much more universally known than it is today and, indeed, it was known already during a certain period of the Atlantean Epoch. At that time the possibility of conquering death was really something which was commonly known. I only wish to remark that I was not very happy about allowing this truth to appear in print recently. Therefore where this should have come in the discussion about Atlantean times in the Luzifer article, a row of dots was printed in place of those things which may not yet be communicated.¹⁴ It cannot even yet be communicated in its entirety. There is a very similar piece of information recorded by a very advanced medium, which appeared in the Theosophical Review¹⁵ dealing with exactly the same thing in a rather different form. The overcoming of death in Atlantean times is naturally preserved in the memories of the individuals concerned without their being aware of it. There are many people reincarnated today who passed through that period in their former lives and who are led to such revelations through their own memories. That will first of all lead to a kind of overrating of certain medical discoveries. People will imagine that medical science was the discoverer of such things. In reality people will have been led to them through their own memories of Atlantean times.

Certain things will mature in the near future and therefore we shall speak about them. This makes it necessary to see the need of a step by step advance in the gaining of knowledge. This step by step advance is therefore rightly emphasised by those who wish to revive the Misraim and Memphis Rite at the present time. Even if this does not succeed during the next year or two, one must not think that failure in such things is of any significance There is a man at the head of the American Misraim movement, whose significant character constitutes a sure guarantee of constancy in the advance. This is the excellent Freemason, John Yarker.¹⁶

It is difficult to say at the moment what form the matter will take in Great Britain and Germany. You will perceive that one must reckon with the human material concerned, and that the German movement, therefore—if it is to concern itself with such matters -will also have to reckon with what is available in this direction. If genuine occultists are to take part in such things they must needs be active in one or other direction. They will not always be able to take part in such things. Even the Masters, when they prescribe something of this kind, have to take their cue from great universal laws.

If, therefore, you hear something concerning the German Misraim-Memphis tendency, you should not imagine that this now has significance for the future. It is only the frame into which a good picture may later be put. This German Misraim Order stands under the overall guidance of a certain Reuss,¹⁷ who holds the actual leadership in Great Britain and Germany today. Then, the well-known Carl Kellner¹⁸ also works in this direction. The actual literary work is in the hands of Dr. Franz Hartmann,¹⁹ who serves the Misraim Rite with his pen to the very utmost. That is as much as I can impart to you in this or that fragment from here or there, concerning this movement.

Now I can only characterise what is involved here in general terms. There are four kinds of instruction given in the- Misraim Rite.²⁰ The ninety-six degrees can therefore be achieved through four different kinds of instruction or disciplines. These four disciplines, by means of which one advances, are the following: First, the so-called symbolic instruction or discipline. By means of this, certain symbols can be recognised as facts. The person concerned is instructed in the occult laws of nature, through which quite definite effects are produced through cyclic movements in humanity.

The second kind of instruction or discipline is the so-called philosophic one. It is the Egyptian hermetic discipline. It consists of a more theoretical kind of instruction. The third kind of instruction is the so-called mystical discipline, which is based more upon inner development, and which, if rightly applied, would lead above all else to the appropriate manipulation of the Philosopher's Stone, that is, to the overcoming of death. That is essentially expressed in one of the sentences which I read out to you which stated that by means of Freemasonry everyone is able to convince himself of the fact of immortality. It depends, however, as the Cabbala says, whether this is requested or not. The fourth kind of instruction is the Cabbalistic one. It consists in the recognition of the principles of world harmony in their truth and reality, the ten basic ... [Gap]

By means of each of the four paths one can rise to a higher perception through the Misraim Rite. But there is actually no one within the ranks of Freemasonry today who would accept the responsibility of giving practical guidance to anyone, because those concerned have not undergone these things themselves, and the whole affair is a provisional arrangement and only intended to provide a framework for something which is still to come. It is possible that this framework will be filled with occult knowledge. Occult knowledge has to be cast in existing moulds. The important thing is that such moulds exist in the world. If there is molten metal and no mould into which to pour it, you are unable to do anything but let it run out in one lump. So it is also with spiritual currents. It is important that moulds exist into which can be poured the spiritual metal. That is symbolised by the Molten Sea. That will become recognised when what is now seemingly only vegetating receives form for outward manifestation.

Last time I read to you from a speech by the English Prime Minister Balfour.²¹ From that, then, it is already noticeable that certain things are physical truths today, that are in primeval occult perceptions. If you read Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, you will find there a passage relating to electricity, which expresses word for word what physicists are now gradually arriving at. What is written there is, however, only a hint at what is actually involved. It is the physical atom which is in question. This was misunderstood by all outward—but not occult—science until four or five years ago. It was taken to be [body having] mass in space. Nowadays one is beginning to recognise that this physical atom bears the same relationship to the force of electricity that a lump of ice bears to the water from which it has been frozen. If you conceive of water becoming frozen to ice, so is the ice also water, and in like manner the atom of physics is nothing else but frozen electricity. If you can grasp this point completely and were to go through the statements about the atom contained in all the scientific journals until a year or two ago, and were to regard them as rubbish, you will have more or less the right idea. It is only very recently that science has been able to form a conception of what the atom is. It stands [in the same relationship to electricity] as ice does to water out of which it has been frozen. The physical atom is condensed electricity. I regard Balfour's speech as something of extreme importance.²²

It is ... [Gap] something which has been published since 1875 [1879?].²³ The fact has been known to occultists for millenia. Now one is beginning to realise that the physical atom is condensed electricity. But there is still a second thing to be considered: what electricity itself is. That is still unknown. They are ignorant of one thing: namely, where the real nature of electricity must be sought. This nature of electricity cannot be discovered by means of any outer experiments or through outer observation. The secret which will be discovered is that electricity—when one learns to view it from a particular level—is exactly the same as what human thought is. Human thought is the same thing as electricity, viewed one time from the inside, another time from the outside.

Whoever is now aware of what electricity is, knows that there is something living within him which, in a frozen state, forms the atom. Here is the bridge from human thought to the atom. One will learn to know the building stones of the physical world; they are tiny condensed monads, condensed electricity. In that moment when human beings realise this elementary occult truth about thought, electricity and the atom, in that same moment they will have understood something which is of the utmost importance for the future and for the whole of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. They will have learned how to build with atoms through the power of thinking.

This will be the spiritual current which will again have to be cast in the moulds which have been prepared for it by occultists over millenia. But because the human race had to pass through the era of the development of understanding and to look away from the true inner work, the moulds have become mere shells. But they still retain their function as moulds, and the right kind of knowledge will have to be poured into them.

The occult investigator obtains his truth from the one side, the physical scientist from the other. Just as Freemasonry has developed out of working masonry, out of the building of cathedrals and temples, so one will in future learn to build with the smallest of building blocks, with entities of condensed electricity. That will call for a new kind of masonry. Then industry will not be able to carry on any more as it does today. It will become so chaotic and will only be able to work purely out of the struggle for existence per se, as long as man does not know ... [Gap] Then it would be possible for someone in Berlin to drive into the city in a cab, while in Moscow a disaster which he had caused was taking place. And nobody at all would have any inkling that he had been the cause of it. Wireless telegraphy is the beginning of this. What I have portrayed is in the future. There are only two possibilities available: Either things go on chaotically, as industry and technology have done until now, in which case it will lead to whoever has the possession of these things being able to cause havoc, or else it will be cast in the moral mould of Freemasonry. *This last sentence appears as follows in the notes of Marie Steiner-von Sivers: ‘These things will either continue chaotically, as industry and technology have done until now, or harmoniously, as is the aim of Freemasonry; then the highest development will be achieved.’

Question: Why is the Catholic Church so antagonistic towards Freemasonry?

Answer: The Catholic Church does not want what is coming in the future. Pius IX was initiated into Freemasonry. He tried, through the Chapter of Clermont, to bring about a connection between the Jesuits and the Freemasons. That did not succeed, and therefore the old enmity between these two remained. Our Jesuits know little about these things, and the clergy are also unaware of what is involved. The actual clergy ... [Large gap]

The Trappists have to keep silent, for it is known that by doing so an important faculty of inspired speech in the next life is implanted. That is indeed only to be understood through a knowledge of reincarnation.

• 1 . According to legend the Memphis Rite is supposed to have originated with a man called Ormus, who was converted to Christianity by St. Mark in the year 46. It is said that the Crusaders carried this masonic knowledge with them from the Holy Land and founded a Grand Lodge in Scotland in the twelfth century. The legend derives the name Misraim from Mizraim, one of the sons of Ham. He came to Egypt, possessed himself of the country and called it after his name (Misraim or Mizraim—an old name for Egypt). The teaching about Isis, Osiris, Typhon, etc., is supposed to have come from him, cf. Schuster: Die geheimen Gessellschaften, Verbindungen und Orden (Volume 2, Leipzig 1906). According to Heckethorn: (Secret Societies, Book 8, Chapter 20), the Egyptian masonry was founded by Cagliostro. The Rite of Misraim is attributed (Heckethorn, Book 8, Chapter 10) to a foundation in Milan of 1805, i.e., ten years after the supposed death of Cagliostro, which foundation was laid by several masons ‘who had been refused admission into the Supreme Grand Council.’ The Rite of Memphis is said to be a copy of the Rite of Misraim and was founded in Paris in 1839. It is supposed to have been combined with the Misraim Rite towards the end of the nineteenth century, since when it has been known as the ‘Memphis-Misraim Rite.’ John Yarker (see note 16), the ‘Absolute Sovereign Grand Master in and for Great Britain and Ireland of the Combined Scottish, Memphis and Misraim Rite,’ established a Grand Orient (Grand Lodge) for Germany in 1902.
• 2 . Count Alexander Cagliostro, allegedly identical with the Sicilian Joseph Balsamo—a fact which he himself, however, always vigorously denied—died in the Vatican prison in 1795. He is regarded, along with the Count of St. Germain, as one of the most controversial figures of the eighteenth century. In an account of his life by Francois Ribadeau Dumas: (Cagliostro, Allen and Unwin 1967) the attempt was made to put the record straight. For instance, it was quoted out of the Protocol of the trial by the Inquisition that ‘it has not been possible to find a single witness among Cagliostro's accusers who had known Balsamo.’ Furthermore, a passage is quoted from the book by Cagliostro's ‘learned historian,’ Dr. Marc Haven, Le Maitre inconnu Cagliostro: ‘No one has proved that Balsamo and Cagliostro are one and the same person; neither Morands, nor Goethe, not the Commissary Fontaine, nor even the trial of the Holy Inquisition have produced a document which precludes all doubt.’
• 3 . In the notes of Marie Steiner von Sivers it is said to be 5,530 years. According to Heckethorn (Book 8, Chapter 20), 5,557 years (see note 13). Ribadeau Dumas (in the work quoted above) states that Cagliostro left many works behind him, among which is one entitled: The Art of prolonging Life. All of them, apart from his Egyptian Ritual, have disappeared. As Ribadeau Dumas says: ‘If they haven't been burned, they must reside in the Vatican archives. Let us hope that, in the light of the new ideas of the occumenical movement and reconciliation with the “separated Brethren”, the Vatican library will one day release these curious documents to which Cagliostro so often referred and through which he might be vindicated.’
• 4 . This almost certainly happened during lecture 5 given on the 4th November 1904, though it is not recorded in the notes.
• 5 . Mabel Collins (pseudonym for Mrs Kenningdale-Cook), 1851–1927, was one of the best authors of the Theosophical Society. Rudolf Steiner wrote an appreciation of her novel Flita, True Story of a Black Enchantress, when it first appeared in German translation. This was published March 1905 in the periodical Luzifer-Gnosis and is recorded in the complete edition in German of Rudolf Steiner's works in Volume 34, Luzifer-Gnosis.
• 6 . See note 4 to lecture 5 given on 4th November 1904.
• 7 . According to the account of Madame d'Adhemar, the Count said to her: ‘Madame, they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind; this is what Jesus said in the Gospels, perhaps not before I did but, anyway, his words have been preserved in writing, only mine could have been made use of.’ Quoted from Heyer: Aus dem Jahrhundert der Französischen Revolution, (Edition 1956). These words, however, do not appear in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament, Hosea, Chapter 8, verse 7. (See also the statement in lecture 5 of the 4th November 1904).
• 8 . He is reputed to have died in Eckernfoerde on 27th February 1784. As proof of this is the death register of the St. Nicholas Church in Eckernfoerde, according to which he was ‘quietly interred’ on 2nd March 1784.
• 9 . Prince Karl, 1744–1836, son of the ruling Landgrave Frederick II, Danish General and Governor of the Dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein. His Freemasonry writing: La Pierre Zodiacale du temple de Denderah, appeared in 1824. His memoires, which were dictated 1816/17, appeared in Copenhagen in 1861 and, in German translation, in Cassel in 1866. In the latter is to be found a report concerning the Count of St. Germain.
• 10. See Karl Heyer's: Aus dem jahrhundert der Französischen Revolution.
• 11. Rudolf Steiner apparently bases his statements on an article by Isabel Cooper-Oakley in the periodical Gnosis, of 15th December 1903, the pertinent passage of which reads (Quoted from: The Count of Saint-Germain, by Isabel Cooper-Oakley, Rudolf Steiner Publications, p. 145 and p. 140 et seq.):
  
  ‘Franz Graeffer left us the curious account of a journey by Saint Germain to Vienna. Unfortunately this description is not quite satisfactory. Graeffer himself confesses that it was written on 15th June, long after the event. He says: “A peculiar irresistible feeling has compelled me to set down these transactions in writing once more, after so long a time, just today June 15th 1843.” Further, I make this remark, that these events have not been hitherto reported.’
  
  ‘One day the report was spread that the Comte de St. Germain, the most enigmatical of all incomprehensibles, was in Vienna. An electric shock passed through all who knew his name. Our Adept circle was thrilled through and through: St. Germain was in Vienna!
  
  ‘Barely had Graeffer, his brother Rudolf, recovered from the surprising news, than he flies to Hiniberg, his country seat, where he has his papers. Among these is to be found a letter of recommendation from Casanova, the genial adventurer whom he got to know in Amsterdam, addressed to St. Germain.
  
  ‘He hurries back to his house of business; there he is informed by the clerk: “An hour ago a gentleman has been here whose appearance has astonished us all. This gentleman was neither tall nor short, his build was strikingly proportionate, everything about him had the stamp of nobility ... He said in French, as it were to himself, not troubling about anyone's presence, the words: ‘I live in Fedalhofe, the room in which Leibnitz lodged in 1713.’ We were about to speak, when he was already gone. This last hour we have been, as you see, Sir, petrified ...”
  
  ‘In five minutes Fedalhofe is reached. Leibnitz's room is empty. Nobody knows when “the American gentleman” will return home. As to luggage, nothing is to be seen but a small iron chest. It is almost dinner time. But who would think of dining! Graeffer is mechanically urged to go and find Baron Linden; he finds him at the “Ente”. They drive to the Landstrasse, whither a certain something, an obscure presentiment, impels them to drive post-haste.
  
  ‘The laboratory is unlocked; a simultaneous cry of astonishment escapes both; at a table is seated St. Germain, calmly reading a folio, which is a work of Paracelsus. They stand dumb at the threshold; the mysterious intruder slowly closes the book, and slowly rises. Well know the two perplexed men that this apparition can be no other in the world than the man of wonders. The description of the clerk was a shadow against reality. It was as if a bright splendour enveloped his whole form. Dignity and sovereignty declared themselves. The men were speechless. The Count steps forward to meet them; they enter. In measured tones, without formality, but in an indescribably ringing tenor, charming the innermost soul, he says in French to Graeffer: “You have a letter of introduction from Herr von Seingalt; but it is not needed. This gentleman is Baron Linden. I knew that you would both be here at this moment. You have another letter for me from Bruehl. But the painter is not to be saved; his lung is gone, he will die July 8th 1805.
  
  ‘St. Germain then gradually passed into a solemn mood. For a few seconds he became rigid as a statue, his eyes, which were always expressive beyond words, became dull and colourless. Presently, however, his whole being became reanimated. He made a movement with his hand as if in signal of his departure, then said: “I am leaving (ich scheide); do not visit me. Once again will you see me. Tomorrow night I am off; I am much needed in Constantinople; then in England, there to prepare two inventions which you will have in the next century—trains and steamboats. These will be needed in Germany. The seasons will gradually change—first the spring, then the summer. It is the gradual cessation of time itself, as the announcement of the end of the cycle. I see it all; astrologers and meteorologists know nothing, believe me; one needs to have studied in the Pyramids as I have studied. Towards the end of this century I shall disappear out of Europe, and betake myself to the region of the Himalayas. I will rest; I must rest. In exactly 85 years people will again set eyes on me. Farewell, I love you”. [Said in 1790. Exactly 85 years later (1875) the Theosophical Society was founded.] After these solemnly uttered words, tie Count repeated the sign with his hand. The two adepts, overpowered by the force of such unprecedented impressions, left the room in a condition of complete stupefaction. In the same moment there fell a sudden heavy shower, accompanied by a peal of thunder. Instinctively they return to the laboratory for shelter. They open the door. St. Germain is no more there ...’
• 12. It would seem that a person, rather than a body of people, is here meant. Heckethorn, in talking about the Order of Memphis, says that: ‘it works 33 degrees and embraces a far more extensive ritual of workable degrees than any other rite, every one of its 33 degrees having its appropriate and elaborate ceremonial easily arranged for conferment and its titles are purged of ridiculous pretensions. Its government is strictly representative, as in our own political constitution. The 32 and 31 are the first, second, third and fourth Officers of the Chapter, Senate and Council and form the Mystic Temple and judicial Tribunal, the presiding Officer, or Grand Master of Light, having the 33rd degree to enable him to represent the Province in the Sovereign Sanctuary (33–95) or ruling body.’
  
  Dr. Steiner speaks at the beginning of this lecture about the Combined Rite of Memphis and Misraim having a great number of degrees, that 95 out of the 96 Degrees have to be undertaken by its members and that the Supreme Leaders of the Grand Orients usually possess the 96th Degree. It seems likely that it is this Supreme Leader who is in possession of the actual occult knowledge and knows the path and the language of the Freemasonry manifesto, through which is revealed the voice of the ‘Wise Men of the East.’
• 13. See preceding lecture of 9th December in which the text of the manifesto is given in full.
• 14. This relates to the articles which appeared in the periodical Luzifer-Gnosis, in December 1904 under the title ‘From the Akashic Records.’ See Cosmic Memory, Chapter 4, ‘Transition of the Fourth into the Fifth Root Race,’ p.66 (Rudolf Steiner Publications Inc., New York, 1961).
• 15. The article in question appeared in the December issue of the Theosophical Review of 1904 signed only ‘E.’ Its contents were the result of a combined exercise undertaken by ‘E,’ the interrogator, ‘T,’ the medium employed to transmit by automatic means the communications of ‘F,’ the spirit guide. What follows comprises only a few extracts of the original article.
  
  ‘F,’ though a politician and a man of the world, is an enthusiastic humanitarian ... He added that he felt very anxious, for soon an important discovery would be made which would give the doctors a greater power than they had even now, and that it would lead to more cruelty in experiments on animals, for the man who found it out would think he had learned it by vivisection. “But remember, it is not so, it is not a discovery, only a remembrance; for the man who will find it out was an Atlantean, and the Atlanteans were far more learned in medicine than we are; indeed the body had no secrets for them”. I then began to question him about Atlantis ...
  
  They commanded the elements, made fine weather or storm as it pleased them. There were no children, for by an effort of unnatural power they attained to the great secret of causing life without material union of the two forces. The soul returned and reincarnated by an effort of will, taking its form from the natural elements without any other medium. This was what ultimately ended their power, for it could not be allowed to continue. It is dimly figured in a late Hebrew legend by the “tree of life”. There was nothing left of progression, and therefore a cataclysm had to overtake this civilisation, and destroy even its memory.
  
  ‘They overset the balance of creation, and so ruined their civilisation. The material cause was that they withdrew the life-force of the earth, and exhausted all the supplies of the life-current. This caused convulsions of nature, and the storm broke, irremediable, terrible, and swamped them. The Titans vied with the gods but were defeated. All religions tell this tale as a note of warning.
  
  ‘Your earth is a living creature, and if you can tap its life-current you can work all miracles. The Atlanteans are the souls of today in some cases, but they have been discrowned ... They had to return into ordinary life by the simple way of being born as an ordinary infant.
  
  ‘I will now tell you a little more about the wonderful power of Atlantis, so as to make you realise what man has been, and will be in the future ages; for to tell the truth Atlantis was material perfection, to this man can never return, but to perfection he will come in future time.
  
  ‘The ways of life of the highest classes were most simple, for nourishment was obtained almost from the air alone. Like orchids, the rulers, and more especially the priests, drew all their sustenance from the substance contained in the atmosphere. Consult any botanist you like and you will see that I am right. You cannot do this, for you are not self-materialised; you are creatures born, and not made by your own will ...
  
  ‘It was only the discovery of the great secret, that of the “tree of life”, which simplified matters, and that you will never regain until you cease to care for the power for its own sake. I mean the secret of death and birth. There is no need for men to die. There is no reason for men to be born. I know the secret in part, but not fully, for I am not good enough to be permitted to recall the wonderful power. If I could do this I should at once be tempted to reveal it to you, for it would be, God willing, an eternity of happiness.
  
  ‘I will, however, try and define somewhat and give you an example. A man is entirely renewed each seven years; after a while, however, he deteriorates and slowly decomposes. This is owing to ignorance, for if he knew how to regulate the inflow of new particles, he would never choose worse but rather better particles, and the atoms would remain permanently polarised by his will. Man is really held in a single cell; this cell is immortal and descends from generation to generation, creating ever new forms in which a human spirit can manifest. If this cell is retained in the body, and there is no procreation or waste of conservative power, then there is no reason why man should not exist for ever, during the cycle. By his children, however, man reproduces himself, and so destroys his material self. To an adept, to marry is to become a lower creature subject to death. This is truth. Every man or woman who creates can only do so by handing on his immortality. Man is a spirit, and the spirit is the central point of the materialised form. The whole of mankind accepts death as a necessity, and therefore hypnotise themselves into a belief that they must, die, but there is no reason for it if the cell is still intact in them.
  
  ‘Think it over and understand that this is one of the chief Christian teachings that has been corrupted. Christ rose from the dead to be the first fruits of life.
  
  ‘I want to refer to the new discovery which will be made, and of which I have previously spoken. It was well known once, and will return to the fated man's memory, and he will be hailed as a benefactor of humanity. In the old days of Atlantis when the secrets of the body were entirely unveiled to the caste of rulers and priests, they learnt it in a far more terrible way even than that of vivisection, namely by the stultification of the soul, thus destroying or distorting the power of evolution in a creature. You do not know this, thank God! or the earth would be once more a land of devils ...’
• 16. Yarker, 1833–1913, was an Englishman who was active within English Freemasonry. When it is here said that he was at the head of the ‘American’ Misraim movement, this is on the grounds of a statement made in the Historical Edition of the Oriflamme, Berlin 1904, co-edited by him, to the effect that only America possessed a legitimate Charter and that Yarker had been appointed in New York in 1872 ‘by S.G.C. 33° as “Chief Representative” and “Guarantor of Friendly Relationships” with the Manchester Grand Orient of the Scottish Rite and Sovereign Sanctuary of the Memphis and Misraim Rite.’ As significant masonic author he had obtained high Degrees in many different connections. (See end of note 1 to this lecture).
• 17. Theodore Reuss, 1855–1923. Authorised by Yarker to inaugurate the setting up of the Memphis-Misraim Rite in Germany. Rudolf Steiner did not know Reuss at that time. An account of this is going to appear in the documentation of the history of Rudolf Steiner's ‘Esoteric School’ (untranslated).
• 18. Carl Kellner, 1851–1905, Austrian inventor and big businessman. According to Hugo Göring in the January issue, 1895, of the periodical Sphinx (Official organ of the German Theosophical Society, edited by Hübbe-Schleiden), he invented the process for the manufacture of cellulose and worked together with the medical doctor, Franz Hartmann. Kellner was the Sovereign Honorary General Grand Master for the Memphis and Misraim Rite in Great Britain and Germany and signed himself as such for the Historical Edition of the Great Oriflamme of 1904.
• 19. Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912. After an adventurous life and personal acquaintance with H.P. Blavatsky, he founded the so-called ‘Leipzig’ Theosophical Society. He was the editor of the theosophical periodical Lotusblüten. He is mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in his autobiography: The Course of My Life and in the second volume of Rudolf Steiner's letters.
• 20. The four kinds of instruction described by Rudolf Steiner are enumerated by Heckethorn (p. 299), where he deals with the ‘Organisation of the Rite of Misraim.’ He says: ‘Then arose the Rite of Misraim with ninety degrees arranged in four sections, viz. 1. Symbolic, 2. Philosophic, 3. Mystical, 4. Cabbalistic; which were divided into seventeen classes.’ ‘The Rite of Memphis,’ he says (p. 301), ‘is a copy of the Rite of Misraim and was founded in Paris in 1839. It was composed of ninety-one degrees, arranged in three sections and seven classes.’ Where Heckethorn speaks of the ‘Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry or Order of Memphis’ (pp. 253–256), he states: ‘The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry works thirty-three degrees, divided into three sections, embracing modern, chivalric and Egyptian Masonry, as the latter was worked on the continent last century ... It embraces a far more extensive ritual of workable degrees than any other rite, every one of its thirty-three degrees having its appropriate and elaborate ceremonial easily arranged for conferment, and its titles are purged of ridiculous pretensions.’
  
  On the other hand, when speaking about the Egyptian Rite in connection with Cagliostro, Heckethorn says, (p. 352): ‘The Egyptian Rite invented by Cagliostro is a mixture of the sacred and profane, of the serious and laughable; charlatanism is its prevailing feature.’
  
  From this it appears that the ‘Memphis and Misraim Rite,’ referred to by Rudolf Steiner, is a complex mixture of those rites which confer the Higher Degrees. Heckethorn refers to these as ‘spurious masonry’ (p. 265), in contradistinction to ‘Blue’ or ‘Symbolic’ Masonry, which restricts itself to the three lowest degrees only.
• 21. This has not been recorded in the notes at our disposal. In connection with the speech itself, see note 19 to the previous lecture and the succeeding note to this.
• 22. The following extract of Balfour's speech is the part referred to. Under the heading: ‘Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter.’
  
  ‘But today there are those who regard gross matter, the matter of everyday experience, as the mere appearance of which electricity is the physical basis; who think that the elementary atom of the chemist, itself far beyond the limits of direct perception, is but a connected system of monads or sub-atoms which are not electrified matter, but are electricity itself; that these systems differ in the number of monads which they contain, in their arrangement, and in their motion relative to each other and to the ether; that on these differences, and on these differences alone, depend the various qualities of what have hitherto been regarded as indivisible and elementary atoms; and that while in most cases these atomic systems may maintain their equilibrium for periods which, compared with such astronomical processes as the cooling of a sun, may seem almost eternal, they are not less obedient to the law of change than the everlasting heavens themselves.
  
  ‘But if gross matter be a grouping of atoms, and if atoms be systems of electrical monads, what are these electrical monads? It may be that, as Professor Larmor has suggested, they are but a modification of the universal ether, a modification roughly comparable to a knot in a medium which is inextensible, incompressible and continuous. But whether this final unification be accepted or not, it is certain that these monads cannot be considered apart from the ether. It is on their interaction with the ether that their qualities depend; and without the ether an electric theory of matter is impossible.
  
  ‘Surely we have here a very extraordinary revolution.’
  
  It is interesting to note that Balfour does not use the term ‘frozen’ electricity or ‘coagulated’ electricity as the German translation does. He merely states that matter is the ‘mere appearance of which electricity is the physical basis.’
• 23. See note 20 to the preceding lecture.

Report in the “Frankfurter Nachrichten” of January 21, 1906

“The wisdom at the core of religions” was the subject of the third Theosophical lecture, which Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave in the Gutenberg Hall on Friday.

All religions have certain similarities; they all have something fundamental in common. Only the theosophical school of thought, which is so much misunderstood, was called upon to shed new light on these mysterious things, for one of its main tasks is to research the wisdom teachings of all the religions of the world.

What is religion? The word means connection; through religion, the human soul is connected to the divine, it is the bridge between the soul and its spiritual-divine origin. All religions have become, have developed; they used to be different from what they are today. Recent natural science is convinced that a mainland once existed between Europe and Africa, between Africa and America – we call it Atlantis after the ancients – on which lived different people than we do today. They did not have the same intellectual powers as we do, but they had others that we lack, which are similar to the abilities that our soul develops in dreams. Their imagination was not based on sensory perception of things; instead, the outside world appeared to them in images, symbolically, as it does in dreams. They also felt their divine origin, because they felt at one with all life, with that of plants and animals.

This view of the Atlanteans is peculiar to all the early beginnings of religions. The soul's experience of all of nature, this empathic feeling for natural forces in higher spiritual vision, gave rise to the belief in the “Great Spirit”, which is revealed in every sound of nature. Then came the time when, out of the soul's dream state, out of symbolic contemplation, intellectual life in the modern sense developed. People scattered to different countries and adapted to their climate and other conditions. What had previously been felt as a spirit now had to take on a different form; religion had to be proclaimed in different forms to correspond to the changed circumstances. The Atlanteans developed the images from the soul world, but now the outside world approached man and was different everywhere. Consequently, the bond between the soul and its divine origin had to be knitted in new forms. Hence the diversity of religions, but also their common ground, the agreement regarding the basic truths, regarding the core of wisdom.

Spiritual leaders and guides of humanity, the “Brotherhood of Initiates”, have always existed, even among the Atlanteans; and it was they who proclaimed the wisdom core of the original religion to all times and all peoples and thereby preserved it. All the founders of religions, the authors of the Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the magi of the Chaldeans, the priests of the Babylonians, the world sages of the Greeks, the Zarathustras, Confucius, yes, the German mystics, Paracelsus, Angelus Silesius and Jakob Böhme – they were all, together with the greatest initiate, Jesus Christ, such guardians of humanity, such proclaimers of the religious core of wisdom. He explained what speakers understand by this core of wisdom using the example of the doctrine of the Trinity, which returns more or less developed in all religions.

There is also profound wisdom hidden in everyday things. The names of the days of the week also have a deep meaning. They reflect the long development that our earth has undergone since it was in a molten state. It has passed through various stages, within which man has developed to his present organization and form.

We belong to the fifth root race of our Earth. The first tribes were the Atlanteans who had come over, who once lived on Atlantis, the submerged continent. The tradition of the great flood that destroyed Atlantis is preserved in the story of the Flood in the legends of all religions. What distinguishes our race most of all from the Atlanteans is the gift of intellect. The Atlanteans did not yet have a mind. They had only just developed memory and language. The third race, the Lemurian, also lacked language. The bodies of the Atlanteans were not yet fully formed. They lacked the forebrain, which was still developing. They could not reason or draw conclusions, but they had an excellent command of the lower forces of nature, through which they could exert a strong influence on humans and animals.

The Lemurians, the third race, inhabited a continent between present-day Asia, Africa and Australia. Volcanic catastrophes dissolved this part of the world. The Lemurians had no memory yet. The last remnants of this race, in whom these facts can be observed, are still found in Australia. Their language consisted only of sounds that did not serve as a means of communication but were used as magic spells. The words had magical powers. The bodies of these people were still soft. They had the ability to extend their limbs by means of their willpower, just as lower animals can extend and retract tentacles today. — In the middle of the Lemurian period, they developed self-awareness, which is what distinguishes humans from animals. Animals have the physical body, etheric body and astral body in common with humans; only the sense of self makes humans human. The meaning of the ego is unique in its depth. “I” is the unspeakable, the divine. No one can say “I” to the other. And it is both confidential and intimate. I can only say “I” to myself. It is the only word that cannot be applied to anyone else.

Man possessed the three lower principles, sthula sharira, linga sharira and the astral body, from the moon. This higher principle, the new self, was brought over from the world of Mars by the guides of humanity. Before that, the astral body was only able to function through the suggestion of the initiates; man first had to see spiritually in order to feel. Mars is a predecessor of the earth. There, the astral bodies were already more developed than on earth. Now an influence took place that we can call the Martian stage.

In the middle of the Atlantean race, in the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites, thinking was added. But they could not yet combine, it was memory work. Thinking came through a Mercury impact that gave man the ability to develop further. From this fifth sub-race of the fourth root race, the fifth root race later developed. In esoteric teachings, “Earth” refers to Mars and Mercury.

Before the Lemurian race, bodies were air-shaped, and even earlier they were ethereal on an astral world body, which then condensed into the ethereal-earthly.

The first earthly forms were repetitions of earlier states and rounds. On the moon, the large one, not yet separated from the sun, the Hyperborean race and the polaric race lived. It was only during the Lemurian epoch that the moon split off. At the time of the Hyperboreans and Polar Men, the sun and moon were still united. Osiris, the sun, and Isis, the moon, gave birth to Horus, the earth, and also the human soul. And even earlier, the universe had already undergone other metamorphoses through a whole pralaya. Before the Lemurian epoch, the sun, moon and earth still formed a whole. There the astral body was formed. The possibility of lust and suffering was developed. Minerals and plants were still very similar. The minerals grew, similar to the plants. Man lived on a swamp floor. The earth had not yet taken on its solid form. Plants emerged from the mineral kingdom. The mineral also lived. Everything lived, the living grew on the living. We see a remnant of this epoch in the parasitic animals and plants. Mistletoe is a parasite that can only live on other plants. It is an example of a retarded creature that has not transcended the lunar state. It plays an important role in Nordic mythology: the evil Loki kills Baldur with mistletoe. Only this parasite from the moon could have had a deadly power over Baldur, the sun god, because it was before the sun. There are also lower animals that have not completed the lunar cycle, and these therefore surround themselves with a shell to protect themselves from the outside world; otherwise they would not be able to withstand the terrestrial influences.

The solar epoch precedes the lunar epoch. The body of the sun was the dwelling place of all of us, we are children of the sun. Our pranic life force comes from there. Before that, man had only a physical body. There he received the etheric body.

Before the Sun there was Saturn. As a planet, it was physical. This physical matter was the origin of the mineral kingdom. It formed the human body. The other bodies were still resting in God.

We should not think of the transition from Saturn to the Sun, from the Sun to the Moon as a leap, but rather something like this: Saturn encompassed the whole area of the later solar system. The Sun separated itself from the surplus parts that human beings did not need for the formation of their physical body. This is referred to as “splitting off”.

The human etheric body was formed on the sun, which now also included the moon and the earth, by receiving the pranic life force. When the sun had split off, the large moon, including the earth, moved around the sun but without rotating around itself. It was not yet mobile enough for this, because the astral only developed on the moon. And only when this life force had been absorbed by humans and the earth did the moon split off from the excess matter, the slag, and form the earth's satellite, as we know it. On earth, the manas was then added to the four lower principles, and its task is to develop man up to the budhi stage.

In the middle of the Lemurian race, the impact of Mars occurred. From it we received self-awareness. Mercury is the source of the Budhi principle. The Budhi stage encompasses clairvoyance, the continuity of consciousness, which is then no longer interrupted by sleep and death. Consciousness then extends into devachan and to the planets. This is the development from manas to budhi. This is to reach perfection in the sixth and seventh races.

Far beyond that is the development of Jupiter and Venus. Vulcan is not yet visible; it can only be perceived by the initiated.

The state on Jupiter is such that if an ordinary person could be transported there, he would go mad, for he would lack all means to comprehend what is going on, and he would not be able to make himself understood to the inhabitants there at all. Communication there occurs only through thoughts that evoke a light effect. The luminous figures that are evoked are only apparent, whereas on Venus the thought forms are not only objective, but real entities. The power of thought there is so great that it creates real beings. The volcano cannot be thought of by beings who are endowed with brains. In order to keep these seven stages of planetary development constantly in people's minds, the great sages, the custodians and guides of humanity, gave the names of the stars to the seven days of the week. The original names have not been preserved in all languages, but they can be traced in many modern languages.

The counting of days began with the ancients on Saturday, the day before the sun was worshiped. The seven days of the week should be a constant reminder to man that he has grown out of the cosmos.

When mankind united in states ruled by laws, when parliaments emerged as we have them today, they forgot the origin of these laws. It used to be different. People were well aware of the great spiritual laws. They knew the one truth and knew that there could only be one truth.

The fifth root race developed from the Primitive Aryans. We can divide it into seven cultural epochs. The first, the Primitive Indian, was led by the seven wise Rishis. It was directed entirely towards the supernatural, the all-embracing divine. The Primitive Medes and Persians had a dual-god system. They saw light and shadow, and called them Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the evil principle. Among the Babylonians and Egyptians, the cult of the gods took on further form and shape. In all these cultures, the priests alone possessed the wisdom and ruled the peoples, who themselves were not yet intellectually developed. The development of the states and the rule of the priests existed side by side for a long time, merging into one another.

Let us now take a schematic look at the epochs that have passed us by. Seven to eight thousand years ago, when the Atlantean culture was transitioning into the post-Atlantean culture, the wise recognized that every culture has to go through seven phases.

1st phase: The great divine impact is determined by laws.
2nd phase: Love shall rule everything.
3rd phase: The effects of passions.
4th phase: Kama-Manas, - arts and sciences.

5th, 6th and 7th phase: Manas, Buddhi, Atma principle take effect. This overview for a future cultural epoch, this seven-part plan was set down in the Sibylline books. Thus the sages did not act on mere foresight, but rather built on a very definite plan, ordered by high divine beings according to eternal laws.

Many things from prehistoric times have been handed down to us in myths and legends. The Trojan War, for example, illustrates the struggle between the third and fourth sub-races. Troy and its gods were outwitted by the cunning of Odysseus. His cleverness, embodied in the wooden horse, brought down Troy. The Laocoön Group also gives us a picture of the struggle of the intellect with the power of priestly wisdom; or, better said, the priestly culture is overcome by cleverness.

Aeneas, the son of Anchises and Aphrodite, became the progenitor of the Romans. The seven Roman kings are to be regarded mythically, as is already being done by historians. Romulus symbolizes the lasting cosmic substance of the physical body; Numa Pompilius the whole power of life, the warlike element, self-confidence, and worship. The conquest of Albalonga took place under Tullus Hostilius. The Alba longa was the robe of the priests. The conquest by the Romans means that the higher law of the Budhi will gain the upper hand over the rule of the priests, in which the individual human being received knowledge of the higher laws only through the priests, while he should gradually strive for the highest in self-awareness and self-responsibility. The emergence of the plebeian class coincides with this period of the development of the lower manas. Ancus Marcius: expansion of the state and city. Founding of the port city of Ostia. The Roman citizen as a provisional ego carrier. Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, who comes from outside. He represents the part of the Manas, the spiritual self, that connects the three lower limbs with the three higher ones. Servius Tullius: Division of classes according to wealth, census, elevation of the Plebeians, impact of the Budhi. Tarquinius Superbus, the Exalted: highest education of the absolute royal power, goal: Atman, the spiritual man.

Theosophy also brings order into the chaos of historical research. States, too, are built according to very definite laws. We always find the seven-fold division according to which everything develops. The secrets and confusions that otherwise seem insoluble to us are solved by this thread.

Answering questions

Mr. Hube asked a question about the development of the senses. Dr. Steiner replied:

The sensory organs on the moon were quite different from those that later developed on Earth. For example, salt could be perceived, but not seen in the present sense of the word. Only through what is seen does the image arise in the astral. There are four types of ether: heat ether, light ether, chemical ether and life ether. The life ether or prana has two poles: electricity and life.

The Lemurians first had cold blood; the earth itself gave them the necessary warmth; this process is aptly described in the words: “The Spirit brooded over the waters” - matter. Only the astral body could generate warmth in man.

The sensation of light only arose gradually when the sun separated from the earth. At first there was only a sense of light and darkness; a visual organ gradually developed that no longer exists today but is still preserved in the myth of the one eye of the Cyclops. With the development of the eyes, which could only arise when the sun gave light to the earth, man lost the ability to perceive the soul in his surroundings. The soul became more and more a mirror of the outside world.

The ethereal ancestor of man was basically a single organ of hearing; the ear developed only later. The sense of touch has remained with man; it is distributed over the whole body, which feels.

The significance of the moon in its present state

It still has certain effects on the astral body, and also influences reproduction, ebb and flow, and common fertilization.

When asked about the canals on Mars, Dr. Steiner said,

that even science describes this discovery as a mistake. The development of the Martians is much higher than ours; it cannot be measured by our standards.

The days of the week in German, Swedish and French:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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