The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In material science it is customary—with the exception of a few circles who in modern times have come to a different explanation—to represent our present solar system as having developed out of a kind of nebula which embraced a space as far as the orbit of Neptune, that is, as far as the orbit of the outermost planet of our solar system. And then, it is supposed, through a condensing process, our sun and the planets moving round it gradually formed. As we have said, there are now a few exponents -who have a somewhat different view; but they too do not bring forward anything essential for us who take a spiritual view. So our sun and the planets circling round it are supposed to have formed themselves into globes. In connection with this a neat little comparison has always been made use of in the schools, and it is still employed to-day, to show by ocular demonstration how a whole planetary system can originate through rotation. Some oily liquid is taken, which, when placed in water takes a globular form. Then a small disc is cut and inserted through the equatorial line of this oily ball so that it is divided into two halves. This is then rotated by means of a pin stuck through the centre of the disc, and one sees at first one drop separate itself and circle as a separate body round the large globe, then a second and a third drop, and finally a large drop remains in the centre around which many smaller ones revolve. “A planetary system in miniature!” says the experimenter. Then he says: Why should not our solar system originate from that primeval nebula in this way, if we can now imitate it in this miniature solar system? Usually this comparison seems to be extremely illuminating and people now understand how once upon a time Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury separated from that primeval nebula. But the whole affair, not only the comparison but the whole idea, proceeds from the emptiness of all present-day thinking, for the persons in question, otherwise quite learned men, who put for-ward this illustration in such an illuminating manner, forget only one thing, namely, that they themselves are present and turn the pin. Now self forgetfulness is very good in certain realms of life, but in this case, if the experimenter is forgotten, the most important thing is forgotten, for without him the drop of oil would never rotate at all. The learned person who believes in such a superstition—this superstition is called the Kant-Laplace system—should at least be logical in his thinking, he should at least presume that some sort of being must have sat on a gigantic stool in space at that time and set a gigantic axis in motion. But human thought has gradually become so accustomed to consider only the material, that the contradiction in such a comparison is no longer noticed. As a matter of fact, there is a certain truth in this so-called Kant-Laplace system, although the truth is different from the materialistic explanation of the matter. There is a certain truth in it because to spiritual vision everything contained in our present solar system actually appears as having proceeded from such a primeval nebula; only to him who can really investigate historically it is clear that the good in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis comes from occult traditions. This was forgotten when the word “occultism” became something of which one was afraid, as children are of the chimney-sweep. That which really took place did not happen without the influence of spiritual beings and powers. Matter can do nothing unless spiritual beings are behind it.

It would take us too far to-day if, linking on to what was said yesterday, we were to explain the whole of our solar system. Leaving the planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, etc., out of our present study, let us only keep in mind what is of special importance to human life and human evolution.

At one time there was, in fact, such a nebula; and in this all the parts of our solar system were as if dissolved. But, bound up with this nebula, so that they belonged to it, were all the beings mentioned in the course of our observations yesterday. For example, all the beings who passed through the human stage in the twenty-four Rounds were connected with this cosmic nebula. Other beings too were bound up with it. They all dwelt in this nebula which, if not thought of in connection with these beings, is a fantastic abstraction. In the way the materialistic chemist imagines this nebula, it is impossible; it exists only in thought, there is no reality. In reality, the nebula only exists because it is inhabited by a number of spiritual beings. For when this nebula again became visible, there were connected with it all the beings who once inhabited ancient Saturn, who then passed through the various stages of evolution through Sun and Moon right on up to Earth, when after a long intermediate pause the Earth-nebula arose, so to speak. The other beings also with whom we became acquainted on the Sun, were connected with this nebula. It is the whole choir of these beings, who filled the nebula, who produced the movements. For it is beings who create their field of work.

For example, there were beings who needed a dwelling place quite different from that of man if they were to undergo the evolution suited to them. The men who lived upon the ancient Moon as the ancestors of the present men had only physical body, etheric and astral bodies. With these three members of their being they came out of the so-called pralaya again like a plant from the seed. Thus when the entire system began it was unsuitable for the beings who had brought with them the germs for the present man. Had the speed of development been maintained which our solar system had at the beginning when it came forth from the cosmic twilight, man would have been unable to find the path of his evolution. It would have been as if you were now to be born and then in a very short time become old. If the speed of evolution natal to the Sun had been maintained, man would have grown old quickly; he would be unable to take the slow course through the decades which he now actually does; after a short time he would have white hair, he would be old almost before he was a child.

But this was not to be. There were beings who needed a quicker tempo. These only went through a part of evolution with man, then they took out the heavenly body which now stands as the sun in the heavens and made it their dwelling place. They drew out the substance of the sun together with their own being. For the sun which sends its light to us to-day is inhabited by spiritual beings, just as our earth is. With every sunbeam descending to the earth come the actions of those spiritual beings who in the course of the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon had progressed so far that they were able to participate in the rapid development taking place on the present sun. High, exalted beings were connected with this sun existence at the beginning of our earth development. These separated from the earth; and that which then remained you must imagine as if you had mixed together the present moon and earth in a great cauldron, and this mingled earth and moon circled round the sun for a time.

Thus before we reached the point described yesterday as human incarnation, we have first to recognize the separation of the sun from the earth, that is, the present earth plus the present moon. Upon the sun remained the beings who are the spiritual directors of earthly events. When they came over from the ancient Moon there were seven such beings; in Genesis they are called Elohim, Spirits of Light. For a time they went through their evolution together with the earth, then they drew forth the sun so that they could now work upon the earth from the sun. These Elohim, these Spirits of Light, were seven in number. Six of them united their existence with the actual cosmic sun, and one, known in the Old Testament as Jehovah, separated from them and remained at first united with the earth. He guided and directed the earthly evolution from within, while the others worked upon it from without. That was the position for a time. But after what was pointed out yesterday concerning the ancient Moon, you will understand that with the withdrawal of the sun was connected a condensation of all that emerged as earth plus moon. There came a period in the earth's evolution when not only the substance, but all beings, underwent a coarsening. For example, the beings who later became man, who at that time were very soft and delicate, underwent a coarsening through taking on horrible instincts. A coarsening of all life took place.

Evolution could not remain thus if man were to arise. A coarsening would have taken place, everything would have become more and more dense and the human beings would have stiffened into mummies, they would have become mummified. And there would very soon have been a planet upon which some-thing not exactly beautiful, but human-like mummies, statues would have collected. The earth would have become mummified. A different event had to take place. Through the government of Jehovah, as cosmic spirit, that which you now see as the moon as the burnt-out moon-dross in the heavens, was separated from the whole mass of earth plus moon. Not only were the grossest substances separated but also the grossest beings. Hence only through the withdrawal of the sun it was brought about that man did not proceed too quickly in his evolution, and through the withdrawal of the moon it was brought about that he did not develop towards a condition of drying up, densification, or mummification.

Thus the earth was separated from the whole mass, and now the course of human evolution was guided on the earth under the influence of these two heavenly bodies—that is, of course, of their beings, the six sun Spirits and the moon Spirit, who had separated himself for the salvation of man. And it was so guided that on the whole these two forces were balanced. Through the exit of both the sun-forces and the moon-forces, exactly the right tempo for human development was attained.

Now in order to understand this more clearly, imagine a man as if influenced only by the sun. You know that man goes through his evolution upon the earth in many, many incarnations. Man began with his first incarnation, then took on a new body over and over again, until he goes through his last incarnation. He passes through a series of incarnations, as a result of which he develops slowly and rises from one incarnation to the next. Men trod the surface of our earth as true spiritual infants. Since the separation of sun and moon from our earth they have risen to the present stage. All these souls will return in different bodies up to the end of the earth's evolution. Now if man were influenced by the sun alone he would have to pass through in a single incarnation all that he now goes through in so many. The right tempo comes into the many incarnations through the balancing of the forces between the sun and moon from without.

Modern man was gradually shaped during the period which followed the withdrawal of sun and moon; the first germs of the present-day man were then created. That was at a time when man moved upon this earth in quite a different way from that in which he moves now. You must not imagine that when the moon had just gone forth man moved upon this earth in a fleshly form as he does now. There appear again all the forms which had previously been there, as a repetition; and when the earth was liberated from the sun and moon it looked approximately like the old Moon, even softer. And if a being with eyes organized like those of the present day had looked at the earth he would not yet have been able to see man. On the other hand, certain other beings were there who were not sufficiently mature to await a later time. These had to take bodily form while the stage of evolution was still incomplete; so that some time after the moon's departure from the earth certain forms of the lower animals could already be seen physically condensed. Man had not yet descended, nor yet the higher mammals. Man was still a spirit being. He floated as a spirit round the earth and took into himself the finest substances from the environment of the earth. Then gradually he densified so far that he could descend to where the earth had already become solid and islands had formed.

Thus we see that the first human beings appeared comparatively late in the earth's evolution and at that time they had a very different constitution from the present human being. I cannot describe to you the forms of those men which first crystallized, so to speak, out of the spirit. Although you have already heard much that is difficult to believe, you would be greatly shocked if I were to describe to you the grotesque forms of the bodies in which your souls were then incarnated. You would not be able to bear such a description. However, at a later date, when these things which are only now beginning to come to the consciousness of man through Anthroposophy, when they more and more penetrate men's consciousness, this will have to be made known, and it will have a tremendous result, it will be extremely important to the whole life of man. For only when man learns how his body has developed, how the organs he now possesses have gradually developed out of entirely different forms, will he feel that remarkable relationship existing between the organs in the human body which to-day are apparently far apart. He will then see the correspondence between certain organs, for example, between the appendix and the windpipe, which in their earlier form grew together in those remarkably formed beings. All that to-day is man is the previous form unrolled as it were, the previous form unfolded in the most varied ways. Organs which to-day are separated formerly grew together. They have, however, kept their relationship, and very frequently this relationship is manifested in illnesses. It is seen that when a certain organ is diseased another one is of necessity involved. Hence those who really study medicine will have to make many discoveries, of which the present medical age, which is only a collection of notes, does not dream; then only will physicians really learn something about the true nature of man. All this is merely to point out how entirely different was man's earlier form.

The solid parts have only been built into this human form gradually. There were originally no bones in the human body, even when it had already descended. The bones were developed from soft cartilaginous structures which traversed the human body like cords. These in their turn originated from quite soft substances, and these soft substances from fluid substances, these from airy, the airy from etheric and the etheric from astral which had densified from spiritual substantiality. If you trace it back you will find that everything material has originated from the spiritual. Everything is in archetype in the spiritual world. It was only the Atlantean epoch that the bones, formerly merely indicated, actually developed in man.

We must now more closely examine Lemurian humanity in order the better to understand the writer of the Apocalypse. I need only indicate that following the first period, when the moon had separated from the earth and man descended, he was of a very different nature as regards his will power from what he became later. At that time the will of man worked magically—by his will he could work upon the growth of flowers. When he exerted his will he could make a flower shoot up quickly, a capacity which can only be acquired to-day by an abnormal process of development. Hence at that time the natural surroundings depended upon how the will of man was constituted. If it was good it worked soothingly upon the billowing waters, upon the storm and upon the fiery structures which were then all around, for the earth was to a great extent of a volcanic nature. Man worked soothingly upon all this through a good will and destructively through all evil will. Whole islands could be destroyed by evil will. Thus the human will was in complete correspondence with its environment. The tracts of land upon which man then lived were destroyed essentially by the evil will of man, and only a small part of mankind was saved (we have here to distinguish between race-development and soul-development) who lived on into the epoch which we may describe in so far as words can express clairvoyant perception.

After this catastrophe by fire we come to the Atlantean epoch when the human race developed essentially on a continent which now forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, between the present Europe and America. At that time man lived under very different physical conditions. At the beginning of the Atlantean epoch he was a structure which perceived in quite a different way from the present man; we have already indicated this in the first lecture and again later; to-day we shall again point out this different kind of vision of the man of that epoch. He still had a kind of spiritual vision, because the construction of his body was different from what it is now. The etheric body was not yet so firmly bound up with the physical body. The etheric body of the head extended far beyond the physical body. Only towards the last third of the Atlantean epoch did the projecting etheric body draw in and take the form of the present physical human head. Since the form of the ancient Atlantean was so very different from that of present man and his members so differently joined together, his whole life of consciousness, his whole soul life was also different. And here—if we wish to understand the Apocalyptist—we must touch upon a very important, but a very mysterious, chapter.

If you were to enter this ancient Atlantis, you would find that it was surrounded not by such pure air as the present earth but by air saturated with volumes of mist, with water. This air became clearer and more transparent the further Atlantis developed, but the mists were densest where the more advanced Atlantean civilization referred to developed. The thickest mists were there, and from these developed the foundations of the later civilizations. Atlantis was covered far and wide by those mists. A division of rain and sunshine such as we have to-day did not then exist. Hence in ancient Atlantis that which you know as the rainbow could not appear. You might search the whole of Atlantis and you would not find it. Only when the condensation of the water led to flooding, when the great flood spread itself over the earth, could the rainbow originate physically. And this is a point where from Spiritual Science you will gain the greatest respect for the religious records. For when you are told that after the flood, Noah, the representative of those who then saved the human race, sees the rainbow first appear, this is really an historical event. After the flood humanity saw the first rainbow; previously it was not physically possible. Here you will see how profound, how literally true the religious records are. To-day many are distressed when one says that the religious records are literally true. Many quote a saying which is true; it is quoted, however, by lazy people, not as a true statement but from indolence. It is the saying: “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” From this they deduce the right to take no notice at all of what stands in the records, to have no longer the will to recognize what is actually there, for it is the “dead letter” they say. And so they like to let their spirit shine and concoct all sorts of fantasies. These persons may indeed be very clever in their explanations, but that is not the point; the point is that we ought really to see in the records what is contained in them. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life” has the same significance in mystical language as the saying of Goethe, “He who has not this, this dying and becoming, is but a sad guest upon the dark earth.” This saying does not mean: “If you wish to lead some one to a higher knowledge you must slay him,” but it means that just through the culture of the physical world man must uplift himself to spirituality. So also the letter is the body of the spirit, and we must first have and understand it, then we may say that we can find the spirit in it. The letter, the understood letter, must then die so that the spirit may be resurrected from it. This saying is not an injunction to fancy anything you please about what is contained in the religious records. When we recognize the true significance of this rainbow as we have represented it, something like deep respect for the religious records invades our soul, and we get an idea of how, through the deepening of the understanding by the teachings of Anthroposophy, man first attains to true and real feelings and advances to a true understanding of the religious records by an act of will.

We will now look back into ancient Atlantis. We have already said that man then lived in a different state of consciousness and that his memory was different from what it is now; but the difference is much more considerable. If we go far back not merely into the later period of Atlantis but to the beginning, we then find the human consciousness very different from that which we possess to-day.

Let us once more consider the present consciousness. During the day a person uses his senses. At night he goes to sleep. On the bed lie the physical body and the etheric body; the astral body and the “I” withdraw. The sphere of consciousness darkens. The man of to-day sees nothing and hears nothing. Then again in the morning when the astral body and the “I” re-enter the physical body and etheric body, physical objects again confront him. How was it in the early Atlantean epoch? Let us take the moment when in the morning man plunged into the physical body and etheric body; at that time he did not have a physical world around him such as we have to-day. All the present objects which are now seen with clear outlines were then seen as if surrounded with an aura, with coloured edges, quite indistinct. In ancient Atlantis the appearance was somewhat similar to what is now seen when in the evening there is a dense fog and you cannot see the street lamps clearly, but surrounded by coloured edges. Thus it was in early Atlantis. All objects were seen indistinctly, not with clear outlines and surfaces as to-day, everything was as if enveloped in coloured mist. Only gradually have clear outlines developed. Had we looked at a rose in the first portion of Atlantis it was as if a cloudy structure arose and in the middle something red. Only gradually did the external colour appear to be laid on the surface; only later did objects obtain sharp outlines.

Hence you see that the physical world surrounding man was quite different in ancient Atlantis. It was also different when at night he rose out of his physical body when—shall we say—he went to sleep. Really it was not sleep in the present sense. However, the entire world of the misty physical formations remained below, and a spiritual world arose. Possessing no sharp outlines man lived within a spiritual world. Spiritual beings were his companions. In the first portion of the Atlantean epoch day and night alternated in such a way that when man plunged into his physical body he had only hazy, indistinct pictures of the physical world; but when at night he left the physical body he was able to live spiritually, although somewhat indistinctly, among spirits; he moved among spirits. And above all, man's entire life of feeling was also different in the Atlantean epoch. At that time when he went out of his physical body and etheric body, he did not feel fatigue and the need for rest. Neither did he find rest. He had to enter into the spiritual world; that was then his sphere of activity. On the other hand, when the morning came, he felt the need for rest and sought out his resting-place, which was his own body. There he lay peacefully. He crept into his own body and rested during the day.

Thus in the first period of Atlantis it was entirely different from what it is now. During the Atlantean epoch, man gradually passed from the very opposite conditions into those of the later period. This came about more and more as the etheric body was driven into the physical body. This occurred during the last third of the Atlantean epoch. Before this event man felt himself as a waking being above in the spiritual world; but as yet he did not say to himself “I,” he did not possess self-consciousness. When he withdrew from the physical body and etheric body in order to go into the brilliance of the night, he felt himself to be a member of the spirituality which was above, he felt himself safely hidden, so to speak, in his group-soul. It always became bright around him during the night; but he felt himself dependent. Just as our finger belongs to our “I,” so man felt that he belonged to the group-souls which are seen spiritually as the four heads of the Lion, Eagle, Bull and Man, described in the Apocalypse of John. Man felt himself transposed into one such group-soul. And only when, snail-like, he was in his bodily shell did he feel that he possessed something of his own. For the circumstance that man became an independent being resulted from his being able to envelop himself in his body. He had, however, to pay for this confinement in his body by the gradual obscuration of the spiritual world, until it completely withdrew. In its place the world which he saw below when he was in the physical body became brighter and clearer. In this way it gradually dawned upon him that he was an “I,” that he had self-consciousness within him. He learned to say “I” to himself.

If we wish to characterize what took place at that time we must imagine man creeping out of his “snail-shell,” as it were, into the spiritual world. There he is among spiritually divine beings. There resounds to him from without the name of what he is. One group heard the word which in the original language was the word for that group; another group heard a different word. Man could not name himself from within; his name sounded into him from without. When he thus crept out of the “snail-shell” of his body he knew what he was, because this knowledge was poured into his soul. Now when in his body he learned to perceive the physical environment, he learned to feel himself as “I,” he learned to feel within himself the divine power which previously was poured into him, he learned to feel God within him. The God nearest to him, who pointed to his “I,” he called Jehovah. This God was the “I”-leader, and man felt the power of this God arising within his “I.”

External events were connected with this. When the first Atlantean thus descended into his physical body and looked out into space, he did not see an actual rainbow; in the place where the sun later emerged, he saw something like a circle formed of colour; the sun did not yet penetrate in power, but acted through the mist; though hindered and held back by the fog, its forces influenced the earth. It appeared very gradually. All that we have described as the awakening of external consciousness was connected with the emergence of the sun from the mist. That which was up above where the other six spirits had their abode, who together with Jehovah had to guide the earth evolution, gradually emerged and shone down upon the earth in deeds.

What had taken place in man? When previously he rose out of his body, when it was night, so to speak, his soul and spirit entered into the inner astral brilliance to which the external sun is not necessary. This brilliance surrounded him. It was the same light which later shone down physically from the sun, from mighty spiritual beings. As he gradually enclosed himself in his physical consciousness, the door of inner vision was closed. Darkness surrounded him when at night he left his physical and etheric bodies and entered the spiritual world. To the extent to which he confined himself, to the same extent arose the external light which represents the deeds of the spiritual beings of the sun; the light of the spiritual beings shone externally upon the earth. Man prepared himself to look upon the external light as something material. The light shone in his then darkened inner being, but the light was not then comprehended by his darkness. This is a world-historical event. Man bought his self-consciousness at that time through spiritual darkening. In this way man grew out of the brilliance connected with the group-souls. But it was only the very first dawning of the individuality. It was a long, long time before he really grew possessed of it. The last portion of the Atlantean epoch passed away and the flood came.

The post-Atlantean epoch began. The ancient Indian civilization passed away. True self-consciousness had not yet developed. Then came the Persian and Babylonian-Egyptian ages. Man gradually matured so as to develop self-consciousness within him. At length came the fourth age. At this stage something of tremendous importance took place for which all that had gone before was the preparation. Imagine yourself now uplifted from the earth to a distant star and gifted with spiritual vision, looking down to the earth from that distant star. You would then see that this earth as physical body is not only physical body, but that an etheric body and an astral body belong to it, just as with man. The earth has all this too. You would see the earth surrounded by its aura and from that star you would be able to follow the development of the earth's aura for thousands of years. You would see this earth surrounded by all sorts of colours; in the centre the physical kernel and around it the aura floating in various forms and colours; and in this spiritual atmosphere of the earth you would see the most varied structures. You would see these colours and forms change in various ways in the course of thousands of years; but there would come a moment, a moment of great importance, when the whole aura assumes a different form and colour. Seen from outside the earth then appears in a new light; and this takes place extremely quickly, so that one has to say: From this moment a fundamental trans-formation of the earth has taken place; its aura has changed completely. When is this? It is the moment when upon Golgotha the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer. This moment is an extremely important one, the most important moment in the whole of the earth's evolution! The moment when the blood flows from the wounds of the Redeemer is the same as that in which the aura of the earth shapes itself anew. An entirely new power enters in, the power which gives the most important impulse to the earth's evolution, for which all that we have considered up to now was only the preparation.

To the chemist the blood of Golgotha is the same as any other blood; but in reality it is quite different. It signifies that the substance of the blood flows down to the earth, and that the spirit corresponding to it fills the aura of the earth with new impulses and new forces which have significance for the future evolution of humanity. From there the forces which change the earth stream forth, from there they stream through man. Only a small part of what flowed in at that moment has been realized up to now. Ever more and more man will learn to understand what the earth has become through that moment of Golgotha, and what man can develop towards in that consciousness which he has gained since Atlantis. What, then, has man gained since Atlantis? Two things: the “I”-consciousness and the faculty of sight in the external world. That which previously was open to him, the spiritual world, has been closed. Truly these earlier men saw what the later myths relate—Woden, Mercury, Jupiter, Zeus. They saw all these beings at night; they were then among them. This door to the spiritual beings has closed. In its place man gained the world now surrounding him. The spirits have withdrawn from him; all that he was able to see at that time has disappeared. Formerly he saw the Divine when he slipped out of the snail-shell of his physical body. He had now to see the Divine within the body if it were to appear before him. This means nothing else than that we must receive the Divine in bodily visible shape because human consciousness has become adapted to physical vision, and for this reason the Divine Itself had to assume bodily physical form. Therefore the Divine appeared once on the earth in a fleshly body. It had to appear in this form because man had advanced to this stage of perception it had to be presented in this way to his perception so that he could understand it. And all the appearances which had previously taken place at other stages of evolution had to be united in that greatest event in the earth's history, which will throw light on the whole future and which we shall now unveil from the Apocalypse; in that event which physically looks as if drops of blood stream down to the earth, but spiritually as if something rises up which changes the aura of the earth. The force which then flowed in will work together with the earth throughout the whole future. The earth-soul, the spirit of the whole earth, was then inoculated with something new. The Christ principle united with the earth at that time and the earth has become the body of this Christ principle. So that the statement is literally true, “He who eats my bread treads me underfoot.” When man eats the bread of the earth he eats the body of the earth and this is the body of the earth-spirit which, as the Christ-Spirit, since the event on Golgotha, is united with the earth. And man walks upon the earth-body, he treads this body underfoot. All can be understood literally if only we are able first of all to comprehend the text in the right way.

To such a man as the writer of John's Gospel, all that he knew, all that he could grasp with spiritual vision, was a summons to understand the greatest event in the earth's evolution. Of all that he was able to stream through spiritual vision he said, “I must use it in order to understand Christ and His work.” It was the intention of the writer of the Apocalypse to use all his occult knowledge in order to explain the Event of Golgotha. Whatever he could learn from occult science was regarded by him as a road to wisdom, helping him to understand this event which he has placed before us in such a wonderful way, and regarding which we shall see what it signified for him.

Let us take a look at the short life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis is more a memory of a past life than a life in itself, a fine personality, an individuality who, from the very beginning, had the most profound spirituality as an inclination within him. One is always amazed at how Novalis combines the highest intellectuality, the sharpest thinking, with a wonderful spirituality.

He was a trained mining engineer who had a complete mastery of mathematics and the physical sciences, who combined mathematical thinking with a fine, delicate, and yet fiery, ether-like spirituality, who lived this harmoniously in a way that is perhaps unparalleled in life. You have to be able to empathize with what is contained in Novalis' sayings and fragments to realize how deeply he penetrated into the inner structure of the world. You also have to be able to empathize with his enthusiasm for mathematics. For him, it is a great poem that introduces us to the secrets of the world. Man ponders the connections between space and time. If he can imbibe the harmony of the stars, which revolve around the sun according to eternal laws, with the formative forces that work within the earth in ore veins, crystal formations and so on, then he can sense the living essence of the world.

Novalis is filled with true enthusiasm for mathematics. He calls mathematics, which can show such paths of understanding, a sublime religion. It is wonderful how he is able to embrace this seemingly dry science with fervent devotion. For him, the sensory world existed only as a reflection of eternally living spiritual facts, which reveal themselves to earthly perception in natural laws.

Novalis fell deeply in love with a thirteen-year-old girl who died soon after their engagement. The shock he experienced was tremendous. It opened the gates of the spiritual world to him. Novalis speaks with the deceased as with a living person; he called his own further life a 'her-after-death'. She is always present to him. The friendship that later united him with another girl can be called a supersensible one. She is like an emblem for the spiritual being that hovers above and with whom he will completely merge.

There was a power of spirituality in him that stands unparalleled in the modern age.

In earlier lives, Novalis had undergone profound initiations. Thus, he entered this life with a predisposition for a true, real understanding of world events. He appeared in the spiritual sky like a meteor, scattering spirit everywhere in a way rarely found in the expressions of newer spirits.

The fresh, youthful nature of Novalis was characterized by two poles: a great intellectuality and a deep spirituality. The whole wealth of his manifold creative thinking converged in him into an all-embracing sense of totality, which had its source of life in a divine source. He sensed the source everywhere as spirit. Novalis called this consciousness “magic”. The creative imagination, the feeling of the soul was for him a reproduction of the great cosmic feeling; it became for him “magical idealism”. He experienced his ego as related to the ego of all other beings, and he felt that all beings were related to each other. Thus Novalis merged with the spiritual weaving and life of nature.

In the “Apprentices of Sais” you will find the story of the young man “Hyacinth”, who has an intimate relationship with the creatures of nature. He and the girl “Rosenblüte” are bound by a warm friendship. The animals of the forest and the flowers of the fields are his companions in his secrets. It is told how he meets a man with a long beard who has a book from which Hyacinth learns a great deal. Now he is driven to seek out what constitutes the innermost being of man. This, what man must seek, Novalis called “the blue flower”. It is the seeking of the higher self in man.

We also find this significant symbol in oriental mysticism as the lotus flower. It is a symbol of the higher self, of chaste, purified humanity, in which the self can unfold. It is still enclosed as if by petals – later it will bear fruit and seeds. Novalis had brought such knowledge with him from his previous incarnations.

We are now told how Hyacinth wanders to the land of secrets, always searching, until he finds a veiled figure. When he removes the veil, he sees little roses.

In Novalis's “Hymns to the Night”, his experience of cosmic-human unity is expressed lyrically. This is also the case in the “Spiritual Songs”, this harrowing document of merging with Christ.

Everything he wanted to say to the world, Novalis set out in the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”. But he died before he could finish it. Let us recall in our minds what he intended to accomplish.

We are transported back to the time of the Wartburg Singers' Contest when Heinrich was young. But the course of events takes us out of the world of the present and into a fairytale world. We have to transport ourselves back to the time when the area of the Atlantic Ocean was still land. There was once a lively life there, people whose activities would indeed seem like a fairytale to present-day people. It was a land where rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are now. The sun was hidden by fog, the air was watery. It is not for nothing that the Nordic sagas called Atlantis 'Niflheim', that is, Mistheim. There was no distinction between rain and sunshine, only a gradual transition from water to air. A rainbow would not have been possible there. The events of those ancient times are preserved in the legends of the flood, the ark, the rainbow, and one stands amazed at the infinitely deep truths contained in the ancient religious records. At first glance, the biblical account of the rainbow seems allegorical. But here we are faced with a fact: a rainbow would not have been possible in ancient Atlantis. It is one of those sacred moments that overwhelm the occult researcher when he is transported back in time to these older times.

Novalis's seer's eye looked into this ancient realm, which one can truly speak of as a fairytale realm. Man did not yet have his reasoning mind back then; he lived life with nature. He built his house in such a way that it grew out of the rocks and plants. There were no myths back then. What are the myths that our peoples tell each other? The gift of shaping worlds in poetry is only peculiar to our post-Atlantic race; the Atlanteans did not have it. But the Atlanteans still had the gift of transforming plants, even animals and humans. The metamorphic powers of Circe in the Odyssey point to such metamorphic powers of humans. Everything that humans bring forth from within as myth, the people of Atlantis had experienced and seen with their own eyes. The great poets of our time have preserved the images of their poetry from what they had seen on Atlantis itself.

Novalis interweaves his own memories with the story of “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” and brings the ancient Atlantis to life in his tales. He then takes us to more recent times, to the period of city foundations. This time brings with it the emergence of the bourgeoisie and material culture. The rise of the bourgeoisie is linked to external, material culture. What was previously poetry becomes something else.

The origin of our poetry points to the mysteries. We have to go back to the time when the sacred mysteries were the source of inspiration for the poetry of Homer or Aeschylus and Sophocles, when ancient culture laid the foundation for what worked as a spiritual force in Homer and Aeschylus. Only after long trials were the purified admitted to the higher mysteries, the primeval mysteries, which took place in the supersensible, in the astral world. But there was a reflection of this in later times, for example in the Eleusinian mysteries. There the so-called primal drama was enacted. It was depicted how God, the soul of the world, descended into matter and how the descending, suffering and resurrecting God shows the way of redemption. It was the choir that, as in an echo, expressed the language of cosmic events in the ancient Greek mystery drama.

In Aeschylus we experience the transition of the ancient sacred primal drama into the secular drama. It blossoms from a branch that has grown out of the mystery being. The other branch was philosophy, and the third branch was religion.

In the mystery centers, the ancients possessed the unity of religion, poetry and science. There, science was vividly demonstrated. As three branches from one root, these areas worked side by side and into each other. It was only later that they diverged. This separation of the three areas was necessary so that each could become perfect in its own way. So they had to go their separate ways for a while. Great minds seek to reunite what has had to separate in this way. Therefore, we find the striving for the unification of the arts in such phenomena as, for example, in the musical drama of Bayreuth. The aim is to create a total work of art that encompasses the three areas of intellectual life on earth.

Poetry arose out of truth. Originally, poetry was nothing other than the garment of truth. Novalis looks back to primeval times, when poets strove to express the highest truth in their works. If we turn our gaze to the primal poems of humanity, we do indeed find this expression in them. In Atlantis, man was still at one with nature, with his God, and the mysteries presented a picture of reality as it was experienced. Later, memories of these times were revived in the myths. These memories were something sacred and real for Novalis. He said to himself: In the future, what people still carry hidden within them as memories will become reality again. What we create out of our imagination as poets and thus bring into consciousness will one day become fact. The present world is growing into a new spiritual reality. As people carry the seeds of poetry into material life, something very special also grows out of material life. The guide on the way to this new world is Sophia, wisdom.

Novalis sets the events of his story in the time of the rising city culture, in that time when the outer life begins to become material, when it passes into the civil element of the physical plan. For him, the bearers of the future are the poets. The seed of poetry is placed in material culture. Novalis lets Heinrich von Ofterdingen be a kind of seer. He dreams of the blue flower, dreams that are not like other dreams, but a reflection of spiritual reality. He lets him experience different things: legends and historical events come to life, for example, the time of the Crusades shines in, the spiritual that flowed from the Orient into Europe, in the description of the prisoners in the castle.

The most important thing for Henry is his encounter with a miner who has spent almost his entire life underground. It is described what one can feel when working in the shafts under the earth. The stars of heaven shine towards him like the future. In the depths of the earth, he finds his past, as it were. The metals are wondrously related to man. What has developed down there over the millennia, the secret of the divine world order, is brought up by the miner, thrusts itself towards the miner. The selflessness in the work is brought home to us when it is described how the gold is brought to the surface. The miner is only interested in how the gold comes out of the earth: in it he recognizes the creative divinity. It is a beautiful, moral description of the selfless interest in what would otherwise inflame people's selfishness. The miner, who always works in the dark, only has the right idea of the magnificence of light.

Heinrich then meets the old hermit in the cave. The hermit has a wealth of life experience behind him and records it in a book. He talks about how only he who sees in all that is mortal a parable of the immortal is a true historian. This encounter deepens Heinrich's experiences again.

Then, in Augsburg, Heinrich meets Master Klingsor, who is a seer. In a fairy tale, we learn from him what the future will be for all of humanity: a higher world will be born out of this world. There is a poetic magic in the story of the young man's love for Mathilde, who later turns out to be Cyane again – a reference to the fact that the ephemeral is a symbol of the eternal. He knows that out of what is now a hard, stony reality, another world will grow in the future.

Then the absorption into the astral world is described: the land of Astralis symbolizes evolution, development. Poetry becomes a magical force that transforms people. Novalis believes in the magical power of the imagination, where it does not flow licentiously, but rather places itself under the guidance of Sophia and permeates the whole world with the power of creative Eros.

We may see a reincarnated Pythagorean in Novalis.

The Reflection of Cosmic Events in the Religious Views of Men.

Yesterday we looked at certain connections in the spiritual relationships of the so-called post-Atlantean time. We saw how the first cultural epoch of this period will repeat itself in the last, the seventh; how the Persian culture will repeat itself in the sixth; and how the Egyptian culture, which will occupy us during the next few days, repeats itself in our own lives and destinies in the fifth period. Of the fourth culture, the Greco-Latin, we were able to say that it occupies an exceptional position in that it experiences no repetition. Thus we could point in a sketchy way to the mysterious connections in the cultures of the post-Atlantean time, which follows after the time of the Atlantis that perished through powerful water-catastrophes. This age that follows Atlantis will perish in turn. At the end of our fifth great epoch, the post-Atlantean, there will be catastrophes that will work in a way similar to those at the close of the Atlantean epoch. Through the War of All Against All, the seventh culture of the fifth epoch will find its conclusion. These are interesting connections that are indicated in certain repetitions, and when we follow them more closely they will throw light into the depths of our soul life.

In order to lay a proper foundation, we must today allow still other repetitions to pass before our mind's eye. We will let our glance rove far into the evolution of our earth, and we will see that these wide horizons must have an intimate interest for us.

But let us begin with an admonition, a warning against a mechanical approach to the repetitions. When in the realm of occultism we speak of such repetitions, saying that the first cultural epoch repeats itself in the seventh, the third in the fifth, etc., it is easy to let a certain gift for combinations get the upper hand, so that we try to apply such schemes or diagrams in other contexts also. It is easy to believe that we can do this, and many books on theosophy actually contain a good deal of rubbish of this sort. Hence there must be a strong warning that such combinations are not controlling, but only perception, spiritual vision, without which we go astray. Such combinations must be warned against. What we can read in the spiritual world may be understood, but not discovered, through logic. It can be discovered only through experience.

If we wish to understand the cultural epochs more clearly, we must achieve a general view of the evolution of the earth as it presents itself to the seer who can direct his spiritual gaze to the events of the most remote past. If we look far back into the evolution of the earth, we can say that our earth has not always appeared as it does today. It did not have the firm mineral base of today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; the earth did not bear the same plants and animals, and men were not in such a fleshly body as they have today; men had no bony system. All that was formed later. The farther we look back, the nearer we come to a condition which, if we could have observed it from cosmic distances, we would have seen as a mist, as a fine etheric cloud. This mist was much larger than our present earth, for it extended as far as the outermost planets of our solar system and even farther. It included a far-reaching nebular mass, wherein was contained all that went into the formation of the earth, and also of the planets and even of the sun.

If we could have examined this mass of mist closely, if an observer could have approached it, it would have seemed to be composed entirely of fine etheric points. When we see a swarm of gnats from a distance, it looks to us like a single cloud; close-up, however, we see the single insects. Thus, in the most remote past, the mass of our earth would have appeared, although then it was not material in our sense but was condensed only to an etheric condition. This earth-formation consisted of single ether-points, but something special was connected with these ether-points. Had the human eye been able to see these points, it would not have seen what the clairvoyant would have seen or what he actually sees now when he looks back. Let us make this clear by a comparison. Take the seed of a wild rose, a fully developed seed. What does one see who observes this? He sees a body that is very small, and if he did not know how a rose seed looked he would never imagine that a rose could grow from it. He would never derive this from the mere form of the seed. But a person who was endowed with a certain clairvoyant capacity would experience the following. The seed would gradually disappear from his sight, but to his clairvoyant eye would appear a flower-like form growing spiritually out of the seed. It would stand before his clairvoyant view, a real form, but one that could be seen only in the spirit. This form is the archetype of what later grows out of the seed. We would err if we believed that this form was exactly like the plant that grows from the seed. It is not at all like it. It is a wonderful light-form, containing streams and complicated formations. One could say that what later grows out of the seed is only a shadow of this wonderful spiritual light-form beheld by the clairvoyant.

Holding fast to this picture of how the clairvoyant sees the archetype of the plant, let us now return to the primeval earth and the single etheric points. If now, as in the previous example, the clairvoyant contemplated such an etheric point in the primeval substance, there would arise for him from the point (as from the seed in the previous example) a light-form, a beautiful form, which in reality is not there but rests slumbering in the point. What is this form that the seer perceives, looking back at the primal earth atom? What is it that arises? It is a form that is different from physical man, as different as is the archetype from the physical plant. It is the archetype of the present human form. At that time the human form slumbered spiritually in the etheric point, and the whole earth-evolution was necessary in order that what rested there might develop into present-day man. Many, many things were necessary for this, just as much is also necessary for the seed. This seed must be sunk in the earth, and the sun must send its warming rays, before it can develop itself into a plant. We will gradually understand how these points became men if we make clear to ourselves all that has happened in the meanwhile.

In the primeval past all the planets were connected with our earth. However, we will first consider the sun, moon, and earth because they are of special interest to us. At that time our sun, our moon, and our earth were not separate, but were all together. If we could stir these three bodies together like a broth in a great world-kettle, and if we thought of this as one cosmic body, we would have what the earth in its original condition was—sun plus earth plus moon. Naturally, man could live there only in a spiritual condition. He could live only in this condition because what is in the present sun was then united with the earth. For a long, long time the cosmic body contained our earth, sun, and moon within itself, as well as all the beings and forces connected with them. In those times man was still only present spiritually in the primal human atom. This changed only in a time when something important occurred in world-evolution, when the sun split off and became a separate body, leaving earth and moon behind. After this, what was formerly a unity appears as a duality, as two cosmic bodies, the sun and the earth-plus-moon. Why did this occur?

All that happens has, naturally, a deep meaning, and we understand this when, looking backward, we find that there dwelt on earth at that time not only men but also other beings of a spiritual nature who were connected with them. These were not perceptible to the physical eye but were nevertheless present, as truly present as men and the other physical beings. Thus, for example, there are connected with our earth, living in its environs, beings whom Christian esotericism calls angels, Angeloi. We can best conceive these beings if we reflect that they stand at the stage at which man will be when the earth completes its evolution. Today these beings are already as far along as man will be at the end of his evolution on earth. A still higher stage is occupied by the archangels, Archangeloi, or Spirits of Fire, beings whom we can perceive when we direct our glance to what concerns entire peoples. Such concerns are guided by the beings called archangels or Archangeloi. A still higher type of being is called the Primal Beginnings or Archai or Spirits of Personality. We find these when we look at whole epochs of time and at many peoples, with all their connections and contrasts, contemplating what is usually called the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Time. When we examine our own time, for example, we find that it is guided by higher beings called Archai or Primal Beginnings. Then there are still higher beings called, in Christian esotericism, Powers or Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Thus there are innumerable beings connected with our earth who are related to man in a sort of ladder of successive stages.

If we begin with the mineral and rise from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, and then to man, man is the highest physical being, but the others are also there; they are among us and permeate us. In the beginning of things, when the earth emerged from the womb of eternity as a sort of primeval mist, all these beings were bound up with the earth, and the clairvoyant would have seen how other beings pervade this picture at the same time as the human form. These were the beings named above, and beings of still higher types such as the Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and finally the Seraphim. All of these beings were intimately connected with that powerful etheric dust, but they are at various stages of development. There are those whose sublimity man cannot fathom, but others are closer to him.

Since these beings were at different stages, they could not go through their evolution in the same way as man. A dwelling place had to be created for them. Among these high beings there were some who would have been greatly handicapped had they remained bound to lower beings. Therefore they split off. They took the finest substances out of the mist and built their dwelling in the sun. They created their heaven there, and there they found the proper tempo for their evolution. Had they remained in the inferior substances that they left behind in the earth, they would not have been able to continue their evolution. This would have hindered their development like a lead weight. This shows how material occurrences, such as the split in the cosmic substance, do not proceed from merely physical causes but rather from the forces of beings who need a site for their development. It happens because they must build their cosmic house. We must emphasize that spiritual causes lie at the foundation.

Man remained behind on the earth-plus-moon, and with him higher beings of the lowest hierarchy, such as angels and archangels, as well as beings who stood lower than man. But a single mighty being, who was already ripe enough to migrate to the sun, sacrificed himself and stayed with earth-plus-moon. This was the being who was later named Yahweh or Jehovah. He left the sun and became the leader of affairs on earth-plus-moon. Thus we have two dwelling-places: the sun and earth-plus-moon. On the sun were the most exalted beings, under the leadership of an especially high and sublime being whom the Gnostics attempted to conceive under the name Pleroma. We must picture this being as the regent of the sun. Yahweh is the leader of earth-plus-moon. We must make it especially clear that the noblest loftiest spirits went out with the sun, leaving the earth behind with the moon. The moon was not yet split off; it was still within the earth.

How should one conceive this cosmic event of the separation of the sun from the earth? Above all, one must feel the sun and its inhabitants to be the most august, pure, and sublime element that was formerly connected with the earth, whereas earth-plus-moon was the lower element. At that time its condition was still lower than that of our present earth. The latter stands higher because there came a later period during which the earth unburdened itself of the moon and its grosser substances, in the presence of which man could not have developed further. The earth had to expel the moon.

Just before this, however, was the darkest and most dreadful time for our earth. Everything with a noble evolutionary disposition came under the control of bad forces, so that man could progress further only by eliminating the worst conditions of existence along with the moon.

We must realize that a sublime light-principle, that of the sun, was opposed to the principle of darkness, that of the moon. Had one clairvoyantly observed the sun, which had already withdrawn, one would have seen the beings who wished to inhabit it, but also something else would have been perceived. What had withdrawn itself as the sun would have shown itself not only as a cluster of spiritual beings, nor would it have appeared as something etheric, for that belongs to a coarser realm; it would have appeared as something astral, as a mighty light-aura. What one would have sensed as a light-principle, one would have seen as a shining aura in cosmic space. The earth, through allowing this light to go forth, would suddenly have appeared densified, though not yet coming to a firm mineral consistency. A good and an evil, a bright and a dark principle, stood opposed to each other at that time.

Now let us see how the earth looked before it expelled the moon. It would be entirely wrong to think of it as resembling our present earth. The core of the earth was then a fiery seething mass. This core would have appeared as a nucleus of fire surrounded by powerful water-forces, although these would not have been like our water of today, for they contained the metals in fluid form. In the middle of all this was man, but in entirely different form.

Thus the earth appeared when it expelled the moon. Air was not to be found on the earth; it simply was not there. The beings then existing needed no air; they had an entirely different breathing system. Man had become a sort of fish-amphibian, but he consisted of soft fluid material. What he sucked into himself was not air but what was contained in the water. This is approximately the way the earth looked at that time. We must see that the earth at that time was in a lower condition than at present. It had to be so. Otherwise man could never have been able to find the right tempo and the means for his evolution, if the sun and moon had not separated themselves from the earth. Had the sun remained in the earth, everything would have gone too fast; whereas everything would have gone too slowly with the forces that now work on the moon. As the moon withdrew from the earth amid tremendous catastrophes, there prepared itself slowly what we may call the separation of an air-sheath from the water-element. Air was then entirely different from the air of today, for all kinds of vapors were still contained in it. But the being that was then gradually preparing itself was a sort of sketch of the man of today. We will describe all this more fully later.

We have learned to know man in three relationships. First, as he lived in earth-plus-sun-plus-moon with all the higher beings in a single cosmic body. Here he presented himself to the clairvoyant eye in the way described above. Next we see him under unfavorable conditions on earth-plus-moon. Had he remained in this condition, he would have become a malicious and savage being. When the sun had separated itself, there was the contrast of the sun on one side and moon-plus-earth on the other side. The sun, in all its streaming glory, glittered as a great sun-aura in space. On the other side remained earth-plus-moon with all the sinister forces that drag down the nobler elements in man. A twofoldness arises, which is followed by a threefoldness. The sun remains as it is, but the earth separates itself from the moon. The grosser substances withdraw and man remains behind upon the earth.

Looking at the third period, man feels the forces as a threefold principle. He asks: Whence come these forces? In the first period man was still connected with all the high forces of the sun. The forces that developed in the second period then went out with the moon. Man felt this as a redemption, but he had a memory of the first period in which he was still united with the sun-beings. He learned to know what longing was; he felt himself to be a cast-off son. With the forces that had gone out with sun and moon he could feel himself as a son of the sun and of the moon.

So, our earth evolved from a unity to a duality to a trinity: sun, earth, and moon.

The time when the moon split away, when man first received the possibility of developing himself, is designated as the Lemurian epoch. After great fire-catastrophes had terminated this Lemurian epoch, our earth gradually entered a condition that could produce the relationships prevailing in ancient Atlantis. The first beginnings of land emerged from the water-masses. This was long after the moon broke away, yet it was only because of that breaking-away that the earth was able to evolve as it did.

In Atlantis man was entirely different from today, but he had reached the point where he could move about within the air-sheath as a soft, swimming, floating mass. Only gradually did he develop a bony system. About the middle of Atlantis he had progressed so far as somewhat to resemble our present form.

But in Atlantis man had a clairvoyant consciousness. Our present consciousness developed only in much later times, and if we wish to understand the man of that time we must bear this clairvoyant consciousness in mind. We can understand this best through a comparison with the consciousness of today. Today man perceives the world from morning to evening by means of his senses. Through his sense-activity he continually receives impressions of sight, hearing, etc. But at night this sense-world sinks into an ocean of unconsciousness. For the occultist, this is really not so much a lack of consciousness as a lower grade of consciousness.

At this point we must make it clear that today man has a double consciousness, a bright day-consciousness and a sleep or dream consciousness. This was not at all the case in the first Atlantean times. Let us examine the alternation between waking and sleeping in those early times. During a certain period man dipped down into his physical body, but he did not perceive objects in the same sharp outlines as today. If we picture ourselves walking through a dense fog when the street lamps seem surrounded by a light-aura, we will have a rough idea of the Atlantean's object-consciousness. For the man of that time, everything was surrounded by such a fog; everything was as though enveloped in mist. That was the look of things by day. By night things looked entirely different, although still not the same as today. When the Atlantean went out of his body, he did not sink into unconsciousness but found himself in a world of divine spiritual beings, ego-beings, whom he perceived around him as his companions. As truly as man today does not see these beings at night, so truly did he in those times plunge into an ocean of spirituality, in which he actually perceived the divine beings. By day he was the companion of the lower kingdoms; by night he was the companion of the higher beings. Man lived in a spiritual consciousness, though this was dim; and, though he had no self-consciousness, he dwelt among these divine spiritual beings.

Now let us recapitulate the four epochs in the evolution of our earth. First, let us bring to mind the epoch in which sun and moon were still united with the earth. We must say that the beings of this earth are pure ideal beings, while man is present only as an etheric body, visible only to spiritual eyes. Then we come to the second epoch. We see the sun as a separate body, visible as an aura, and moon-plus-earth as a world of evil. Then we come to a third epoch, where the moon separates itself and on earth there work the forces that are the result of this threeness. Then we come to a fourth epoch. Here man is already a being in the physical world, which seems misty to him, and in sleep he is still the companion of divine beings. This is the epoch that closes with huge water-catastrophes, the time of Atlantis.

Now let us go one step further, to the man of the post-Atlantean time. As stated earlier, he has evolved through many thousands of years. We see him pass through the cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean time; the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin culture, and our fifth culture. What, above all things, had man lost? He had lost something that we can conceive when we bear the description of Atlantis in mind.

Let us try to imagine the sleep-condition of the Atlantean. Man was then still the companion of the gods; he actually perceived a world of the spirit. This he had lost after the Atlantean catastrophe. The darkness of night surrounded him. In recompense there came a brightening of the day-consciousness and the development of the ego. All this man had achieved, but the old gods had vanished from his sight; they were now only memories. In fact, during the first post-Atlantean time all that his soul had experienced was merely a memory, a memory of his earlier inter-course with these divine beings.

We know that souls endure, that they reincarnate. Just as in ancient Atlantean times our souls were already present, were already living in bodies, so were they also present at the separation of moon and sun from the earth, and also in the earliest times of all. Man existed in the etheric dust or points, and the five cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time, in their views of the world, in their religions, are nothing else than memories of the ancient epochs of the earth.

The first period, the primeval Indian, developed a religion that seems like an inner lighting-up, an inner repetition, in ideas and feelings, of the very first period, when sun and moon were still bound up with the earth, when the lofty beings of the sun still dwelt on earth. We may imagine that this had to awaken a sublime view. The spirit who, in the first condition of the earth, in the primeval mist, connected himself with all angels, archangels, high gods, and spiritual beings, was for Indian consciousness summed up as a single high individuality under the name of Brahm or Brahma.¹ This first post-Atlantean culture recapitulated in the spirit what had happened earlier. It is a repetition of the first epoch of the earth, in its inner aspect.

Now let us look at the second cultural period. In the principles of light and darkness we have the religious consciousness of the primeval Persian period. The great initiate saw an opposition between two beings, one of which was personified in the sun and the other in the moon. Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, the Light-aura, is the being whom the Persians venerated as the highest god. Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings who belonged to earth-plus-moon. The religion of the Persians is a remembrance of the second epoch of the earth.

In the third cultural epoch, man had to say to himself, “In me are the forces of the sun and of the moon; I am a son of the sun and a son of the moon. All the forces of the sun and of the moon appear as my father and my mother.” Thus we have unity in the primeval past as the attitude of the Indian; while the duality that appeared with the separation of the sun is reflected in the religion of the Persians; and in the religious views of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians we find the trinity that appeared in the third epoch, after the separation of sun and moon. Trinity appears in all the religions of the third period, and in Egypt it is exemplified in Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

But what man had experienced in his consciousness in the fourth earth-epoch, the Atlantean, as a companion of the gods, emerges as a memory in the Greco-Latin period. The gods of the Greeks are nothing other than memories of the gods whose companion man was in Atlantis, the gods whom he saw clairvoyantly in etheric forms when he had risen out of his physical body at night. As truly as man today sees outer objects, so truly at that time did he see Zeus, Athena, etc. For him these were real figures. What the Atlantean felt and experienced in his clairvoyant condition reappeared, for the man of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the pantheon. As the Egyptian time was a memory of the trinity that prevailed in the Lemurian epoch, the experience of Atlantis remained as a memory in the Hellenic hierarchy of gods. In Greece and elsewhere in Europe these were the same gods whom the Atlantean had seen, but under other names. These names were not invented; they are names for the same forms that walked beside man in the Atlantean time when he went out of his physical body.

So we see how the epochs of cosmic events find their symbolical expression in the religious views of the different post-Atlantean cultural periods. What took place during sleep in the Atlantean time lives again in the fourth period.

We are in the fifth post-Atlantean period. What can we remember? In the first period the ancient Indians could conceive the first earth-epoch; in the second period the Persians had the principles of good and evil; the ancient Egyptians could picture the third epoch in its trinity. The period of the Greeks, the old Germans, the Romans, had its Olympus. It remembered the godlike figures of Atlantis. Then came the modern time, the fifth period. What can it remember?

It can remember nothing. This is the reason why in this period, godlessness has been able to make headway in many respects. This is why the fifth period is driven to look toward the future rather than the past. It must look toward the future, when all the gods must arise again. This reunion with the gods was prepared in the time of the bursting-in of the Christ-force, which worked so powerfully that it could again endow man with a godly consciousness. The god-pictures of the fifth period cannot be memories. Only if man looks forward will life again become spiritual. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, consciousness must become apocalyptic.

Yesterday we examined the relations of the single cultures of the Post-Atlantean time. Today we have seen how cosmic events are reflected in the religious views of these cultures.

Our fifth period stands at a central point in the world, hence it must look forward. The Christ must for the first time be fully grasped in this period, for our souls are deeply interwoven in mysterious connections. We shall see how the repetition of the Egyptian time in our fifth period gives us a point of departure, and how we can actually pass over into the future.

• 1. It may occur to the reader that India, even in ancient times, was notable for the multiplicity of its gods rather than for their unity. In this connection the following passage from the Upanishads may be illuminating:
  
  Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him: “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  He answered: “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Thirty-three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Six.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Two.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One and a half.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One.”
  (Brih. Upan., ii, 2, iv, 4.)

Munich, March 7, 1909

It is now my task to speak to the various groups about the more intimate aspects of reincarnation and various matters related to it because deep inside we must become more and more familiar with this subject matter and allow it to penetrate our being. In this context, we will also have to say a few things about the significance of the topic for the life of all humanity. Although we will also little by little discuss relevant questions of importance to the present age, we shall have to take very ancient times as our starting point. This is necessary because the method of inquiry in Spiritual Science differs from that employed by other theories of life or by the disciplines studying social problems. We in Spiritual Science treat the facts of life first in a general way, and then we elaborate on the details.

First of all, we express our world view in the most elementary sense through the statement that the human innermost core—an individual's divine ego—continues to develop from one life to another in successive incarnations. In the second instance, however, such a statement covers the question of reincarnation only in a very elementary way, and that is why we now want to speak about these things in greater detail and in a more intimate sense. Just saying that the ego of a human being hurries from one incarnation to another is not enough; there are many other phenomena connected with the subject of reincarnation, and only a discussion of how they are related to life itself will shed the right light on the issue. Let us begin to characterize reincarnation from this point of view by looking back into ancient times.

We have often talked about the fact that humanity must consider its ancestors to have come from ancient Atlantis, a former geographical region situated between what is today Africa and Europe on the one hand and America on the other. All the souls that are present today had already been incarnated in Atlantis, but in bodies that were in part considerably different from the ones we are accustomed to seeing. The Atlantean humanity had its own special form of leadership, and the soul-forces—indeed all the faculties—of the Atlanteans differed greatly from those of human beings. Hence, leadership as we know it today was nonexistent. In Atlantis, for example, there were no churches, ceremonial centers, or schools in the modern sense, but there existed an intermediate institution between ceremonial center and school; that is what we call the mystery sanctuaries or centers. Leadership of the Atlanteans with respect to learning and the conditions of external life was vested in these sanctuaries, and one could say that the spiritual leaders were at the same time kings of the Atlantean tribes. Initiates, whose mission can be circumscribed by a word of later coinage, by the word oracle, imported knowledge and exercised leadership in the mysteries. We therefore designate the great centers of Atlantean culture as the “Atlantean Oracles.”

We have to get a clear understanding of the function of these oracles. They had to impart knowledge to human beings about the spiritual world behind the physical world. Knowledge such as this is different from ordinary knowledge in many ways; to stress only one difference, spiritual knowledge is not confined to space as is our present knowledge of the physical world. Anyone who, for example, knows about the mysteries of Mars also knows a great deal about the spiritual mysteries of the entire universe. All the heavenly bodies of our solar system are interconnected, and as such they are the exterior expression of spiritual beings. The individual who knows these spiritual beings also knows the forces that are at work from one planet to another as well as in the spiritual world during the time between death and rebirth. And so it was the primary task of one oracle in Atlantis to transmit and proclaim to human beings the mysteries of Mars, whereas the primary task of another was to communicate the mysteries of Jupiter, and so on; and these compartmentalized insights made it possible to lead certain sections of the population. We shall speak about the reason for this at another occasion since our task today is a different one.

The Atlanteans were divided into groups, and part of the whole developmental process was that one group of human beings had to be governed especially by the forces that could be acquired through the knowledge of Mars. Other groups had to be governed by the forces acquired through the knowledge of Venus, or Mercury, and so on. In ancient Atlantis there were actually human beings alive whom we could call “Jupiter People” or “Mars People,” and there were seven oracle centers because the populace in ancient Atlantis was divided into seven groups according to racial characteristics. The names applicable to these oracle centers corresponded to the names of the planets, but they were assigned to the oracles at a later time. The leadership of, and supreme sovereignty over, all other oracles was vested in what we may designate as the Atlantean Sun Oracle. Whatever oracles existed in the post-Atlantean periods—in Greece, Egypt, Asia, all were successors of the Sun Oracle in Atlantis. This is true also for the Apollo Oracle in Greece. The initiate who headed this Sun Oracle was the guardian of the deepest mysteries of our solar system. Together with his subordinates, he was called upon to investigate the nature of the spiritual life on the sun itself. His role was to proclaim to Atlantean humanity the secrets of the whole planetary system and to exercise supreme authority over the other oracle centers.

A very special task devolved on the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. It was to guide humanity in such a way that when the great catastrophe culminating in the submergence of Atlantis was over, the human race would be able to propagate and establish what we have often discussed as the postAtlantean cultures. Specifically, the task of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle was to prepare human beings during the Atlantean time in such a way that they could enter the ancient Indian, Persian, Egypto-Babylonian-Hebraic, and Graeco-Roman cultures. To put it differently, the Great Initiate had to see to it that enough suitable soul material was available for these cultural epochs.

We must now inform ourselves a little about the task of this Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. What were the essential features of Atlantean culture? Certainly it was quite different from later cultures. In ancient Atlantis, an individual belonging to the highest level of cultural life—the levels at which today's great leaders in, say, scholarship, art, industry, or commerce can be found—was one who possessed extraordinary clairvoyant faculties and who was especially skilled in the use of magical powers. The qualities usually attributed to a leader or to a scholar were nonexistent in those days, or they were known only in the most primitive form. But although modern arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were unknown to the Atlanteans, they did possess primitive clairvoyant faculties and powers with which they could pierce into the spiritual worlds. Without the modern ego-consciousness, the Atlanteans saw into the spiritual world, and those whose vision was the most penetrating became the pillars of Atlantean culture. We have already stressed that the Atlanteans were able to manipulate certain inner forces of nature, for example the seed forces of plants; they propelled their vehicles with them, just as we utilize coal to propel our vehicles.

To repeat, the leaders of the Atlantean culture were not the people who tried, as the leaders of our time try, to unlock the secrets of the universe with their intellectual powers; rather, the leading individuals in Atlantis were those who excelled as clairvoyants and magicians. And those human beings who had the first rudimentary inkling about arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were in a certain sense despised because of their simplicity and were not considered as belonging to the aristocracy of cultural life. But it was precisely those human beings who possessed the very first rudimentary knowledge of the aforementioned skills and who were the most lacking in clairvoyant and magical powers whom the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle gathered from all regions. Yes, he assembled the most simple and, in a sense, the most despised people of ancient Atlantis—those who had first developed intellectual capacities. But those who were then at the highest level of cultural life and who were the acknowledged masters of a dimmed clairvoyance were not suitable material to be led through and beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe. No, the call of the Initiate went out to the simple people.

Incidentally, it may be said that we are living in an epoch today when a similar call is once again going out to humanity. To be sure, this appeal is what is appropriate for today, a time when humanity sees only what is in the physical world. The call to humanity issues from unknown depths of the spirit, depths that humanity will gradually become acquainted with, asking that humanity prepare itself for a new culture of the future, which will be permeated with clairvoyant powers. As with Atlantis, a catastrophe will occur, and afterwards a new culture imbued with spiritual capacities will arise, and it will be linked to what we call the idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity.

But today, as in Atlantean times, the call cannot go out to those who stand at the highest levels of cultural life because they will not understand. The Atlantean clairvoyants and magicians, who were in a way destined to die out with their culture, occupied a position similar to that of people in contemporary life who occupy the highest positions in the realms of scholarship and external industrial life—the great inventors and discoverers of our time. No matter how much the present leaders feel there is still to be done, they nevertheless occupy the same position as their Atlantean counterparts. Contemptuously they look down on those who are beginning to feel something of the spiritual life to come. The consciousness of this fact must be awakened in the soul of anyone whose cooperative efforts in the theosophical workshops are to be strengthened. When leading representatives of modern culture look contemptuously down at these small circles, those who are participating diligently in the preparation of future conditions must say to themselves that the intellectual giants of today cannot be counted on to lead the way in this task. It is precisely the people who are held in contempt because they are not considered to have reached the heights of contemporary erudition who are being assembled today, just as the leader of the Sun Oracle once gathered around him the simple of Atlantis. These disdained people are being assembled to prepare the dawn of a new culture whereas erudition of the modern form will bring about the twilight of our culture. This is mentioned in passing to fortify those who have to endure and hold their own against the attacks of the people who consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle gathered his simple people in a region approximately to the west of present-day Ireland. Now we have to get a clear picture of the situation. It took Atlantis a long, long time to come to its end. Great masses of people were continually moving from the West toward the East. In the various regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa there were tribes who had arrived at different times and had intermingled. Then the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle took His small group of chosen people and made His way to Central Asia, where he established a colony from which the currents were to emanate that would later found the post-Atlantean cultures. However, in addition to His simple people, the Great Leader has taken something else with Him. And here we arrive at one of the chapters of human evolution, the truth of which we can comprehend only if we draw on the inner assurance gained by a steadfast engagement in Spiritual Science.

The Great Leader inspected, as it were, the other oracle centers for the purpose of finding in them the most notable initiates. Now there is a certain method by means of which “spiritual economy,” as it may be called, can be put into practice. As you know, it is quite correct to say that the etheric body dissolves after a human being has died; what remains is an extract, and that is taken along. But the extract is only the elementary truth, which must be modified as one advances to higher levels of spiritual knowledge. It is not the case that the etheric bodies of all human beings are dissolved in the universal ether. Etheric bodies such as those possessed by the most notable initiates of the seven Atlantean Oracles are valuable. The spiritual achievements of these initiates were woven into their etheric bodies, and it would be against the principle of spiritual economy if the etheric bodies of the great initiates had simply been dissolved. They were to be preserved as prototypes for a later time, and it was incumbent upon the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to preserve the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates for this purpose. While leading His small group of simple people to Asia, He carried the etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates of Atlantis with Him. Such a thing is possible through the methods that had been developed in the mystery centers. You have to visualize this as purely a spiritual process and not in the way as if one could wrap up etheric bodies and put them into boxes for safekeeping. What is certain, however, is that etheric bodies can be preserved for later times.

Over in Asia, the following happened. The simple people around the Leader propagated from one generation to another. Above all, these people had a tremendous devotion to and affection for their Great Leader. Their education was guided with wisdom and insight so that after many generations certain things occurred through one of the methods worked out in the mystery centers. Such methods are employed behind the scenes of external life, and we shall presently see how they take effect. Today's lecture will be the first in a series of several lectures designed to explain some of the details.

When a human being is descending to a new incarnation, he must envelop himself again with a new etheric body. Now, through the methods alluded to above, it is perfectly possible to weave into this new etheric body an old one that was preserved. And so after a diligent educational process, when the time had come, there were to emerge from the immigrants and their descendants seven individuals whose souls at their birth were sufficiently prepared to have the preserved etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the Atlantean Oracles woven into their own etheric bodies. Thus, the preserved etheric body of the most important Saturn initiate was woven into that of one of the individuals gathered around the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle, the etheric body of the Mars initiate into another, the etheric body of the Jupiter initiate into a third, and so on. Hence the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle had seven individuals whose etheric bodies were interwoven with those of the most important initiates of the ancient Atlantean Oracles.

If you had met these seven individuals somewhere in everyday life, you would have found them to be simple human beings, for they were not the reincarnated egos of the Atlantean initiates; they were merely simple human beings possessing the new faculties of the post-Atlantean era. Their egos were not much different from the egos of those who became the bearers of the first primitive and simple culture immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. What made them different was that their etheric bodies contained the forces of the seven great Atlantean initiates, so we are dealing here not with a re-embodiment of the ego, but rather of the etheric bodies of these great initiates. Thus we see not only that the ego but also that the second member of the super-sensible constitution—the etheric body—is capable of reincarnation. The seven individuals from among the followers of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle were inspired human beings simply by the fact that they had received these etheric bodies containing the forces and powers of the Atlantean era. At certain times their etheric bodies were capable of letting the forces stream into themselves that unveiled the mysteries of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Hence they appeared to be inspired individuals, but their utterances certainly exceeded anything their astral bodies or egos were able to understand.

What these seven inspired individuals taught from various parts of the world sounded like a wonderful harmonious choir, and after the seven had been united in the Lodge of the Seven Rishis, they were sent to India to inspire that country's ancient culture. Much that was profound in this culture has been preserved in a magnificent form in the Vedas,²⁷ and just as many wonderful ideas that give testimony to the deeply scientific nature of Indian culture have been preserved in the Upanishads,²⁸ in the Vedanta philosophy, and so on. However, the teachings of the ancient Holy Rishis, given in times when nothing was recorded, far exceed in beauty anything conveyed to us by the Indian scripts. What was written down in later times is at most a faint echo, for no records were kept of the primeval, sacred culture inspired by the Rishis; everything they taught was transmitted in a spiritual way through the mysteries.

We are interested today in learning how etheric bodies can be reincarnated, how the legacies of the ancient Atlantean epoch were transmitted by the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle into the post-Atlantean era, and how they were then carried into the first culture of that era—into the resplendent Indian culture.

The mysteries of the Sun Oracle itself could not be directly revealed in ancient India, and that is why the seven Rishis spoke of a Being beyond their cognitive reach. They spoke of a Being who is the Leader of the Sun and directs its forces to the earth; they spoke of Vishva-Karman as a Being beyond the range of their knowledge. Vishva-Karman is none other than the Christ who was to appear later and whose coming had already been proclaimed in the ancient Indian culture.

The most important disciple of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to receive the secrets of the Sun's essence was Zarathustra, who was subsequently to establish the second post-Atlantean culture. He was not the Zarathustra history talks about however. It was customary in ancient times that the successor of a great teacher or humanity took the name of his esteemed predecessor. No document contains any reference to the Zarathustra of whom we are now speaking; only his last successor is mentioned in history books. Yet it was the original Zarathustra who founded the primordial Persian culture and who was the first to point out to his Persian peoples that the sun not only possesses physical energy but also spiritual power that streams down to earth. In his endeavor to awaken in his people a realization of this truth, Zarathustra's argument was as follows: If we direct our eyes to plants and everything else around us that contains life, we have to ask ourselves what we would be without sunlight. But together with the physical sunlight, a spiritual force also streams down to earth under the direction of a great sublime Being. Just as a human being has his or her physical body and an aura—we call it the small aura—so the sun has its physical body and its aura. Ahura Mazdao, the “great aura,” consists of the group of great sun beings and their leader. Zarathustra spoke of this Ahura Mazdao, or Aura Mazdao—the Great Aura—and proclaimed the power of the sun aura by which the flow of evolution was made possible. However, Zarathustra also proclaimed that the forces of Ahriman would oppose the Sun Being. This then is what can be said about the external teachings of Zarathustra, but there is more to be said about him.

Zarathustra had some close disciples whom he initiated into the great mysteries of the world. We shall mention two of them in this context. To begin with the first, Zarathustra communicated to him all the wisdom necessary to bring about clairvoyance in the astral body, as well as the ability to perceive in one's present time frame simultaneously everything that is happening and all the mysteries spread out in both physical and spiritual space. To the second disciple Zarathustra transmitted what one might call the power to read the Akasha Chronicle, and this is nothing less than the clairvoyant power of the etheric body enabling the human being to perceive the successive phases of evolution in time. Thus, one disciple received the ability to perceive simultaneous events, and the other the vision of the Akasha Chronicle to perceive successive events that could lead to an understanding of the evolution of the earth and sun. By imparting these faculties to these disciples, Zarathustra had a profound effect on the continuation of culture in the postAtlantean era.

The first disciple was reincarnated as the great individual who was to inspire and inaugurate the new currents of Egyptian culture, the being whom we know by the name of Hermes or Hermes Trismegistos. Through processes that are known, the astral body of Zarathustra was transmitted to Hermes so that he could proclaim the message of the higher worlds and their mysteries and incorporate them into Egyptian culture. Thus by processes we will gradually learn to understand, the astral body of Zarathustra was preserved and was transmitted to one disciple when he was born again as Hermes. Hermes wore Zarathustra's astral body as if it were a garment.

The other disciple was also reincarnated, and in him everything was meant to be revealed that is presented to the earth in the Akasha Chronicle. Since the etheric body of Zarathustra was to be woven into that of a disciple, a very special event had to take place to make this possible. The forces of the new etheric body somehow had to be illuminated in the disciple for his awakening. The Biblical story relates to us in a beautiful and marvelous way what this special event was. Allow your souls to visualize how it had to unfold.

You must first realize that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra possessed his own astral body and ego, and he was now to have the etheric body of Zarathustra woven into his soul. As a small child, he first had to feel how the forces of the etheric body of Zarathustra became active in him, and he had to feel this before the powers of judgment could be activated by his own astral body and before his own ego was able to interfere. So the special event that had to take place was some sort of initiation. The forces of Zarathustra's etheric body had to be awakened in this reborn disciple when he was a very small child, that is before his own individual development could come into play. For this reason, the child was placed into an ark of bulrushes that was then put into the water, so that he was completely cut off from the rest of the world and was unable to interact with it. That is when the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body that had been woven into him germinated and, as we said earlier, became illuminated.

I am sure you know by now that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra was none other than Moses. The Biblical story about his abandonment is really a presentation of that profound mystery behind the scenes of the external world dealing with the preservation of Zarathustra's etheric body and its reawakening in Moses. And this is how Hermes and Moses were able to guide the post-Atlantean culture through its recorded stages.

After hearing about these examples of the reincarnation of etheric bodies and of an astral body, we know it is insufficient to speak only of the reincarnation of the ego. Rather, the other members of the human constitution that we have become acquainted with—the etheric body and the astral body—can also be reincarnated. It is a principle of spiritual economy that what has once been gained cannot perish, but is preserved and transplanted on the spiritual soil of posterity. However, what we have described can be accomplished in another way. We shall see from an example that there are still other methods whereby the past is transported into the future.

You will remember a personality mentioned in the Bible: Shem, a son of Noah and progenitor of the Semitic people. Occult research confirms that there is an individual behind Shem that must be regarded as the tribal individuality of all Semitic peoples. When a number of human beings are to descend from a particular progenitor, a special provision must be made for this in the spiritual world. In the case of Shem, the provision was that an etheric body was specially woven for him from the spiritual world, which he was to carry. This enabled him to bear in his own etheric body an especially exalted being from the spiritual world, a being who could not otherwise have incarnated on earth because it was incapable of descending into a compact physical body. This being was capable of incarnating only by virtue of the fact that it could now enter the etheric body of Shem. Since Shem had his own physical, etheric, and astral body, as well as his ego, he was first an individual in his own right. Beyond that, however, he was an individual whose etheric body was interwoven with the etheric body of another high being of the spiritual world, specially prepared for the purpose of founding a nation, as characterized above. If clairvoyant perception had confronted Shem, it would have seen Shem himself, but with a second entity extending out of him like a second being, yet still united with Shem's etheric body. This higher being was not Shem, but it incarnated in Shem—the human being—for a special mission. Unlike ordinary human beings, this higher being did not undergo various incarnations, but descended only once into a human body. Such a being is called an avatar. An avatar does not feel at home in the world as a human being would; he descends but once into this world for the sole purpose of carrying out a certain mission.

The part of a human being that is indwelled by such an avatar being acquires a special character in that it is able to multiply. When a grain of seed is sown into the ground, the stalk grows from it, and the grain is multiplied into the ears of grain. In the same way, the etheric body of Shem multiplied into many copies, and these were woven into all his descendants. That's what happened, and thus the copies of the etheric body that had been specially prepared in Shem as the prototype were woven into the etheric bodies of his direct descendants.

But this etheric body of Shem was later used in yet another way. How this was done can best be placed before our souls by the visualization of an analogy. You may be a highly cultured European, but if you want to acquaint the Hottentots with your culture, you simply must learn their language. By analogy, the exalted beings that descend to earth to guide humanity must weave into themselves the forces by which they will be put into a position to communicate with human beings on earth. Now in the later phase of the evolution of the Semitic people, it became necessary that a very exalted being descend to earth in order to communicate with them and provide an impetus to their culture. Such a being was the Melchizedek of Biblical history who, as it were, had to "put on" the preserved etheric body of Shem—the very etheric body that was still inhabited by an avatar being. Once it was woven into him, Melchizedek was able to transmit to Abraham the impulse necessary for the continued progress of Semitic culture. Here, then, we have become acquainted with another unique way in which an etheric body develops in a particular human being and is subsequently allotted to a specially selected individuality for the fulfillment of a mission.

Such examples can be found up to the most recent times, and as we trace them, we gradually realize the truth of what occultism is able to say today about this subject matter. Occultism conveys to us that most human beings living at present no longer have etheric or astral bodies that were originally woven anew from the general fabric of the world Almost every human being has in his or her etheric and astral body a fragment that has been preserved from ancient times because the principle of spiritual economy is at work preserving useful elements for repeated utilization.

Let us mention two more examples from the modern age that can illustrate to us how mysteries are at work from one epoch to another. The first example is related to the personality who is discussed in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nicholas of Cusa. He called one of his writings De docta ignorantia, a Latin title that can be translated “Learned Ignorance”; yet it contains more erudition than many a book claiming to contain learned knowledge. There were certain reasons for the title. If you read other writings by Nicholas of Cusa, you will find that a prophetic presentation of the Copernican picture of the universe is woven into them in a curious way. Those who read carefully cannot fail to recognize it. Yet it was not until the time of Copernicus that the world was mature enough to accept this view of the universe in its actual form. Investigation into the connection reveals the following: One of the members of Cusa's super-sensible constitution contained an ancient individuality of the highest rank, and that made it possible for the astral body of Nicholas of Cusa to be preserved and then to be woven into the astral body of Nicholas Copernicus. The wisdom once possessed by Nicholas of Cusa could, as it were, be resurrected in Copernicus, and that is an example of how the astral body has reincarnated.

The second example deals with Galileo, who has been immensely important for modern thought, as many of you who have thought about the matter know. Without him, there would have been no physics in the modern sense because the whole mode of thinking in terms of physics today must be attributed to Galileo. Every schoolboy today will read in the most elementary books of Galileo's law of inertia, of continuity, which indicates that a body in motion tends to continue its movement until it encounters an obstacle. Thus, if we throw some object, it will travel forward by its own momentum until it is stopped by an obstacle or outer force. This is how we think today, and this is what children in school learn from their textbooks. However, people living before Galileo thought in a different manner. They thought that if a stone were thrown, its flight could not continue unless the air drove or pushed it from behind. So we see that the laws of falling bodies, of the pendulum, and of simple machines are all derived from Galileo.

Galileo received his insights through a certain inspiration. I need only to remind you of how he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa—a stroke of genius. Many people had walked past this lamp without noticing a thing, but when Galileo observed it, the fundamental laws of mechanics dawned on him. A human being who can be inspired in such a profound way has an etheric body of enormous richness; to allow it to perish would contradict the law of spiritual economy.

It is for this reason that Galileo's etheric body too was preserved and reappeared after a comparatively short period of time in an individual whose achievements were also to be of great significance. It was woven into a personality who grew up in a remote peasant village in Russia, ran away from his parents, and journeyed to Moscow. The great talent of this young man became apparent very soon, and he rapidly absorbed the knowledge of his day in the schools of Russia and Germany, so that he had soon encompassed the total of the general knowledge available in the culture of his time. All he had to do was to accumulate the knowledge developed on earth since he had died—in his etheric body—as Galileo. And then this very same person became, so to speak, the founder of the whole classical literature movement in Russia, creating lasting literary treasures practically out of the void. But more than that, he also provided important stimuli to every scientific discipline related to physics and chemistry, and particularly to all areas of mechanics. This individual was none other than Michail Lomonosov, whose achievements and reforms were possible only because the etheric body of Galileo had been woven into him. Galileo died in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Michail Lomonosov was born early in the eighteenth century with Galileo's etheric body, representing one of those intimate reincarnations where a member of the super-sensible constitution of the human being other than the ego is reincarnated. Such things lead us toward a deep understanding of the entire evolutionary process and of many other factors that have developed in the course of time, leading to the conditions prevailing at present.

The greatest avatar on earth was Christ Himself, who lived for three years in the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Because Christ lived in the three bodies of the super-sensible constitution of Jesus of Nazareth, it was possible for the latter's etheric and astral bodies, and of the ego too in a lesser degree, to multiply in the same way as we have discussed it before. After the Mystery of Golgotha and as a result of the wonderful laws of spiritual economy, quite a few copies of the astral body and of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were present as archetypes in the spiritual world. If an avatar enters a human sheath, the essence of the host is dispersed into many replicas. In contrast to the copies of Shem's etheric body, the copies of the astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth had another special characteristic. The copies of Shem's etheric body could be implanted only into his own descendants whereas the copies of the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted into all human beings of the most diverse peoples and races. A copy of the archetypal astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted in anyone who through his or her personal development had become ready for this transfer, no matter what race such an individual belonged to. And we see how in this subsequent evolution of Christendom, strange developments take place behind the external historical facade, and only such developments can render the external course of events intelligible.

Now, how did Christianity spread? We can say that in the first few centuries the dissemination of the idea of Christianity depended on what happened on the physical plane. In this era we see that Christianity is decidedly propagated through everything that lives on the physical plane. The Apostles stressed the fact that the propagation of Christianity was based on direct physical perception of eyewitnesses. "We have laid our hands into His wounds" was a statement of proof that the Christ had walked on earth in a human body. In other words, the stress was put on anything on the physical plane that could serve as documentation for the development of Christianity. Time and again during those first few centuries, it was asserted that those who had been disciples of the Apostles themselves were responsible for the continuing propagation of Christianity, and it was emphasized that they had known the immediate followers of the Lord Himself. So we see that people in this era relied, as it were, on eyewitness reports, and this continues in a still deeper sense up to the time of St. Augustine, who said: “I would not believe in the truth of the Gospels if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so.” Why, then, did he believe? Because it was his conviction that the visible Church has propagated the Gospel on the physical plane from one decade and from one century to another. However, in the following centuries, from the fifth to the tenth, Christianity was propagated in a different way. Why and how? It is instructive to learn the answer to this question if we are interested in following the spiritual progress of human evolution.

You can visualize the method of propagation in this next period by considering, for example, the Old Saxon gospel epic entitled Heliand. In this work, a kind of initiate presents his readers with his version of the Christ idea and with his perception of the Christ-Being. The Heliand, the Savior, presented by this Saxon initiate is a super-sensible being. Yet, He is portrayed not within the context of the events in Palestine, but rather as a prince of a Germanic tribe. The disciples are individuals from Germanic lands, and the whole of Christianity is clothed in Central European imagery. Why was this done? It was done because the initiate who wrote the Heliand at the suggestion of Louis the Pious had clairvoyant faculties, so that he was able to see Christ in a way similar to Paul's perception of Christ at Damascus. Through the event at Golgotha the Christ-Being had united Himself with the astral body of the earth, thereby infusing His power into the aura of the earth; and when Paul became clairvoyant, he could clearly perceive: The Christ is present! Paul did not allow himself to become a believer merely on the strength of what was reported to have happened in Palestine. Only after he had seen the being that was woven into the earth with his own eyes did he change from Saul to Paul. In a similar vision, the Risen Christ, the eternal Christ living in the spiritual world after Golgotha, was revealed to the writer of the Heliand, and He was more important to him than was the historical Christ of Palestine. And so he presents Him in another setting because the spiritual Christ was more important to him than was the external image of the Christ. You may want to ask why the author of the Heliand was able to communicate such an image from clairvoyant perception. He was able to do this because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This was the case because during these centuries—starting with the fifth or sixth and ending with the ninth or tenth century—the etheric bodies of those who were destined to do something for the advancement of Christianity were interwoven with a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and one of these special individuals was the writer of the Heliand.

Since there were many others who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric body, we can readily see that human beings in these centuries lived in imaginations that were closely related to the events in Golgotha. All those who created the original artistic portrayals of the Savior on the cross and of Mary with the Jesus Child had been inspired to do pictorial representations of anything connected with the event in Golgotha by one and the same thing: a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the etheric body of each of these individuals. If the paintings of the events in Golgotha seemed like representations of a type, this points to the fact that all the artists were clairvoyant; what they created was then transmitted to posterity by the forces of tradition. In these early centuries, not all the inspired individuals destined to propagate the idea of Christianity were, of course, artists. Take, for example, John Scotus Erigena,²⁹ the scholastic philosopher, who in the days of Charles the Bald wrote the famous De Division Naturae. He, too, had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into his own etheric body.

If human beings were born during the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies, human beings living in the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries received copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth rather than copies of His etheric body. Only by considering this fact do we fully understand some of the important personalities of that time. How will a personality whose own astral body is interwoven with a copy of the astral body of Jesus appear to the outside world? After all, the ego of Jesus is not incarnated in such an individual; each personality retains his or her own ego. Ego judgment can cause many an error to creep into the life of such an individual; but because the copy of the great prototype has been woven into his or her astral body, devotion, all the feelings, everything in short that permeates and weaves through this astral body will come to the fore as the intrinsic essence of the astral body, even though it may perhaps be at variance with the ego itself. Think of Francis of Assisi. There you have a personality into whose astral body a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven. You may have found many extremes in the biography of Francis of Assisi, and if you did, you should consider that they were caused by his ego, which was not on the same level with his astral body. But the moment you study his soul under the assumption that his ego was not always capable of making the right judgments about the wonderful feelings and the humility contained in the astral body, then you will understand him. A copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was reincarnated in Francis of Assisi, and this was the case with many individuals of that time—Franciscans, Dominicans, and all other personalities of that time who will be intelligible only when studied in the light of this knowledge. For example, one of those personalities was the renowned St. Elisabeth of Thüringen.

And so what has happened in the external life of our existence becomes fully intelligible only when we see how spiritual impulses are conveyed in each era and how they are propagated in the course of time.

When Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, something like an imprint of the ego was made in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. When the Christ-Being entered the astral body, we can easily conceive that something like a replica of the ego could be produced in the surrounding parts of the astral body. This copy of the ego of Christ Jesus produced many duplicates that were preserved, so to speak, in the spiritual world. In the case of a few individuals who were to be prophets for their own age, something was woven into their ego. Among them were the German mystics who proclaimed the inner Christ with such fervor because something like a copy of the ego of Christ was incarnated in them—only a copy or image of Christ's ego, of course. Only human beings who prepare themselves gradually for a full understanding of the Christ and who understand through their knowledge of the spiritual worlds what the Christ really is, as He surfaces time and again in ever changing forms during the course of human evolution—only those human beings will also gradually gain the maturity necessary to experience Christ in themselves. They will be ready to absorb, so to speak, the waiting replicas of the Christ-Ego, ready to absorb the ego that the Christ imprinted in the body of Jesus.

Part of the inner mission of the universal stream of spirituality is to prepare human beings to become so mature in soul that an ever-increasing number of them will be able to absorb a copy of the Ego-Being of Christ Jesus. For this is the course of Christian evolution: first, propagation on the physical plane, then through etheric bodies, and then through astral bodies that, by and large, were reincarnated astral bodies of Jesus. Now the time is at hand when the ego-nature of Christ Jesus will increasingly light up in human beings as the innermost essence of their souls. Yes, these imprinted copies of the Christ Jesus individuality are waiting to be taken in by human souls—they are waiting!

And now you see from what depths the universal stream of Spiritual Science flows into our souls. Spiritual Science is not a theory, not the sum total of concepts given merely for the intellectual enlightenment of human beings; it is a reality, and it intends to offer realities to the human soul. Those who wish to gain a spiritual understanding of Christianity and experience it within themselves will strive to make a personal contribution so that either in the present or in a later incarnation a copy of the Christ Jesus individuality can be woven into their own egos. A person who understands the true, inmost essence—the actuality—of the universal stream of Spiritual Science will prepare himself or herself not just for knowledge, but rather for an encounter with actual reality. You must develop a feeling that we in our world movement are not concerned with the mere communication of theories, but rather with preparing human beings to accept facts. We are also concerned that human beings receive what is waiting in the spiritual world and what they have the power to receive, provided they prepare themselves for this task in the right way.

• 27. The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. The Veda is the literature of the Aryans who invaded NW India about 1500 B.C. and pertains to the fire sacrifice central to their religious beliefs.
• 28. The Upanishads constitute the last section of the Hindu Veda and are said to have been composed around 900 B.C. As the wellspring of Hindu speculative and religious thought, they became the basis for the later schools of Vedanta. “Vedanta” literally means “The end of the Veda” and refers to how the Upanishads are to be taught and interpreted.
• 29. John Scotus Erigena (c. 810–c. 877) was an Irish scholastic philosopher.

The legends of the gods and heroes of the Nordic peoples are based on profound occult facts. Even within Europe, there were occult lodges of the white brotherhood in ancient times. From Scotland up to northern Russia. They were called “Trotten Lodges” or “Druid Lodges.” The development of the spiritual life of the ancient peoples was entrusted to these lodges. Druid comes from Drus [...]. The legend that Boniface cut down the oak when he brought Christianity is a beautiful parable for the fact that the old highly religious Druid religion was overcome by Christianity. Six to seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, the old religion began to decline. The last part moved south. The ancient Truscans, from whom the Etruscans later emerged, settled in Italy; further east, another branch moved to ancient Greece. If we take the matter of the northern population as a whole, we find a deep connection in the spiritual realm, between the west and the east.

Let us take a look at Buddhism. This highly spiritual religion hardly found any lasting place in its native country India; it was soon absorbed by Brahmanism; on the other hand, it took root in the peoples descended from the Atlanteans, the Mongols.

The ancient Germans also descend from Atlantis. The similarity of the religions is evident from the names. The Nordic god “Wotan” is equivalent to “Buddha”. The ancient religion comes from Atlantis. It was well aware of the lost continent. The last echoes of the old Druid religion died out under the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the last Druid lodges were abolished.

The old teaching knew two traditions. In the south, the tradition of the Lemurian race that perished in the fire was alive, in the north, the memory of Atlantis that perished in the water. The former was symbolized in the saga by “Muspelheim”, the warm sunny land, and the second by “Nifelheim”, the land of fog. It is also very interesting to trace the relationship between the ancient Egyptians and the Nordic peoples. We can follow it in the religions. Osiris is dismembered by his brother and the pieces scattered, from which the earth then arises. In Egypt you find many Osiris graves, where the pieces of the Osiris body were buried, as it were. In the Book of the Dead, Osiris - the higher self - is addressed directly: “The Osiris and so forth. The task of the priesthood was to awaken the dead Osiris in man.

In the North, we have the giant Ymir. He is slain, and from his parts the earth is created. His hair makes the forests, his bones the rocks, his blood the rivers, and so on, all his limbs are divided. We recognize that this myth has been drawn from the same source as the worship of Osiris.

The Edda is an echo of the immigration of Atlantis. “Edda” and “Veda” are the same word. Thus we recognize the connection between all ancient and old religions.

The entire history of Europe is preserved in the heroic sagas. All the sagas can be traced back to the great Nordic initiate “Sig”, who was initiated for Europe. Siegfried, Sieglinde, Sigurd are all names that point back to him. In terms of depth, the Nordic tradition surpasses even that which comes from India. What strikes us about all the sagas is the prophetic and tragic element that runs through everything. Everything points to what is to come. We see this in the Twilight of the Gods. It was known that the gods they worshipped would not find lasting worship. They said to them: “You are there for the north, but another will come after you who is higher than you.

The story of Siegfried clearly shows what is meant by initiation. He killed the lindworm, bathed in its blood, became invulnerable – all things that symbolize initiation. The initiate is invulnerable – only one spot between the shoulder blades was vulnerable, and that is the spot where Christ carried his cross and thus also made this spot invulnerable. Siegfried had to be replaced by Christ. This is depicted in the Nibelungen. We see the transition of the two currents in the Middle Ages, which finally merged: the old pagan current and the new Christian current. The old pagan current leads directly back to the downfall of Atlantis. It was replaced by the Franks and led over into the Christian current. The Nibelungs come from the Land of the Fogs, the land surrounded by water and fog. The hoard of the Nibelungs is sunk into the Rhine. For the peoples, the Rhine belonged to the great waters that had engulfed Atlantis with the golden city and all its treasures.

Then we see King Arthur's Round Table. It represents the 'White Lodge of ancient paganism'. The contrasts in the Middle Ages become more and more pronounced, in the form of the 'Ghibellines' = Nibelungs - the imperial party - and the 'Wibelungen' = Welfs, the party of the Pope, of Christianity.

What came to Europe from Christianity did not come only from Christian monks, but also from Oriental brotherhoods. The great spiritual brotherhood of the 'White Lodge', the 'Gral Lodge', brought the deepest part of Christianity. Barbarossa wants to get the Grail. He does not reach his goal, but drowns on the way. He was far ahead of his time and therefore could not yet fulfill his task. Now he waits in the Kyffhäuser until the spirit of his people has progressed so far that he can lead them further. Development had not yet reached its low point. There are those who cannot go down as deeply, they have to wait until the others have come through the depths to their point of view, then they can move on with them. So Barbarossa sits and waits. The ravens are to bring him word when the time has come. The ravens are the initiates of the first degree; they are scouts, they bring tidings from the world of the spirit.

The emperor – the warriors – have not found the initiation. Who is suited to seek it? This type is represented by a great, noble, inward-looking mind. The pure fool: Parzival. The Holy Grail did come to the land in the time of Barbarossa, but it was only sensed in dullness. Parzival sees it, but out of ignorance, out of misunderstanding the prohibition of questioning, he misses the question. Now he must go through all the degrees of initiation. He must prove himself as a child of his time, in the worldly knighthood. He goes through doubt: [“Is doubt the birth of hearts?”] Finally, after going through everything, he comes to the Grail. There the entire initiation is symbolically represented. His successor was Lohengrin.

In the history of the Middle Ages, we saw the flourishing of a great cultural movement. Thriving cities emerged, and in them the creative, industrious, but more self-contained bourgeoisie. From Scotland to Novgorod, a circle of flourishing cities emerged. This represents a great step forward in the development of the world. This development of the bourgeoisie corresponds to the female side of man. The masculine seeks its own in the outside world, represented by [gap in the transcript]

The inner being of man is feminine and must be fertilized by the great “White Lodge”. This is presented to us in the Lohengrin saga. The blossoming city-being is represented by Elsa of Brabant. She calls on Lohengrin, the knight of the Holy Grail, for her protection, marries him and loses him again because she asks about his origin.

There is a sacred law among the initiates that one must not ask about their physical origin.

Lohengrin's messenger is the swan. This is the third degree of chelaship, which is designated as follows: They know the name of all things.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, who died in 1225 and to whom we owe the Parzival saga, could neither read nor write. And Jacob Boehme, the poor cobbler, will not have occupied himself with reading books either; but that is no reason why he should not have left us such spiritual truth and wisdom. Walter von der Vogelweide boasted that he was something very special because he could read and write [...]; in the Middle Ages, that was a very rare skill.

All these northern sagas of gods and heroes contain the basis of occultism, which the great initiate Sig proclaimed. “Wotan” underwent four initiations to prepare the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race, which had the task of merging the Greek and Celtic races. The fourth sub-race found its greatness in the south. Here in the north, a corresponding countermeasure was taken. Four stages had to be gone through here first, while high culture was already developing down in the south. From the south came Christianity. In the north, four elementary classes of “Wotan” were gone through so that one would be able to receive Christianity.

“Wotan”, “Wille”, “We” – the trinity.

Creative power, will and we – the power of the mind was developed, the tragic trait that runs through everything.

What did the ancient Germans learn from the Druids? One example: imagine yourself on the moon. There, the lower three kingdoms were not what they are now on Earth. The mineral kingdom had not yet solidified, it was still alive, mobile, best compared to a spinach mass or rather to peat than to rock. There were no stones back then. Life had not yet escaped from it. The same applied to the plant kingdom. The plants of that time could only grow on living things. So living things grew on living things. Now some beings have not achieved the goal that was set on the moon. There are still plants that are unable to sustain their life from dead soil; they can only grow on living things; they are called parasite plants. These include, among others, mistletoe, which can only grow on trees; it is a moon plant. Mistletoe juice is antagonistic to the earth, which is why it is or was used as a poison in medicine.

From the above, we see that on the moon the three kingdoms were not yet completely separated from each other. The mineral kingdom was plant-like, and the plant kingdom was between the plant and animal kingdoms. When certain plants were touched, they produced sounds.

The earth sun is

All these things can only be recognized by those who are familiar with the conditions on earth. At the time of the ancient Druids, these things were told to us as fairy tales by the Druid priests. This is how we have been prepared to understand Theosophy today.

The initiates speak to the souls, not to the respective people.

Thus, today's theosophy prepares us again for the reality of later ages.

Various things, presumably from a question and answer [with comments by the transcriber]

Richard Wagner intuitively grasped the great realities and reflected them in his great operas. Various attempts have been made by the spiritual currents to bring these realities to the attention of mankind today. Just as Richard Wagner was inspired as an artist, so the attempt has been made to make the truth clear to the consciousness of the mind. Nietzsche was chosen as the tool for this. His brain did not hold up. He had to atone for the attempt with death. [...] The European race was too thick-skinned. None of it was of any use until Helena Petrovna Blavatsky got it through. - We were dealing with Kali Yuga, the dark age. We are in the middle of the fifth root race and have passed the low point. Jesus Christ: When Christianity emerged, Jesus of Nazareth was a highly developed chela, third degree, the swan. For him, the whole world is what the human ego is for the ordinary person, that is, he knows the true divine in every thing. He knows the whole world inwardly. Every thing tells him its true name.

[In response to a request for further clarification, Dr. Steiner tried to make it clear to us:] As I speak to you, I move the air, the sound waves reach your ear and you absorb the words in your soul. The air is in perpetual motion, the auditory nerves catch the sound. Now imagine the air with its different vibrations, because each word produces different vibrations [...]. Now imagine that from the beginning, when a thing was created, a word was spoken for every thing, and that the air waves that formed this word were made firm, made rigid. Imagine that my words were made rigid, then they would fall visibly on the floor here. That was indeed the case with creation.

Christ can be found in the astral world. Master Jesus teaches how to find Christ. Christ will come again as a spiritual man when he will incarnate again in the sixth root race.

He will have a forerunner, John the Baptist. The sun was in Aries in the spring at the time of Christ, hence Christ = the Lamb. But it is slowly moving forward. It used to be in the sign of Taurus, hence the service of Taurus; even earlier in Gemini, Perse - Ormuzd and Ahriman. A solar period lasts two thousand six hundred years. Now it is coming to Pisces. In the Middle Ages, reference was made to the Age of Pisces. An element, a sea of spiritual life was to come. Later comes Aquarius, after two thousand six hundred years. The Templars taught that John would return - John the Baptist

We have seen that we come closer to the profound meaning of the Gospel of St. John when we seek to approach it from various sides, and yesterday we were able from a certain point of view to indicate one of the most significant mysteries of this Gospel. In order that we may gradually reach a complete understanding of the mystery presented yesterday, it will now be necessary to consider the advent of Christ-Jesus in our postAtlantean period. We have gathered together the most varied material in order that we might trace the evolution of the human being and within it the Christ Principle. Today we shall try to understand why, just at this point of time in our evolution, the Christ appeared as a human being walking upon the earth and we shall in this way form a connection with what we have already heard in part in the last lectures. Now we shall have to consider especially the evolution of our humanity in the post-Atlantean period.

We have repeatedly stated that at a time very far in the past our forefathers dwelt out there in the west in a region now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean. Our forebears dwelt upon old Atlantis. In the lecture of the day before yesterday we were able to call attention especially to the external bodily appearance of these our Atlantean forefathers. We have seen that the physical body, visible now to the external human sense organs, only slowly and gradually reached the present density of flesh which it now possesses. We said that not until the last part of the Atlantean period did men bear some resemblance to their present form. Even toward the last third of the Atlantean period they were still essentially very different creatures from the men of today, although to the external senses they appeared much the same. We can best make clear what progress the human being has made, if we compare him in his present state with any of the existing higher animals. However highly developed the animal may be, it must now be clear for various reasons how the human being differs essentially from the animal. We find that upon the physical plane or in the physical world, every animal consists of physical body, ether or life body and astral body; that these three parts compose its animal being in the physical world.

You must not imagine that only what is physical exists in the physical world. It would be a great mistake if you were to seek all that is etheric or in fact all that is astral only in the super-sensible world. It is true you can see only what is physical with the physical senses in the physical world, but that is not because only what is physical exists here. No, the ether and astral bodies of the animals are present in the physical world and the clairvoyantly endowed person can see them. It is only when he wishes to reach the real ego of the animal that he can no longer remain in the physical world; he must then mount into the astral regions. There the group-soul or group-ego of the animals is to be found and the difference between the human being and the animal consists in the ego of the former also being present here below in the physical world. This means that here in the physical world, the human creature consists of a physical, ether and astral body and an ego, although the three higher members, from the ether body upwards, are only perceptible to clairvoyant consciousness. This difference between the human being and the animal is expressed clairvoyantly in a certain way. Let us suppose that a person endowed with clairvoyance is observing a horse and a man. Extending beyond the horse's head, which is lengthened out to a muzzle, he finds an etheric appendage. This etheric head protrudes beyond the physical head of the horse and is magnificently organized; these two do not coincide in the horse. But he finds that in the human being of the present, the etheric head corresponds almost exactly in form and size to the physical. Clairvoyantly observed, the elephant makes an extremely grotesque appearance with its extraordinarily huge etheric head; it is, indeed, etherically a very grotesque animal. In the human beings of the present, the physical and etheric heads coincide and in form and size they are very nearly alike. This, however, has not always been the case. We find it so only in the last third of the Atlantean period. The ancient Atlanteans' etheric head protruded far beyond his physical head, then by degrees these two grew together and it was in the last third of the Atlantean period that the physical and the etheric heads exactly coincided. In the brain, near the eyes, there is a point which coincides with a very definite point in the etheric head. These points were apart in ancient times; the etheric point was outside of the brain. These two important points have drawn together and only when this occurred did the human being learn to say “I” to himself. Then appeared what we yesterday called the “Consciousness Soul.” Through the coincidence of the etheric and physical heads, the appearance of the human head changed very greatly, for the head of the ancient Atlantean was still very different in appearance from the head of present human beings. If we wish to understand how the present evolution became possible, we must consider a little the physical conditions in ancient Atlantis.

If you had been able to walk through ancient Atlantis, out there in the west, you would not have been able to experience the conditions of rain, fog, air and sunshine that we have now in our present earth. At that time mists pervaded especially the northern regions, west of Scandinavia. Those human beings who lived in ancient Atlantis, in the region where Ireland now stands and even further to the West, never saw rain and sunshine as separate phenomena as is now the case. They were always immersed in mist and only with the Atlantean Flood did the time come when the fog banks separated from the air and were precipitated into the ocean. You might have searched through the whole of Atlantis and you would not have found that spectacle which is now well known to you all as an extraordinary phenomenon of nature; it would have been impossible to discover a rainbow. That is only possible through a separation of rain and sunshine such as can now exist in the atmosphere. On Atlantis before the Flood, you would have found no rainbow. Only gradually, after the Flood, did this phenomenon appear, that is, it became a physical possibility. If after having received these communications of Spiritual Science, you recall that the memory of the Atlantean Flood is preserved in the various sagas and myths of the Deluge and that after the Deluge, Noah came forth and first saw the rainbow, then you will get some idea of how literally and profoundly true the religious documents are. It is a fact that human beings first saw a rainbow after the Atlantean Flood. These are the experiences which can be had by one who acquaints himself with occultism, and then bit by bit learns to understand how literally the religious documents must be taken. Of course one must first learn to understand the alphabet.

Towards the end of the Atlantean period, the external and internal human conditions proved to be most favorable in a certain region of the earth's surface which was in the vicinity of present Ireland. This region is now covered with water. At that time the conditions there were especially favourable and in this region the most highly gifted of the Atlantean races developed, a race that was especially endowed with the capacity to rise to an independent human self-consciousness. The leader of this people, which in Spiritual Science literature is usually designated the ancient Semites, was a great initiate who sought the most highly developed individuals of this people and migrated with them to the east through Europe as far as Asia into a region occupied now by the present Tibet. Thither migrated a relatively small but spiritually very highly developed fraction of the Atlantean peoples. Toward the end of the Atlantean period, it so happened that gradually the westerly portions of Atlantis disappeared and became covered by the sea. Europe in its present form gradually arose. In Asia, the great Siberian regions were still covered with extensive bodies of water, but, especially in the south of Asia, there were regions of land which had already appeared, differently formed, however. Some of the less advanced of the great mass of people joined with this germinal group which migrated from west to east. Many went with them a long distance, others not so far. But the peopling of ancient Europe came about for the most part through the migrations of great hordes of people out of Atlantis who settled there. Other great groups of people who had been driven from other parts of Atlantis, even some from ancient Lemuria, had come into Asia at a still earlier period and now encountered each other during this migration. Thus peoples variously endowed and of very different spiritual capacities settled in Europe and Asia. The small number who were led by that great spiritual individuality, Manu, settled there in Asia in order to foster the greatest possible spirituality. From there streams of culture flowed out into the various regions of the earth and among the various peoples.

The first cultural stream flowed down into India, and through the impulse given by the spiritual mission of that great individuality, Manu, there developed what we may call the ancient Indian civilization. We are not speaking now of that Indian culture of which we have only echoes in those wonderful books of the Vedas, nor are we speaking of what has been handed down to posterity as tradition. Previous to all that can be known of this external culture, there existed a much more glorious and more ancient culture, that of the ancient Holy Rishis, those great teachers who in the far distant past gave to mankind the first post-Atlantean civilization. Let us transplant ourselves into the souls of the people of this first post-Atlantean cultural stream. This was the first really religious human culture. Those Atlantean cultural periods which preceded this one were not religious cultural epochs in the true sense of the word. Religion is, in fact, a characteristic of the post-Atlantean age. You will ask, why is this the case?

Let us see how Atlanteans lived. Since the etheric head was still outside of the physical head, the ancient hazy clairvoyance was not yet completely lost. Therefore, at night, when the Atlantean was outside of his physical body, he could look into the furthest reaches of the spiritual world. Although during the day—when he dipped down into his physical body—he saw physical things here in the physical world, at night he still saw, to a certain degree, the regions of the spiritual world. Transfer yourselves now for a moment into the middle or first third of the Atlantean period. What was the condition of the human being then? He awakened in the morning and his astral body was drawn into his physical and ether bodies. At that time the objects of the physical world were not yet so sharply and clearly contoured as they are now. When a city is enveloped in fog, and you observe the lanterns in the evening as though surrounded by an aura of color with undefined edges and streams of color, you have in this a picture of how things appeared at that time on Atlantis. The outlines were not clearly defined, but it was like seeing the lanterns in the mist. Hence, there was likewise no such sharp division between the clear day-consciousness and the unconsciousness of the night as appeared after the Atlantean period. During the night the astral body slipped out of the ether and physical bodies, but since the ether body still remained partly united with the astral body, there were always reflections of the spiritual world; the human being could always have a hazy clairvoyance, could live within the spiritual world and could behold about him spiritual beings and spiritual activities. The scholars who sit in their studies say that the common people have composed, for example, the Germanic myths and sagas out of their folk phantasy. Wotan and Thor and all the other gods were only personifications of nature forces. There are complete mythological theories which deal in this way with the folk creative phantasy. When one hears such a thing, it is easy to believe that such a learned individual is like the Homunculus in Goethe's Faust, born out of a retort, who had never seen a real human being. For anyone who has really observed the people, it is not possible to speak in this way of the creative folk imagination. The legends of the gods are nothing less than what remains of actual events which people of earlier ages really beheld clairvoyantly. This Wotan really existed. During the night human beings wandered about among the gods in the spiritual world and knew Wotan and Thor there as well as they knew people of flesh and blood like themselves here upon the earth. What primitive people of that age beheld, for a long time dimly and clairvoyantly, has now become the content of myth and saga, especially of those of the Germans.

People who at that time migrated from west to east into the regions later called Germany were those who had retained, more or less, some degree of clairvoyance and who were still able at a certain time to perceive in the spiritual world. And simultaneously with the migrations of that greatest of initiates and his followers into Tibet, whence he sent forth the first cultural colony into India, initiates who fostered the Spiritual Life in the Mysteries were left behind everywhere among the people of Europe. Mysteries existed among these people, the Druid Mysteries, for example, but men no longer have any knowledge of them—for what is recounted is merely fantastic rubbish. It is a significant fact that at that time when the higher worlds were mentioned among the Druids or among the peoples of the regions of western Russia and Scandinavia where the Mysteries of the Trotts existed, there was always a large number who knew of these spiritual worlds. When they spoke of Wotan or of the incidents that occurred between Baldur and Hodur, they were not talking of something wholly unknown to them. There were many who had themselves experienced such incidents in special states of consciousness, and those not having the experiences themselves heard it from their neighbour in whom they had confidence. Wherever you might have gone in Europe, you would still have found vivid memories of what existed on Atlantis. What did exist there? Something one might call a natural, living companionship with the beings of the spiritual world, with what is today called Heaven. The human being continually entered into the spiritual world and lived there. In other words he needed no special religion to point out to him the existence of a spirit-land. What is the meaning of “religion?” It signifies union, union of the physical world with the spiritual. At that time the human being needed no special means of union with the spiritual world, because for him it was a world of natural experience. Just as there is no need now for anyone to impart to you a belief in the flowers of the field or in the beasts of the forest, because you see them with your own eyes, so similarly the Atlanteans “believed” in the gods and spiritual beings, not through religion, but because they experienced them. As human evolution progressed, mankind acquired a clear day-consciousness. It was in the post-Atlantean age that people acquired this clear waking consciousness and they gained it by renouncing their ancient clairvoyant consciousness. It will be theirs again in the future in addition to the present clear day-consciousness. For our ancestors here in Europe, the sagas and myths often aroused memory-pictures of the distant past. One might ask, what was the nature of these most developed human beings? Strange as it may sound, these highly developed individuals whom the leader guided eastward into Tibet were for the most part advanced, because they had lost their ancient, dreamlike consciousness. What does it signify to progress from the fourth over into the fifth root-race? It means becoming day-conscious; it means losing the ancient clairvoyance. The great initiate and guide led away the members of his little group in order that they might not have to live among people who were still at the stage of the ancient Atlanteans. Among the first, only those could be guided into the higher worlds who had been trained artificially, who had gone artificially through an occult training. It may be asked, what did the people of the first post-Atlantean epoch have left of that ancient relationship with the spiritual, divine world? Only the longing for the spirit world, the door to which had been closed. They felt that there had been a time—for they heard it in their sagas—when their forefathers had gazed into the spirit world, had lived there among spirits and gods and had discovered themselves in the midst of deep spiritual realities. “Oh, could we but experience this too!” they said and out of this longing the ancient Indian way of initiation was created. This method of initiation arose out of the longing for what was past and caused the pupil to lose, for a time, the clear day-consciousness which he had acquired in order that he might force himself back in consciousness to his former state. “Yoga” is the method of the ancient Indian initiation which, through its technique and exercises, restored what had been lost in a quite natural way.

Imagine, for example, an ancient Atlantean whose ether head protruded far beyond his physical head. When the astral body withdrew, a large part of the ether head was still united with it, therefore what it experienced could be imprinted upon the ether body and thus he became conscious of his experiences. When, in the last part of the Atlantean period, the ether part of the head was drawn wholly into the physical head, the astral body left the ether body entirely each night. Thus in the ancient initiations, the teacher had to try to draw out the ether body of his pupil by artificial means; in other words, the pupil had to be brought into a sort of lethargic condition, into a kind of death-like sleep which lasted about three and a half days. During this time the ether body protruded from the physical body and was loosened from it. What the astral body then experienced was impressed upon the ether body. Then when the ether body was re-drawn into the physical body, the pupil knew what he had experienced in the spiritual world.

That was the ancient method of initiation, the Yoga initiation, by means of which the pupil was lifted out of the world wherein he found himself in order to be transported back again into the spiritual world. And the cultural mood which resulted from this kind of initiation found its echo in the later Indian culture. It was this mood that gave rise to the words: Truth, Reality, Being exist only in the spiritual world, in that world into which a person enters when he lifts himself out of the physical sense-world. Here he is in the midst of the physical world, surrounded by the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. But what surrounds him is not reality, it is only an outer semblance; he lost the reality ages ago and now lives in a world of appearance, of illusion, of Maya!

The world of the physical, therefore, was the world of Maya for the ancient Indian civilization. We must comprehend this, not as a dull theory, but in accordance with the cultural mood itself—in accordance with the feelings of the people themselves of that time. When the ancient Indian wished to be especially holy, the world of illusion became worthless to him. This physical world became to him an illusion; the true world existed for him when he withdrew from the physical, when through Yoga he was permitted to live again in the world in which his forefathers still lived during the Atlantean period.

The significance of further evolution consists in the human being of this post-Atlantean period becoming gradually accustomed to value the physical world which is allotted to him, according to its worth and meaning. The second epoch, the next step after the ancient Indian period, is also a pre-historic cultural epoch which is named after the people who later lived in the region of Persia; we designate it the primitive Persian civilization. However, we have not the later Persian civilization in mind, but a pre-historic culture.

The second period differs very essentially in its mood, in its feeling-content from the primeval Indian period. It became more and more difficult to loosen the ether body during initiation, but it was still possible and in a certain way it was always done even up to the time of Christ-Jesus. But there was one thing these men of the primitive Persian civilization had attained; they began to appreciate Maya or illusion as something of value. The ancient Indian was happy when he could flee from illusion. For the Persian, it became a sphere of activity. It is true, illusion still continued to appear to him as something hostile, something which must be overcome. Later this gave rise to the myth of the battle between Ormuzd and Ahriman in which the human being allied himself with the good gods against the power of the gods of evil existing in matter. Out of this, the mood of that age was created. The Persian was still not fond of this physical “reality” (Maya), but he no longer fled from it like the ancient Indian; he worked upon it and considered it a stage upon which he could be active, a place where there was something that must be overcome. In this second cultural stage, a step in the conquest of the physical world had been made.

Then came the third cultural stage. We are now approaching closer and closer to historical times. This cultural period is designated in Occult Science the Chaldaic – Babylonian – Assyrian – Egyptian civilization. All these civilizations were founded by colonies sent out under the guidance of great leaders. The first colony founded the civilization of the ancient Indians, the second founded what we have just described as the ancient Persian cultural centre and a third cultural stream travelled still further to the west and laid there the foundation of the Babylonian – Chaldaic – Assyrian – Egyptian civilization. Thus an important step was taken in the conquest of the physical world. To the Persian it still seemed like an intractable mass which he had to manipulate if he wished to work in it with those Beings whom he considered the good Spirits of the true Spiritual Reality. He had now become more familiar, more intimate with physical reality. Just consider the ancient Chaldean astronomy. It is one of the most extraordinary and tremendous creations of the human spirit of the post-Atlantean age. There you see how the course of the stars was explored, how the laws of the heavens were examined. The ancient Indian would have looked out at this heaven and said: The course of the stars with its laws is not worth the trouble to investigate! To the people of the third cultural epoch it was even then very important to penetrate into these laws. To those belonging to the Egyptian civilization, it was of special importance to examine the earthly relationships and to develop the science of geometry. Maya or illusion was explored and physical science came into being. Men studied the thoughts of the gods and felt that they must make a connection between their own individual activity and what they found inscribed in matter as the script of the gods. If you were to investigate spiritually the earlier conditions of Egyptian political life, you would gain a concept of a political organism very different from any that people of the present day can possibly imagine. The individualities who directed and guided those political states were wise men who knew the laws governing the course of the stars, of the movements of the cosmic bodies, and at the same time they knew that everything in the cosmos must mutually correspond. They had studied the course of the stars and knew that there must be a harmony between what was taking place in the heavens and what was happening upon the earth. According to the events in the heavens they decreed what, in the course of time, is to occur on earth. Even in the earliest part of the Roman period (the fourth cultural epoch) there still existed the consciousness that what transpires upon the earth must correspond to what is happening in the heavens. For long periods in the ancient Mysteries it was known at the beginning of a new epoch what events would transpire in the following period. It was known through the Mystery-wisdom, for example, at the beginning of Roman history that a period would follow in which the most varied historical events would be enacted and that they would take place in the region of Alba Longa. For anyone who can read it, it is clear that a deeply symbolical expression is suggested here and that it was, so to say, priestly wisdom that laid out or planned the civilization of ancient Rome. “Alba Longa” was the long priestly garment. In these ancient regions the future historical events were in this way laid out—if we may be allowed to use a technical expression. They knew that seven epochs must follow one after another in succession. The future was divided according to the number seven and an outline of the future history was foretold. I could easily show you how prophetic historical plans were concealed in the story of the seven Kings of Rome which had already been inscribed in the Sibylline Books even as early as the beginning of the Roman epoch. In those days people knew that they had to live through what was written there and on important occasions they consulted the Holy Books. This then accounts for the holy and mysterious character of the Sibylline Books.

Thus humanity of the third cultural epoch worked Spirit into Matter, permeated the outer world with Spirit. There are countless historical evidences of this concealed in the development of the epochs of this third cultural stream—this Assyrian – Babylonian – Chaldean – Egyptian civilization. Our own age can be understood only when we know the important relationships which exist between that age and our own. I should like now to call attention to one of the relationships between these two epochs, in order that you may see how wonderfully things are connected for anyone who can penetrate more deeply into them and who knows that what is called egotism and utilitarianism has now reached its culmination. Never before was a cultural epoch as purely egotistic and unidealistic as our own and it will become even more so in the near future. For, at the present time, spirit has descended completely into a materialistic civilization. Tremendous spiritual forces have had to be employed by men in the great discoveries and inventions of the new age, that is, of the nineteenth century. Just think, for instance, how much spiritual force exists in the telephone, in the telegraph, in the railroads, etc.! How much spiritual force has been materialized, crystallized in the commercial relationships of the earth! How much spiritual energy it requires to cause a sum of money to be paid, let us say in Tokyo, by means of a piece of paper, a cheque written here in this place! Thus one may ask: Does the use of this spiritual force mean spiritual progress? Whoever faces the fact must acknowledge the following: You build railroads indeed, but they carry, practically, only what you need for your stomachs; and when you yourself travel, you do so only because of something that has to do with your physical needs. Does it make any difference from the standpoint of Spiritual Science whether we grind our own corn with a few stones or obtain it from a distance by means of the telegraph, ships, etc.? A tremendous spiritual force is employed, but it is used in an entirely personal sense. What then will be the meaning of what men thus negotiate? Apparently not Anthroposophy, in other words, not spiritual realities. When the telegraph and steamships are used, it is in the first place a question of how much cotton will be ordered to be sent from America to Europe, etc.; in other words it is a question of something that has to do with personal needs. Mankind has descended to the profoundest depths of personal necessity, of physical personality. But just such an egotistic, utilitarian principle had to come sometime, because through it, the ascending course of all human evolution will be facilitated. What has happened to cause the human being to attach so much importance to his own personality, thus causing him to feel himself so much a separate individual? And, moreover, what was it that prepared him for this strong feeling of self in his life between birth and death?

In the third period of civilization a most important preparation was made for this, in the desire to retain the form of the physical body beyond death in the “mummy,” in the wish to prevent the dissipation of the form of the body by embalming it. Thus, this holding fast to the separate individuality became imprinted upon the soul in such a way that now it appears again in another incarnation as the feeling of personality. That this feeling of personality is so strong today is the result of the embalming of the body in the Egyptian period. So we see that in human evolution everything is correlated. The Egyptians mummified the bodies of the dead in order that people of the fifth epoch might have the greatest possible consciousness of their own personality. Certainly, profound mysteries exist within human evolution.

Thus you see how the human being has gradually descended deeper and deeper into Maya and has permeated matter with what he is able to achieve. In the fourth cultural period, the Greco-Latin age, he placed his inner being out in the external world. Thus you see in Greece how he objectified himself in matter and form. He concealed his own form in the figures of the Grecian gods. In Aeschylos there still resounds, in dramatic form, men's desire to convert their own individuality into artistic form. They step out upon the physical plane and create a copy of themselves. In the Roman period men created an image of themselves in the institutions of the State. It is a sign of the greatest dilletantism when one traces what is now called Jurisprudence back beyond the Roman period. What existed previously is, in concept, something quite different from Jus or “Justice,” “Right” (Recht), for the concept of the human being as an outer personality, the concept of human rights did not exist prior to that time. In ancient Greece there was the Polis, the little municipal state, and men felt themselves as members of it. It is difficult for people to enter into the consciousness of the Greek epoch. In the Roman epoch, the path into the physical world had been trod so far that the individual human personality—as a Roman citizen—appears also as possessing rights. Everything progresses by stages and we shall trace in detail how the personality emerges by degrees and how at the same time the physical world is being conquered more and more in the progress of history, and how the human being is plunging deeper and deeper into matter.

Our own epoch is the first after the Greco-Latin; in other words, it is the fifth epoch of the post-Atlantean age. There will follow after it a sixth and a seventh epoch. The fourth, the Greco-Latin, is the middle period, and during this middle period, Christ-Jesus came upon the earth. This event was prepared for within the third post-Atlantean epoch, because everything in the world has to be prepared beforehand. The third epoch made ready for that greatest of all events which was to be enacted upon the earth during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch at a time when men had progressed far enough in their feeling of personality to step outside themselves and create their gods in their own image. In the art of the Grecian period, men created a world of gods after their own image. They repeated this in the form of the State. An understanding of physical matter was reached even to the degree of the union of Maya (the world of illusion, matter) and Spirit. This is the moment when men also attained an understanding of personality. You will comprehend that this was also the time when they were able to understand God as a personal manifestation, the time when the spirit belonging to the earth also progressed to the point of becoming a personality. Thus we see how in the middle of the post-Atlantean civilization God Himself appeared as a man, as a separate personality. When we see how in Greek art the human being fashioned an image of himself, we may say: What happened in the middle of the post-Atlantean civilization appears to us as an image. When we pass from the Greek to the Roman period and observe the types of human beings of the great Roman Empire, does it not actually seem as though the Greek images of the gods had descended from their pedestals and were walking about in their togas? One can fairly see them!

Thus the human creature had progressed from the time when he felt himself as a member of the Godhead to a feeling of himself as a personality. He could comprehend as a personality even the Godhead Itself which, embodied in the flesh, had descended and dwelt among men.

It has been our desire here to picture to our souls the reason for the appearance of Christ-Jesus just at this period of human evolution. How this mystery developed further, how in the earlier evolutionary periods it shone forth prophetically, and how it works prophetically into the distant future, we shall consider next time.

It is not by chance that we have a theosophical movement. It has to do with the whole of 19th-century development, with the spread of materialism which came to the fore in the 1840s—more or less, also a little before and after that. Materialism had also spread during the four centuries that went before. To understand this we have to go back to the 5th and 6th centuries. People have a completely wrong idea about the way people's minds went in those days. It is the worst of errors to imagine they thought the way we do today. They had quite different ideas about the stars in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, for example. Today people see only material things in them. In medieval times every star was seen to be a spirit. Not only uneducated but also educated people saw a star as a spirit. And so the whole space of heaven was filled with spirit. There is a big difference between assuming the universe to consist of bodies only or thinking that there is also spirit. In those times people felt secure in a spiritual cosmos. We have no need, however, to long for those medieval views to come back.

Copernicus²⁰¹ conquered cosmic space for a materialistic approach. Exploration of the physical world reached its greatest height. Schleiden²⁰² and others discovered the cell. Railways and everything of that kind gave a tremendous boost to materialism. The great guides of humanity then asked themselves what was to be done. How can we make people understand that there is a life of the spirit? People then only had a feeling for material things and would say: ‘If there is a spirit, let it prove itself to be a spirit.’ Spiritualism broke out and people actually attempted this.²⁰³ Initiates always seek to teach people in a way they will understand, and efforts were therefore made to produce manifestations, revelations from the other world.

Now we must first of all consider human destiny after death. When we are asleep, physical body and ether body are united and the astral body is floating above the physical body. When we die, not only does the astral body separate from the physical body, but both the astral and the ether body go away, leaving the physical body behind. The astral and ether bodies remain together for a short time, a review of life follows that takes two or three days. Then they, too, separate, the ether body dissolves to be part of the power of life in general, and the astral body reaches a state known as kamaloka. It is disembodied but still has the habits and inclinations of the physical body. Let me illustrate this. A gourmet still has his food fancies. He no longer has a palate, but the palate's desire remains as a sensation of burning thirst. In kamaloka such habits are shed, with the desires finally consuming themselves. Then the astral body, too, is shed, in so far as it was the vehicle for desires.

There is a way in which such abandoned astral corpses can be galvanized and brought into the world we perceive through the senses. The medium makes his ether body available for this and ‘materializations’, as they are called, are brought about with its help. This was the method used to show materialistic humanity what remains after death, and the initiates had hoped that this would convince people.

Two problems arose, however. In the first place, people who became convinced because of spiritualism did not improve morally with this, that is they did not reach a higher level ethically. In the second place this way of seeing, or of being convinced, actually proved unfavourable—after death. People who had it did not have it easier in kamaloka but harder. For on top of everything else they now also brought the desire with them to see all things of the spirit satisfied in material terms, through the senses, for any such view will appear as a quality in kamaloka. An oppressive, leaden weight lay upon these dead. The initiates therefore said to themselves: ‘This will not do.’ Ah, you'll say, the initiates got things wrong then. But they, too, have to learn from experience, trial and error. It was then the almost unanimous decision in the great community of occultists that as this external means had not proved effective they would take another route, which was the inner route of theosophy. What are its aims? The aim is to get to know the spirit that lives in the human being himself. This spirit is the goal. But it is only possible to get to know the spirit if one is without prejudice. One has to understand the things that humanity has in common.

Egotism had evolved parallel to materialism. Here's just one example. Participation in group travel is contingent on one particular condition, which is that religious subjects must not be brought up in conversation. People are afraid of the egotism of personal opinion, for if you have seven people you'll also have seven opinions. Opinions are thus put above general love for humanity. But brotherhood only begins where love of humanity ranks above opinions.

Theosophy exists so that truth may be sought with personal opinions in balance. People have to be tolerant again, not only as regards the person but also with regard to individual nature. To be tolerant is not just to let others be but in this context to open oneself up to understanding their peculiar nature. Theosophy should thus not be a dogma but an expression of love. We must help our brothers, that is, put love above opinions, and this brings a uniform spirit to human evolution. This is the practical approach which should develop in the theosophical movement.

Answers to questions

Question. What method of training should be chosen instead of yoga training?

Answer. Do not confuse occultism with theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to teach the profound wisdom. It does not in itself exist to make people clairvoyant, though it does also go towards such training.

Occult training is available. Some people think they have to look to India for this, but in this they are greatly mistaken. Training of this kind is also available in Europe. Someone looking for a teacher or guru will find him in the world. Theosophists are wrong to look for this only in India. Chacravarti,²⁰⁴ an Indian of high repute, significantly said at the Chicago congress: ‘My people, too, have gone downhill when it comes to understanding the world in spiritual terms, and theosophy has helped us to rise up again.’

Mrs Blavatsky actually did not only present Indian views, as many people assume. First a European was her guide, and then an Egyptian.²⁰⁵ That was when she wrote Isis Unveiled.

You should not think that the training should be the same for all. The nature of the Indian organism is such that the ether body may be drawn out much more easily. It is at a different level, the first level of the Indian root race, i.e. its first root race, whereas Europeans are at the fifth level of the fifth root race. It is relatively easy to get an Indian to be clairvoyant, drawing out the ether body and putting it into the state known as lethargy, i.e. numbness and lack of sensation. It is as if the body has gone dead. If we were to let a finger die by tying it off, a clairvoyant would see the ether finger hang down beside the tied-off finger. When someone has been hypnotized, the clairvoyant sees the etheric brain hanging down on either side of the head. When the body has thus been deadened, the astral body has to be used, and this imprints anything impressed in it into the ether body. It is extremely difficult for a European to get such astral impressions, or to have them given to him, and a way was sought, therefore, where it was not necessary to draw out the ether body. The Rosicrucians found this from the 14th century onwards, and their method is the best for Europeans. Our bodies have grown denser than Indian bodies; they have gone through a downward development, which is in accord with the necessary process of evolution. On the other hand we enter this state in full conscious awareness, whilst daytime consciousness is suppressed with the Indian method.

Hypnotizing people is not, on the whole, a good thing. Firstly the intervention weakens the subject's will. Secondly it is black magic, with the subject being overcome by the hypnotist. It definitely should not be used with healthy people, though the situation may be a little different in case of sickness.

What does the term ‘downward development’ mean?

Take the materialistic view of things. Here ape, here man—and man is therefore descended from the ape. This is not the case, for ape and man have common ancestors, something modern scientists also accept.²⁰⁶ The truth is that the one must develop at the cost of the other. Thus there was a realm of life forms during the ancient moon period of evolution that were somewhere between animal and plant. Mistletoe is a relict of this. The plant evolved downwards, the animal upwards. The same applies to man. Human beings developed some parts upwards and others downwards. Thus it is a fact, for instance, that humans once had cartilage instead of bones. To put it crudely: they are progressively hardening. On the other hand any loosening or separation of the higher bodies brought about by occult training is an anticipation of general evolutional stages that will be reached in the future.

Why has man been incarnated in his physical body?

Man already had all the potential in those earlier times which he is to develop on earth, but none of it was his own. When man will no longer gain anything from being in this world he will no longer need to incarnate. He will then give his body to the planet.

What is the situation with the Flood?

This Flood was the great event which came when the greater part of Atlantis went down. The actual end of Atlantis covered vast spaces of time. Like everything important told in the Bible and the oldest records—much treasure trove still waits to be found there—the rainbow which came into being in Noah's day²⁰⁷ is something of great significance. We are told it symbolized the covenant between god and humanity. In occult terms it has another meaning as well. On Atlantis, moisture and air were distributed in a very different way. German mythology refers to Niflheim, home of mists. The whole of the air was filled with water then. Human beings of post-Atlantean times were only able to live after the sinking of Atlantis. The rainbow could only develop when both rain and sunshine had become possible on earth.

We read of dirigible airships in records of Atlantis.²⁰⁸ What was the situation there?

The Atlanteans had developed their second body, the ether body with its vital energies, to a high level. The rational mind was only feeble at that time. Memory had to take its place. Thus Atlanteans would not do sums, now knowing the value of figures, but were able to judge quantities from memory. They knew what amount they would have if they added 3 items to 3. Earlier situations they were able to remember helped them to know this. Having fully developed their vital energies they knew how to make use of the vital energies in the whole natural world. They knew the germinative potential of grain seed, for instance, and how to draw it forth and use it. Just think of the power in a seed grain! Think of everything that may come of it. The yogis also know, in a way, how to lure the germinative power out of the seed. The stories of a mango seed being put in the soil and a shoot arising, then the tree, leaves, flowers and finally fruit is not fiction, it is a fact. Atlanteans who were able to use vital energies for a dirigible as well as for other things therefore need not be mere fable.

Is it possible to avoid having to go through devachan after death?

At a particular stage of development the ether body is so firmly put together that it will not dissolve after death. This happens when the astral body has imprinted much spirituality in the ether body. With the ether body able to continue, the pupil need not go into the devachan, which is the place where the new ether body is created.

Does the kind of food we eat really have such great significance for the development of occult powers?

Absolutely. Development is completely impossible if alcohol is taken. And it is strange, but there are deep reasons for this, that the issue of abstinence and temperance is coming alive so much again at this time.

But wine is surely only grape juice, and therefore fruit juice?

Juice obtained from grapes is good for development for as long as it is only fruit juice, though when it has fermented it has a detrimental effect. Look back once more in history. Wine began to be taken 600 years before Christ, when the custom was probably already at its height, for the feasts of Dionysus developed at which homage was paid to the god of wine. But just like everything else, so every fruit, too, has its time, and grapes will vanish from the earth again. Just think of the coming of the vine pest. Everything coming from a living animal serves us for food—milk, eggs—and so does every part of a plant that seeks to reach the light, the sun. Because of this, tree fruits are very good. Tubers growing in the soil, such as potatoes, and roots are not so good. In the past, people ate people, then they ate animals. They will gradually change to a pure vegetable diet and finally end with the minerals. Everything that precipitates should be avoided, salt, for instance. All this has to do with the development of occult powers and not with gaining knowledge of spiritual truths.

• 201. Copernicus, Nicolas (1473–1543). De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Nürnberg 1543.
• 202. Schleiden, Matthias Jakob (1804–1881), German botanist. Beiträge zur Phylogenesis, in Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologic und wissenschaftliche Medizin vol. 5, 1838.
• 203. See Rudolf Steiner's public lecture on the history of spiritualism in The History of Spiritism and the History of Hypnotism and Somnambulism (in GA 52, Berlin 30 May 1904. Tr. F. E. Dawson. London & New York: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. & Anthroposophic Press 1943; also lectures of 10 and 11 October 1915 in The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century (GA 254). Tr. D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973.
• 204. Chakravarti, Prof F. N. spoke for Hinduism at the World Religious Congress in Chicago and also for theosophy, being a theosophist himself.
• 205. Nothing further is known about these two guides. See Olcott HS Old Diary Leaves 1895.
• 206. See Poppelbaum H. Man and Animal, chapter on origins
• 207. Genesis 9: 13-17.
• 208. E.g. in W. Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis, preface by A. P. Sinnet

Of course today we can remember that it is a favorable karmic situation that we are together again on the day when the first act of consecration of man could be performed here two years ago. We have a rather strange order in the main points in the development of the spiritual life here, as it were. The act of consecration of man two years ago, the burning of the Goetheanum, the laying of the foundation stone of the Anthroposophical society a year later and now after the second year we have gathered together here in order to look at the Apocalypse in accordance with your needs.

As I mentioned at the, beginning, a study of the Apocalypse is very closely connected with what is contained in the act of consecration of man; and therefore every day that we spend on the Apocalypse is really a memorial festival for what we permitted to live amongst us two years ago in order to bring what wanted to reveal itself from the spiritual world into this life as the present, modern cultic ritual.

With respect to the coincidence of events, it will perhaps be appropriate today that we will have a point in the Apocalypse before us which is very difficult to understand, but which really leads into the whole heart of the Apocalypse and which is connected most closely with the mystery of the act of consecration of man, because it is objectively connected with the being of Christ. It is really only possible to speak about this point in connection with the Apocalypse. For the Apocalypse bears the fundamental Christian character on its forehead to such an extent that there is no doubt that we cannot get anything out of what is connected with this Apocalypse in a natural way which deviates from the Christian viewpoint. And you may be assured that what I will have to say about this point which we want to discuss today arises in a very striking way from the views of the Apocalypticer.

We look around us at the turning point of our era and we find ourselves in the fifth post Atlantean period since the beginning of the 15th century, and in this period we have the beginning of a renewed battle which Michael will have to fight in connection with everything which has to happen in the near future, and we look back from there to the fourth post Atlantean period which immediately preceded our present one.

We know that this fourth post Atlantean age began about the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the Mystery of Golgotha fell in this fourth post Atlantean age and that it can be placed approximately in the center of this age, if we take the slight displacements which always occur in world evolution into account. Thus we can make a schematic sketch of what is connected with our spiritual development as follows (drawing). So that we can say, the 5th post Atlantean age is here, and it was preceded by the fourth, third, second, first back to the Atlantean catastrophe, which as we know essentially transformed the shape of the earth's surface, and which gave a new face to our earth, as it were.

Now let's take a look at what this fourth Atlantean epoch is. It was preceded by what I have often called the Lemurian epoch in earth evolution, and then by what we can call the second and the first epochs in earth evolution. These first three epochs up to the Atlantean one are repetitions of the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of evolution, respectively, whereas the fourth, Atlantean epoch is something new. The first three are definitely repetitions; it's true that they are repetitions on a higher level, but they are repetitions nevertheless.

The fourth or Atlantean epoch is something new. What happened during the Atlantean epoch occurred while the earth had forms which were quite different from the later ones. The earth's crust wasn't nearly as solid in the middle of the Atlantean epoch as it is today. The long geological periods of time which were presumably necessary for these events are illusions. The earth solidified from a relatively fluidic condition during the Atlantean epoch. The human race was quite different during the Atlantean period. It didn't have the present solid skeleton yet in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. As far as their material makeup is concerned men were more or less similar to lower animals. This doesn't apply to their form, for their forms were magnificent, but the substances were soft and cartilaginous and similar to those in jelly fish. Thus we can say that all physical conditions on earth have changed since that time and that the radical transformations which were still possible on the physical plane in the middle of the Atlantean epoch no longer occur.

It was even possible for men to make rapid metamorphoses, since the materials in their physical bodies were soft; so that depending on their inner soul life they became larger or smaller with various shapes; for every emotion immediately became imprinted in the physical body. In the middle of the Atlantean epoch, if someone wanted to grab something that was a little distance away, his will worked into his gelatinous organs so that they became quite long; so the way that shorter and longer range physical events and processes occurred was different then than it is today. There was an image of the real spiritual events in all physical processes, transformations and metamorphoses. This is not the case today. When we look outside today we don't perceive the working of the spirit in the course of the seasons or in other events anymore. When these rapid transformations occurred in the ancient Atlantean period men did not doubt that this world contained divine, spiritual things. Although the Atlantean continent was still quite mobile, it was beginning to get a fairly constant shape. It was enclosed by a kind of woven, dense fluid, and yet one can't call it semi-fluidic. It consisted of a viscous material which could support soft bodies and soft, mobile plants which floated or glided in this substance and were not yet attached to the ground. So the physical conditions were quite different.

One can say that sea and land were not as distinct then as they were later, that is, one passed over into the other. The people who saw the conditions at that time could say that the gods were working harder in the bordering ocean, where what was being transformed became more manifest than in the solid, fluidic land. One saw the gods at work all around Atlantis; no one doubted that these gods were at work; one perceived the spiritual and psychical everywhere, even in a physical way. One saw psychical and spiritual things in the physical world.

The peculiar thing about the earlier, Greek part of the fourth post Atlantean epoch was that one could clearly see the gods working in everything which goes on in the air; this became more indistinct in the centuries just before the fifth post Atlantean period. In ancient Atlantis one saw the gods at work in fluidic solids, and in the fourth post Atlantean age one saw them at work in the aeriform fluids in cloud formations, in the formation of twilight conditions, etc.

We don't find any descriptions of these things that are like definitions, for people's consciousness wasn't as clear yet, but they were there, because I'd like to know how an open-minded person can understand those wonderful paintings of clouds up to the early Renaissance where something spiritual is born out of the clouds in any other way than that one feels that there is a divine, spiritual activity in the aery cloud beings or in the aery, watery beings. You see, at that time men were constituted in such a way that they didn't look at the physical part of cloud formation, but they felt that something was being revealed through the clouds. This is a very beautiful feeling but it is very difficult to reconstruct for modern consciousness. When someone from even as late as the 8th and 9th centuries looked at the morning sky and saw how the twilight or the glimmering cloud formations at twilight stood before his soul, he really felt that the aurora or red dawn was alive; and he had the same feeling at dusk. The same applied to other things.

So that we can say that people saw the spirit in a physical way in ancient Atlantis. After Atlantis came the post Atlantean epoch with its seven ages. A repetition of the physical happenings in Atlantis at a soul level really occurred in the fourth post Atlantean age. The mighty upheavals of which I spoke: 333, 666, which are soul shocks in the evolution of mankind, definitely correspond to physical upheavals in the Atlantean epoch. And the seers in the Græco-Roman period definitely felt that when they saw something like soul revelations in fluidic, aeriform things, there was something in their souls which was a repetition of earlier earth conditions that occurred in the physical world. Only a dim awareness of this was present, for all consciousness was dimmer at that time.

As I recently mentioned in Anthroposophical lectures, the teachers at the school of Chartres and in other schools showed that the soul experiences of this Græco-Latin age were a psychical repetition of more condensed physical experiences and events in the Atlantean epoch.

And now we are in the consciousness age. The direct soul experiences in aeriform fluids have disappeared. One could say that the fifth post Atlantean age began through a kind of a catastrophe, and that this was a preparation for the further development of the consciousness soul of humanity. We're still in the chaos of this development of the consciousness soul to some extent with respect to our outer civilization. But the dawn of the Michael age will bring perception into this chaos.

This perception will consist of something like memories or Fata-Morgana mental formations which will arise in men in an entirely spiritual way—no longer in a physical way as in the Atlantean epoch, or in a psychical way as in the Græco-Roman age, but in a completely spiritual way—and this will begin after the appearance of the etheric Christ. Human thoughts will have a visionary character and will be like inner mirages, but they will be completely conscious in the age of the consciousness soul. Just as one sees a mirage in the desert which is brought about by the warm air, so men's thoughts will be carried by warmth and they will help men to understand aeriform-fiery and aeriform-warm things.

We can say that man perceives divine things in solids and fluids during the Atlantean epoch (of course this is more in outer, physical matter), that in the fourth post Atlantean or Græco-Roman age man perceives spiritual things in wonderful aeriform, fluidic formations, and that now in the fifth post Atlantean age men's consciousness souls will become aware of aeriform, fiery things and aeriform, warm things which will appear more and more. This will permit something to arise before men in mighty pictures which the Greeks experienced in a soul way and the inhabitants of Atlantis experienced in a physical way.

Thus a time is approaching in human evolution when visions which have the clarity of thought will arise concerning past times on earth and thereby concerning the origin of man and everything which is connected with this. The appearance of the Darwinistic view which gave man a lowly origin on the basis of mere inferences precedes the inner perception of evolution, the wonderful Imaginations which will arise from the inner warmth which is connected with man's breathing process; they will arise like concrete, significant, colored visionary thoughts. Man will know what he was when he looks into a kind of a reflection of the Græco-Roman age and then behind this into what existed in Atlantis. This perception that is of considerable interest for us because it will begin soon is something where we look right into the Apocalypticer's heart, because it is so close to us. For this kind of perception which is almost upon us is what he indicates in a picture: a woman clothed with the sun, a dragon under her feet, giving birth to a baby boy.

And in fact the eyes of many human beings will be opened by this Imagination during the course of this century. Much understanding will radiate from this picture, and it is one which shines back into the Græco-Roman age where it was prepared at the soul level and brought into the shape in which it will appear in the near future, and where it took on a great variety of forms. There was Isis with the Horus child, and metamorphoses of this as the Christ-bearer with the Christ child, that lived in a wonderfully profound way precisely in the Græco-Roman age. They have been handed down through traditions.

In the near future men will look back at the way in which people saw such things in the clouds, that is, in aeriform-fluidic things during the fourth post Atlantean age. And they will also look back even further to what lived in physical, Atlantean events. It will be as if this picture of a sun-clad woman who gives birth to a little boy and who has a dragon under her feet was like the eyepiece of a spiritual telescope which points to something physical lying far back in the past which occurred between the earth and the planets and the sun sphere; earthly, physical things were connected much more closely with cosmic things at that time.

For you see, we know that when the ancient Saturn period was repeated, many of the events which were peculiar to ancient Saturn evolution occurred again during earth evolution, albeit in a condensed form. During the repetition of ancient Sun evolution in the second period, the sun separated from the earth with all the beings who belong to the sun, whereas it was still connected with the earth during the repetition of Saturn evolution. During the third, Lemurian period of earth evolution the moon separated also, so that the next earthly-reality is a trinity of earth, sun and moon. You will find a description of the way the planets were added to this in Occult Science. You can also find all the events which I described there which are connected with the return of human souls during the Atlantean period. These are earthly events which are seen from an earthly perspective.

Now let's add something else to this. Someone who grasps the world's secrets since the Mystery of Golgotha with initiation science will look upon the Christ as the sun being who was united with the sun before the Mystery of Golgotha. When the priests in the mysteries wanted to connect themselves with the Christ in pre-Christian times they looked up to the sun. Christ has become an earth spirit since the Mystery of Golgotha. We must look for Christ the sun spirit in earthly life and in earthly activities. Those who wanted to see him and commune with him before the Mystery of Golgotha had to raise themselves up to the sun.

However, this sun spirit which we must look upon as a male being when it came down to earth, is described in a brilliant way in the Apocalypticer s vision, through a vision that stands before us in an almost material form; similar events in earlier ages can also be described in this way, and I have often done so. It stands there as a splendid physical vision in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. After this point in time the wise men in the mysteries looked up to the sun, and they saw the Christ developing and becoming mature in the sun until he could go through the Mystery of Golgotha. However, when they looked back to this point in Atlantean evolution they saw a birth taking place outside in the cosmos in the sun.

For the priests who saw the Christ as a male being in the sun after his birth in the middle of the Atlantean period saw a female being in the sun before that. This is the important change that occurred in the middle of the Atlantean period. Before the middle of the Atlantean epoch one saw a cosmic woman in the sun's spiritual aura, the woman who was clothed with the sun. This woman who was clothed with the sun corresponded to what was happening in the heavens above the earth at that time, and as the Apocalypticer rightly describes it, she gives birth to a little boy, who is the same being that went through the Mystery, although it went through other forms beforehand. A kind of a birth which was really just a complicated metamorphosis took place at that time in the Atlantean period. One could see how the female sun gave birth to something that was male—to her son. Now what does this mean for the earth? Of course in the middle of the Atlantean period one felt much differently about something like the sun existence than one did later.

Today one looks upon the sun as if it were a collection of craters and burning masses; the present-day descriptions of this by physicists are really horrible. But at that time one saw something like what I just described: a real sun-woman with a dragon at her feet, giving birth to a little boy. The ones who saw something like this and understood it said: For the heavens this is the birth of Christ, and for us it is the birth of our ego.

Even though this ego only entered man's inner nature much later; since this point in the middle of Atlantis evolution occurred in such a way that although men were not as conscious of their ego in an elemental way as they are today, they became ever more conscious of it because the mysteries drew their attention to it. The sun enkindled the ego in man. And the sun's action continually enkindled the ego from outside through the birth which had happened along the lines of this Imagination, until the fourth post Atlantean age, when the ego entered into man. People felt this and they felt that man really belongs to the sun; this was a feeling which made a deep impression upon the human soul.

Now that we have become such delicate souls with respect to our inner experiences, we have no idea how stormy and wild soul experiences, were in earlier times. The fact that man's ego was given to him from the cosmos made him feel that his nature had changed completely. Before that he had mainly been dependent upon what was in his astral body. What was in his astrality worked into his soul and spirit, so that during this ancient time man had the idea: He's standing here (drawing), the sun is up there, the ego is not there yet, but the astral works down from the sun. Man has his astral body from the sun, the astral body which is not controlled by the ego and which has somewhat refined emotions but nevertheless animalized ones in it. The man who had become an ego and who had previously had nothing but an astral body bubbling through him had become an entirely different human being. However, all of this came from the sun.

Let's place the picture of the sun as it was at the beginning of the Atlantean period before us in a somewhat schematic way. It was permeated by a lively luster, which bubbled through the lower half of the sun being. Something was born out of this above, and one felt that there was an indistinct face here. Man felt that the emotions that seethed in his own astral body and everything that gave him his spiritual and soul nature originated in the lower part of the sun being. In the next stage men saw the sun like this (drawing). Things develop more clearly here, the face becomes more distinct, the figure begins to look something like a woman, who is to bring man control through the ego. The space down here where the animal elements are wriggling becomes ever smaller. Finally, the time comes when the woman is present in the sun and gives birth to a little boy and now has what was previously further up here under her feet, where the ego-bearing woman in the picture on the sun demonstrates how one controls the dragon—the astral world of the previous epoch—which is now under her feet. The battle of Michael and the dragon began in the sun at that time, and in fact this brought it about—one saw this as a physical phenomenon—that everything which was in the sun slowly moved towards the earth and became an ingredient of the earth. It became an earth content which thereby controlled man in his sub-consciousness, whereas the ego entered ever more into his consciousness.

These cosmic, meteorological things that took place during the Atlantean epoch had their counter image in the Græco-Roman age when Isis with the Horus child became the Virgin with her Jesus boy. This will appear in a vision to those who look back in the next age which is almost upon us.

Man will see the sun-clad woman in this picture, who has the dragon under her feet that was thrown down to the earth by Michael, so that it cannot be found in the heavens anymore. This Imagination will appear in the age which will be followed by the one where the dragon is turned loose and where what I described to you yesterday will begin. It's a fact that deepened and extensive perception of past times on earth, man's origins and of the Christ being will soon arise in this Michael age. For Michael will concern himself with what the Apocalypticer points to and which will begin again in the Michaelic age, he will concern himself again with that draconic beast in human nature and in human evolution which he threw down.

Let's imagine what happens here in a vivid way. One will look back into the Atlantean epoch—the Apocalypticer does it in advance: he has the vision of the sun-clad woman who gives birth to the little Jesus boy and who has the dragon at her feet—, but this becomes fainter and fainter the closer we get to the end of Atlantean evolution. New continents rise out of the ocean at the end of Atlantean evolution the continents which now contain the forces through which the post Atlantean epoch entered into its various aberrations. The beast with the seven heads rises up from the sea. Sevenfold land rises up from the sea and pulls men down through the spiritual elements which evaporate from the earth into their emotions.

The Atlantean catastrophe appears to the Apocalypticer in the form of this seven headed beast which rises from the sea, and it will appear in the future when what the Apocalypticer is pointing to will begin again in the Michaelic age. The Apocalypticer is speaking of very real events which concern us a great deal, in connection with the spiritual life of humanity. And the content of this Imagination is connected with the being of Christ.

An age will soon come when men's souls will again see how the spirit lives in earthly things and therefore the spiritual processes in transubstantiation will also be visible to them. Then the earthly reflection of what has happened in heavenly regions will appear in transubstantiation so that what has occurred since the middle of the Atlantean epoch is a small section of everything which is connected with the being of Christ. One will understand how the kind of metamorphosis which takes place in transubstantiation is possible when one will see that the transubstantiation in what is physical and chemical at the moment—which is only a passing episode—is connected with something that is quite different than things which are apparently material.

Thus we can deepen our remembrance of the first act of consecration of man two years ago, this remembrance of the Christ who shone down from the heavens and really descended from the heavens during the Atlantean epoch, who appeared in the clouds in the Græco-Roman age and walked on earth, and who was understood by men in their visions, who is now walking on earth in an etheric form in our age, and is understood by men through visions and Imaginations. The Christ is present in transubstantiation and will be present for human beings more and more. The ways in which the Christ will gradually live in events during earth evolution are connected with the events that I described today. Let's take this in as a kind of festive idea today in memory of the first act of consecration of man which was celebrated in the Goetheanum two years ago.

In last week's lecture we became familiar with every day expressions of man's inner life, namely laughing and weeping, and today we will explore the conditions in both our immediate and more distant surroundings upon which this inner being of man, including man's whole evolution, in a certain way depend. As wide as possible a study of man is what we have been working at in these group lectures this winter, and we will go on studying man from as many aspects as possible.

If you consider what you know of earth conditions, then even if you look at these relatively superficially you would realise immediately that man takes on a different form in different regions of the earth. External bodily characteristics vary according to the different zones of the earth. You will remember that there are ‘races’, the black, red, yellow and white race, and that these races were originally connected with certain regions of the earth. You will also find this corroborated by history, either in what you learnt at school from the observation of purely physical, material conditions, or what we have learnt through anthroposophical science itself. Looking back into the ancient past, we see how the human soul and actually the human body too, developed in the different epochs of earth evolution. In the sphere of spiritual science we have looked back into ancient India, Persia, Egypt, and so on. And we saw how the various capacities that mankind has today, developed gradually in the course of ages. All this gives you an idea of how external conditions are connected with the unfolding of man's inner being. Now if even present-day earth conditions bring about such differences among men, what tremendous human differences must have come about since the very beginnings of our earth evolution, after it has passed through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. We have described various details of this. What we are going to describe today, however, shall be considered from another point of view. For we shall really get to know human conditions if we continually consider them from different points of view.

At the beginning of earth evolution, earth, sun and moon were, as you know, still one body. The conditions within our whole evolution must have been entirely different then. Man, evolving in earthly evolution, would have been very different whilst the earth was still one with the sun; and how greatly he had to change as first of all the sun and then the moon separated from the earth! Now we know that the epoch after the sun and the moon had separated from the earth is also the so-called Lemurian evolution, in which man had only just begun to acquire a form that is anything like our present-day one. We have often described it by saying that this was actually the time when man descended from higher regions on to the earth. Although man was already in a physical body at the time when the sun was still joined with the earth, it was not like today's body. At that time he had the kind of physical body like you can imagine if you picture man today not standing with his feet on the earth, but raising himself into the air, as though he had no bony elements within him, but still belonged to the regions of air and water, whereby we must imagine the water dissolved in the air. He would have been like a transparent being on the periphery of the earth. A present-day eye would not be able to distinguish this human being from his environment, just as a present-day eye cannot distinguish certain sea creatures from their surroundings, because they look so similar. You can imagine such a being wafting through the air. Not until after the separation of the sun and the moon did man become like we know him today. What were the conditions necessary for man to develop into what he is today? It was essential that the sun's force should not work from inside but from outside on to the earth. That was the purpose of the separation of both sun and moon, that these two cosmic bodies should send their forces, like the sun sends its light, from outside on to the earth. Man could only acquire his present-day form because the sun shone on him not from below, from the centre of the planet, but from the side. Just imagine, if you care to assume such a hypothesis, that the moon were to fall back on to the earth, and the sun to reunite with it; if he wanted to survive in those conditions man would have to re-clothe himself with a body as airy as it was before, and he would have to be able to waft through the environment he is familiar with today. Thus man owes his present existence to the fact that the sun and moon shine on him from outside. We will disregard all the other forces today.

Now the sun and moon work in various ways from outside. The way the sun works in the region of the North Pole is very different from the way it works at the Equator. We get the impression of tremendous contrasts that acquired a meaning the moment the sun began to shine on to the earth from outside. You know, of course, that the nearer we get to the North Pole the greater are the differences between winter and summer. And right at the North Pole half the year is day and half the year night. When you think of these differences, then what spiritual science has to say about these things will make sense. It tells us that at the North Pole itself earth conditions in Lemurian times were the closest to those conditions existing on the earth when the sun and moon were still united with it. Today, of course, these conditions are quite different. But even today it is still to a certain extent true that at the North Pole the strongest influence is from the earth's centre to its surface, and the influence of the sun and the moon are at their least. What has made itself felt since Lemurian times, in the great increase of forces raying in from outside, has had the least influence of all at the North Pole, so the effect of the centre of the earth on its surface and everything living upon it is here at its greatest. On the other hand the influence of the sun and the moon is strongest around the Equator, and this was already so in Lemurian times. In the Kashic Record we can confirm that earth conditions changed to something completely new with the separation of sun and moon. This, however, led to a quite definite consequence. Something arose which was of fundamental importance for the whole of earth evolution. For the reasons we have given it was in the area of the North Pole least possible for man to descend, as it were, and to incarnate in a physical human form in such a way that he could come to best expression within it. Therefore in ancient Lemurian times it was just at the North Pole that those beings congregated who, if I may express it this way, laid no claim as yet to coming right down on to the earth, but who preferred to remain above in the regions where the air was still interlaced with vapour. Thus there was at the North Pole in Lemurian times a kind of spiritual species that did not concern itself very much with the physical bodies that swarmed about on the earth below. From a spiritual point of view, seen by a present-day eye, this species consisted of transparent forms that were therefore not actually visible, and as such they were highly developed, but regarding their physical form they showed a lower form of humanity. They lived in an etheric body and were beings of a more ethereal nature, having only a loose connection with the primitive bodies developing on the earth below that still had no density to speak of. These bodies were too dependent on the earth, and these spiritually more advanced beings only used them as sheaths to the very smallest extent. If, therefore, a man of the present, with his powers of perception, had been able to visit the North Pole in Lemurian times, he would have spoken about its population much in this way: What peculiar people!

They are really very little developed with regard to their physical bodies, but this must point to something special, for as a people they are skilful and intelligent; it is as though they were being directed by strings from above! And so indeed it was, for the real human being did not descend on to the earth's surface. That is why the people living around the North Pole at that time were in the highest degree ethereal beings with highly developed etheric bodies but underdeveloped physical bodies; beings that as it were could grasp all the wisdom of the world with their etheric bodies, as though they had great clairvoyant faculties, and who looked out to the starry Heavens with an understanding of the beings who were weaving the life of world spaces. But you could almost say that their physical bodies were sleepy. Yet because they were led as though by strings from above, the deeds they performed were perfectly intelligent.

In the equatorial regions it was different. The influence of the sun and the moon was becoming more and more active from outside. The air was interlaced and warmed through by the rays of the sun. All the phenomena taking place in the region of the air became dependent on the sun and the moon. And the result of this was that just in ancient Lemurian times the people of these regions descended deepest into their physical bodies, and their etheric bodies interpenetrated their physical bodies most deeply. A present-day man with eyes of the senses would assume these beings to be the most highly developed physical human beings, whilst he would reckon the northern peoples to be underdeveloped. And there was a further difference that is of special importance.

Where the sun had least influence men developed in such a way that over large areas they all looked more or less similar to one another. For each of these beings that did not descend but was still ethereal belonged to a number of forms below. Up in the North they were group souls, whilst the souls around the Equator were more individual souls, and each human being was much more inside his own body. Thus the inhabitants of those regions that we find at the North Pole today had, in Lemurian times, the characteristics of group soul beings to the greatest imaginable degree. A great number of people looked up to their group soul. And if we look at these group souls as souls we will see that they were much more highly developed than the souls which, in Lemurian times, descended into physical bodies in the equatorial regions. So we can say that the North Pole was populated by people that actually lived in the realms of air in a kind of paradise, and who had not yet descended as far as the earth. What we thus understand to be a necessary consequence of the foregoing you can now compare with what you encounter here and there in anthroposophical literature, namely that those higher beings who were once the teachers of mankind descended from the cold North! We have actually found them, the group souls around the North Pole. If they wanted to become teachers of those people who were inferior souls and who entered more into physical bodies, then they had to descend further, too, and oppose the capacity of the clairvoyance of Lemurian times in their etheric body, or they had to sacrifice themselves and take on the physical human form of the Lemurian people.

If we had taken a journey in Lemurian times from the Equator to the North Pole, we should have found a spiritualising of the earth population. In those times we can distinguish as it were a twofold population: one kind that had still remained spiritual, and whose earthly bodies appeared really to be only an addition to their spiritual being, and another kind that had already descended into matter, into the physical. What would have happened if no change had occurred with earth evolution? The best souls of the polar regions would not have been able to descend at all into physical bodies. And on the other hand the equatorial population would have more or less died out. Having descended too soon into a physical body, they fell into those wicked and immoral practices that led to the downfall of Lemuria. And this resulted in the best section of the population migrating to those regions lying between the Equator and the northern lands. For in Lemurian times we find the members of mankind with the greatest chance of survival living in the countries between the Equator and the North Pole. The human bodies that could become bearers of the most advanced human souls developed best in those regions of ancient Atlantis known today as the temperate zones.

Now all the various stages of evolution leave so-called stragglers behind and there are also stragglers left from these ancient times. What we call the Lemurian population of the earth, that remarkable people of the North with strongly developed etheric bodies and less developed physical bodies, and that other equatorial population with strongly developed physical bodies and less developed etheric bodies, of these people nothing remains, they became extinct. For these bodies were of such a nature that we cannot even find remains; the substance was so soft that there can be no question of there being any remains. Of paramount importance in their Atlantean descendants was that the germ of the ego, the consciousness of Self, the foundations of which were already basically there from ancient Lemurian times on, went through a progressive development on the earth. If mankind had not to a large extent migrated to Atlantis, the active development of the ego would not have come about. For the Lemurian population would have gradually died out, having to succumb to passions, and the best souls of the North would not have descended to earth at all, for they would not have been able to find suitable bodies. The underdeveloped bodies of earlier times would not have provided them with the possibility of developing a strong consciousness of self within the bodily nature. Through the fact that the better sections of the Lemurian population migrated to Atlantis, the human body evolved its form to the extent that it could become the bearer of self-consciousness in a harmonious way. And it was only in the course of time that the human body acquired this form in the regions corresponding to the present temperate zones. For in this period of evolution the human body was still evolving. In Atlantean times the human body was not yet confined to rigid forms, and the highly developed human beings, those of great spiritual significance, were physically small in those days, whereas a person who was not very significant spiritually had in Atlantean times a gigantically developed physical body. And if you had met such a giant in those days, you could have concluded: He is not on a very high level spiritually, for he has rushed into his body with his whole being! Everything that refers to ‘giants’ in legends is absolutely based on a knowledge of the truth. If, therefore, a real memory of these times is preserved in the Germanic myths, we feel it to be absolutely correct, from the spiritual scientific point of view, that the giants are stupid and the dwarfs very clever. This is entirely based on what could be said of the Atlantean population: Where the people are small we find great intelligence, and a race of large men are all stupid! Where human intelligence ran to flesh there was not much mind left. So that physical size expressed the inability to retain the spiritual. In those days the body was still to a certain extent perfectly capable of transformation. Just at the time when Atlantis began to sink there was a great contrast between men who were good as to their qualities of soul, and were a race of little men, and the giant forms who were wicked and in whom everything had turned to flesh. You might even find echoes of these facts in the Bible, if you cared to look for them.

So we see that in Atlantean times the human body could still form itself according to spiritual characteristics. Therefore it could also take on the form which enabled it to mould all the organs, heart, brain, and so on, in such a way that they could become the expression of an actual ego being, a being with self-consciousness. These capacities and characteristics, however, developed on innumerable different levels. There were people whose inner nature was correctly balanced and who were normal, for they had not developed egoism to too great an extent, nor had they developed their ego-feeling solely on a lower level. With them, devotion to the outer world and ego-feeling maintained a balance. Such people were scattered about everywhere. And these were the men that the Atlantean initiates could do most with. On the other hand there were other men who had developed a tremendously strong ego-feeling, much too soon, of course; for human beings had not yet reached the point when they could make of their bodies an instrument for a strongly developed ego-feeling. This made the body hardened in egoism as it were, and it became impossible for it to develop beyond a certain point. There were other people again who had not reached anything like a normal ego-feeling because they were more susceptible to influences from the outer world than they should have been; peoples who had completely surrendered themselves to the outer world. Thus it was the normal human beings that were the best material for the initiates to use for the evolution of the future, and they were also the ones that the great sun initiate, Manu, gathered around him as being most capable of evolving. Those peoples whose ego impulse was developed too strongly, so that it permeated their whole being and made it a manifestation of egohood, these people gradually wandered to the West and became the nation the last survivors of which appeared as the Red Indians of America. Those people whose ego-feeling was too little developed migrated to the East, and the survivors of these people became the subsequent Negro population of Africa. If you look at those things in a really spiritual scientific way you will see evidence of them right into the physical characteristics. If a man brings his whole inner being to expression in his physiognomy and on the surface of his body, then it permeates his external being with the colour of his inner nature as it were. Now the colour of egohood is red or copper or a yellowish brown. And an overpowering feeling of ego arising from offended self-respect can even nowadays turn a man as it were yellow with rage. They are absolutely connected, these two phenomena: the red colour of those peoples that migrated to the West and the yellow colour of the man whose ‘blood boils’ as we say, and whose inner nature is showing itself right into his skin. Those people, however, who had developed their ego being too little, and who were too exposed to the influences of the sun, were like plants: they deposited too many carbonic constituents beneath their skin and became black. This is why the Negroes are black. Thus both east of Atlantis in the black population and west of Atlantis in the red population we find survivors of the kind of people who had not developed their ego-feeling in a normal way. The human beings who had developed normally lent themselves best to progress. Therefore they were the ones chosen to infiltrate the various other regions from the place we know of in Asia.

Now between the little group of people Manu gathered round him and the extreme cases there were obviously innumerable intermediary stages of development. These were also turned to account, of course. To some extent these intermediary levels were extraordinarily suitable for the further evolution of earth civilisation. Thus for example, in the migration from West to East a people remained behind in parts of Europe who had developed their ego-feeling to a marked degree, but who were at the same time not very open to influences from the environment. Think what a peculiar mixture was bound to result in Europe. Those people who migrated to the East and became the black race were very susceptible to external influences, especially that of the sun, just because they had so little ego-feeling. But other peoples migrated into these parts, or at least in this direction, who had a strong ego-feeling. These were peoples who had preferred as it were going East to going West, and they are a milder red than they would have been had they gone West. They gave rise to the race of people who had a strong ego-feeling which nevertheless kept a balance between this and their devotion to the outer world. Those are the peoples of Europe of whom we were able to say in the last public lecture that their strong feeling of personality was from the beginning their essential feature.

Thus we see how man's outer surroundings work on his inner situation, and how the earth, through the different positions in which the areas of its surface are exposed to the sunlight, gave rise to innumerable levels of soul development. All according to the direction in which the souls looked, they found a different possibility for developing themselves in a physical body. It is very important that we realise the connection between the sun's influence on the earth and man's evolution. If some day you follow up these matters with me as far as the details of later times you will see how much becomes comprehensible through the fact that all these possible shades of colouring arose. Thus for example there was that particular part of the population that stayed in Europe whose characteristics were as I have described, and they led an independent existence up till much later times. They did not concern themselves about other people; but those that migrated into the regions already colonised by peoples with various shades of dark skin, and mixed with them, acquired every possible shade of skin colour. Look at the colours to be found in Asia, from the Negroes to the yellow races. Hence you have bodies that are sheaths for every possible level of soul, from the completely passive Negro soul entirely given up to the outer world of physical existence, to the other levels of passive souls in every possible part of Asia.

Various characteristics of the evolution of the Asiatic and African peoples will now be comprehensible to you: they present various combinations of surrender to the environment and the external manifestation of ego-feeling. So fundamentally we have two groups of people representing combinations: those on European soil, forming the root stock of the white population, who had predominantly developed the feeling of personality, but who did not migrate to where the feeling of personality permeated the whole body, but to where the ego-feeling became more inward. Therefore in western Asia and partly in North Africa and the countries of Europe, too, in earlier times, you find a people with a strong inner ego-feeling, but who on the whole were not given to losing themselves in the outer world; their inner character was strong and firm, but it did not set its imprint on the bodily nature. On the other hand there are those peoples in Asia with passive, self-effacing natures in whom just this passivity expresses itself in the highest degree. This makes the people dreamy, and the etheric body penetrates very deeply into the physical body. That is the fundamental difference between the European and the Asiatic peoples.

Manu, with his group of normal men, was wedged in between them. He had to bring the right form of culture to each different shade of the population, and he had to colour this wisdom and teaching to suit the external conditions of the people. Thus we see that the peoples of Asia were given instruction of the kind to satisfy them in their passivity and self-effacement. The Afro-Asiatic peoples do not emphasise the ego. The Negro would to some extent not lay stress on the ego at all. When these people looked up to the divine, they said: I do not find my innermost being within me, I find it in Brahma by flowing out of myself and surrendering myself to the universe!

A teaching such as this would not have been understood in Europe. Europe was situated much too near the North Pole for that, and the countries have kept a certain similarity right down the ages. Let us remind ourselves that it was at the North Pole that we previously found the peoples that did not descend right into physical bodies but whose physical bodies were actually to a certain extent stunted. In fact the European peoples had not as yet quite descended into their physical bodies. They turned their feeling of personality inward. And we would find this more and more the further back we went. Just think how this feeling of personality has been preserved right into later times, when people perhaps no longer saw any reason for it. Someone who belonged to the East would have said: I unite myself with the one, all-embracing Brahma! Thou unitest thyself with Brahma! The other man unites himself with Brahma, they all unite themselves with the one Brahma! With whom did the European unite himself, if he had to acknowledge this as an acceptable idea? He united himself with the one valkyrie, with the one higher soul. And the valkyrie, one might say, was there for each one at the moment of death. It was all an individual, personal matter. And it was only at the border of these two regions that such a thing as the Moses-Christ religion could arise. It could only come right in the middle between East and West. And whilst it could not take root over in the East where the idea of God was that of a unity, but at a previous stage, it could assert itself as the idea of a personal God, which Jehovah is and which Christ is, among those people who already bore the feeling of personality within themselves. Therefore it spread to the West, and we see it meeting with understanding, when envisaged as the idea of a God people could think of as a person. That is why we see it developing in this way almost as a necessity just in this particular belt. The feeling of personality was there, but it was still inward, still spiritual, just as with the ancient Lemurians everything was still spiritual, and the bodily nature was only developed to a small degree. The bodily nature was certainly developed here, but the personal element, which man prized so highly, was inward, and man also wanted to conquer what was external by means of the inner being. Thus it was here that they best understood a God who had the greatest wealth of inner nature permeating his outer nature, namely the Christ. In Europe everything was prepared for the Christ. And because these were regions in which in earlier times men had not descended entirely on to the earthly scene, and therefore some kind of last remnants of spiritual perception existed, there was still something remaining of the vision of spiritual beings, of the old European clairvoyance.

This old European clairvoyance had also led to there being an ancient image of God throughout Europe and also as far as Asia, which present-day scholars, perhaps, will only get to know of if they discover it in the myths of certain isolated districts of Siberia. A remarkable description emerged there long before Christian times, when nothing was known as yet of what was going on in the South, namely what is described in the Old Testament, the Greco-Roman evolution and that of the East. A remarkable idea emerged there which possibly led to the name that has now more or less died out, the ‘Ongod’; and Ongod is a name that is still echoed as it were in the idea of the ‘One God’. The Ongod would be something like the divine we perceive in all spiritual beings. So according to this way of thinking the idea of a personal God was something that was absolutely familiar to the people that lived in this particular belt of the earth. Therefore we can understand that it was just here that this particular outlook bore its chief fruit. For this belt of the earth and its inhabitants had so to speak solved the mystery of the ego. Strictly speaking all evolution since Atlantean times consists either of peoples who maintained the ego-feeling in just the right proportion, or of peoples who developed the ego too much or too little. Nothing special could come of the peoples who had developed the ego in too great or too little a degree. The peoples we have just described as the peoples of the Near East, and also the peoples of certain parts of Africa and especially of Europe, had developed the ego in a unique way.

These were the basic conditions necessary for the coming civilisation that has developed roughly since the beginning of our era. The ego had to reach a certain point of development, as it were, but not overdo it in either direction. And it is our task today to understand this in the right way. For all spiritual science has in a certain respect to appeal to what we call the development of a higher ego from out of the lower. When we look back over the ages we can learn from the fact that certain sections of the earth's inhabitant's did not find it possible to keep pace with earth evolution in the development of their ego, how many mistakes can be made in regard to the development of the higher ego out of the lower. In ancient Atlantis, for instance, there were peoples who dropped out of the earth population so to speak, and they became Red Indians. What would they have said if they had been able to put the facts of their development into words? They would have said: Above all I want to develop my inner being, which I find to be the highest thing within men when I look within myself. And they developed this ego so strongly that it affected even the colour of their skin, and that is how they became red. Their development led them into decadence. Among the people of Atlantis in whom everything still went directly into the body, these were the ones who cultivated what we might call inner brooding upon the ego, and they were so to say convinced that they could find within themselves everything that had to be developed. At the other extreme were those people who said: Oh, the ego is of no significance. The ego must lose itself entirely, it must dissolve altogether, and only listen to what the outside world says! They did not really say this, because they did not reflect in this manner. But those are the peoples who denied their ego to such an extent that they went black, because the external forces coming from the sun to the earth made them so. Only those peoples that were capable of holding the balance with regard to their ego could develop into the future.

Now let us look at our present earth population. There are still people today who say: Oh, the anthroposophists talk of a spiritual world which they seek within themselves. We, however, look back to our good old religious traditions that have been handed down to us externally. We rely on what comes to us from outside and are not very concerned about a higher world! Of course everything is more spiritual today than it was in Atlantis. Nowadays you no longer go black if you rely merely on traditions, and say: Those to whom we have entrusted the welfare of our souls will take care of us, those who do the job, and whose business it is to see that our souls reach Heaven! Nowadays this no longer makes you black. But we do not wish to deny everything, for in parts of Europe people still say today that if you think in this way you will go ‘black’! Everything happens to be more spiritual today! That then is the one type. The others are those who, without taking the trouble to go into all the details of spiritual science—investigations in the Kashic Record, the nature of reincarnation and karma, the principles of man's being, and so on—which require an effort to be understood, are so easy-going that they say: What do I want all that for? I look within myself, that is my higher ego, the divine man within me is there! Such a way of thinking often arises, even in theosophical circles. These people do not want to learn anything, or really develop themselves and be prepared to wait until the ego has taken hold of the various parts of their nature, but run around waiting for the divine man to speak out of them, talking incessantly about the higher ego. Indeed, there are even certain books that tell you: You do not need to learn at all! Just let the God within you speak! Today, when everything is more spiritual, this no longer makes people red. But they succumb to the same fate as did the peoples that were always boasting of their ego.

What we need is an ego that keeps itself mobile, neither losing itself in external physical observation or in external physical experience, nor remaining stationary at one point, but really advancing in spiritual development. That is why the great masters of wisdom and of harmony of the perceptions have not been telling us all the time in the theosophical movement that we should let the divine man within us speak; on the contrary they have given us quite specific impulses for finding the wisdom of the world in all its different aspects. And we are not pupils of the great masters by only wanting to let the God within us speak, or by imagining that each individual carries his own master within himself, but by wanting to get to know the structure of the world in all its aspects. Anthroposophical development is a striving to know all the subtle aspects of cosmic happenings. We attain our higher ego by evolving upwards from stage to stage. Our ego is there outside, manifest in the wonders of the world. For we are born out of the world and want to live our way back into it.

Thus we see that conditions which a man can fall into today are only so to speak modern, more spiritual versions of what we met with in Atlantean times. Even then men came under these three categories: There were those who really wanted to develop their egos, and who were always taking in new things, and by so doing they really became the bearers of post-Atlantean civilisation. Then there were those who only wanted to let the divine speak in them, and their egos made them red. And the third group turned their minds exclusively outwards, and these people became black.

We must learn the right lesson from these phenomena of earth evolution, then in the anthroposophical movement we shall really find the right impulse. What happens has always in a certain way already happened, but it happens again in ever new forms. The anthroposophical movement is something so great and significant because it is carrying further in the various regions of the earth something that developed visibly in Atlantis, but now is more invisible. Thus man is hastening forward from a civilisation of the visible towards a cultural epoch of the invisible and ever more invisible.

In the preceding lecture it has been shown to what extent the external world is an illusion, concealing the spiritual world behind it. The consciousness of the seer penetrating through this illusion represents one path to the spiritual world. It has, however, also been shown that everything in the inner life of the soul, thinking, feeling, sensations, as also the more complicated phenomena of conscience, and so on, form a kind of veil concealing a spiritual world. And the consciousness of the seer penetrating these veils represents the other path into the spiritual world. The existence of these two different paths has been known at all times to men who sought for initiation. Hence we find that a distinction was made by ancient peoples between upper and lower gods. In the Mysteries of all epochs it was taught that at a certain stage of initiation man enters the world of the upper and of the lower gods, but a great distinction was made between them. Man has no influence upon the way in which the outer world confronts him in the many coloured tapestry of colour impressions, warmth impressions etc., or in the phenomena of the elements of fire, air, water and earth. The sun rises in the morning; it sheds its rays of light over the earth, and according to the different conditions set up the external world of the senses appears; when man penetrates through these outer phenomena, he reaches the spiritual world.

Man is not in a position to destroy this world of the senses through his own resources, because he cannot materially affect the outer phenomena surrounding him; the sense world is placed before him by the spiritual beings of whom it is an expression and manifestation; through his own power he cannot impair it. At initiation he is able to penetrate the veil of the sense world, but he must leave it just as the spiritual beings have shaped and fashioned it.

The relation of a man to his own inner life is different. His perceptions, feelings, will, his thinking and the development of his conscience depend upon the extent to which he has worked upon the evolution of his soul life. Man cannot evoke a pure or an impure red or green colour from the dawn or from a plant: but the corruption of his soul life may well give rise to grotesque feelings and bad moral judgements; he can submit in a greater or lesser degree to the dictation of his conscience; in his fancies he can devote himself to beauty or to ugliness, to true or to false thought images. Through his own conduct a man modifies or changes the veil spread over the spiritual world by the inner life of the soul. And because what we see behind the veil of our own soul-life depends upon whether this veil itself is pure or corrupt, it is easy to understand that in cases where the inner life is corrupt or but slightly developed when the ascent into the spiritual worlds, or descent to the realm of lower spiritual beings takes place, grotesque images in the form of false, nonsensical abnormal concepts and forces, may be called into being. For this reason it came about that in every age a distinction was made between the ascent to the upper gods and the descent to the lower gods, and that this descent was regarded as more essentially dangerous than the ascent to the upper gods, and on this latter path, through the veils of the inner life to the spiritual worlds, very high demands were made of the pupil of the Mysteries and of Occult Science.

Mention had to be made of this, because these two paths to the spiritual world have played a great role in human evolution and because the East and the West and the relation between the ‘Children of Lucifer’ and the ‘Brothers of Christ’ can only be rightly understood if their existence is taken into account. In the outer world, which to the ordinary human eye is apt to appear a motley web of many and varied facts and phenomena, there is nothing which is not guided by wisdom, nothing in which spiritual beings, spiritual forces and facts do not come into play; and we understand the matter aright only when we have realised that the spiritual events have been brought together under the direction of those powers which have been described from many different aspects. To understand why a certain form of wisdom has flourished in the East and why the future of the Christian impulse depends upon the development of powers residing in the West, we must consider the origin and historical trend of the two worlds (East and West).

We know that the spiritual life of the present had its origin in old Atlantis. That an ancient spiritual life developed upon a land in the West lying between modern Europe and America, and that such Asiatic, African and American civilisations as exist are the last remnants of those of ancient Atlantis. Atlantis is the Father and Motherland of all the cultured life of today. Before the mighty catastrophe which changed the face of the globe into its present configuration, there were to be found in old Atlantis species of men very different from those of the present time, men guided by high initiates and leaders. A civilisation developed there essentially under the influence of an ancient clairvoyance, and men possessed a natural and instinctive faculty for penetrating through the outer veils of the sense world to the higher spiritual world as well as through their own soul life to the lower gods. Just as it is natural to men of the present day to see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and so on, it was natural for men of that time not only to see colours and hear in the outer world, but to be aware of spiritual beings as realities behind these colours and tones. In the same way it was natural for men at that time not only to hear the voice of conscience but also to perceive those spiritual beings called Erinyes by the Greeks. The old Atlanteans were intimately acquainted with a spiritual world. The purpose of human evolution implies that men are gradually to rise up out of this old instinctive but spiritually perceptive consciousness and push forward to the consciousness proper to our modern time. It was necessary for men to go through this stage of life on the physical plane. It was not possible to guide the whole evolution of mankind from the spiritual world in such a simple way that one stream of humanity should pass from old Atlantis over the regions of Europe and Africa into Asia, and that everything should develop, as it were, along straight lines. Evolution is never a simple, straight line of development from a single germ; another factor has to come in, and a very simple analogy will show that this is the case. Consider a plant. The seed is put into the earth and out of it develop the elementary organs of the plant, the leaves, and later, the calyx, stamen, pistils and so on. Now if development is to continue in plant life, as we know it, it is essential that something else should happen. The formation of the fruit from the blossom depends upon fecundation the fertilising substances of one plant must pass over to another, for the fruit could not develop simply out of the blossom. A stream of influences from outside has to be introduced in order that development may progress. What may be perceived in the plant is a picture of universal life and is also an indication of the laws of spiritual life. It is quite false to believe that in spiritual life a stream of culture arises here or there and continually produces new offshoots from itself. This may happen for a time, but it would no more suffice to bring about what is to come to pass, than would the blossom, without fertilisation, be able to produce the fruit. At a certain definite point of cultural evolution, a side influence must come in, a spiritual fertilisation of human development. Just as in plant life the male and female elements develop independently, so in human evolution from the time of Atlantis there had to be formed not one stream but two, passing from old Atlantis towards the East. It was necessary that these streams of civilisation should develop separately for a while, and then meet again to fertilise each other at a definite period. We can follow these two streams of human evolution if we examine the records of spiritual seer-ship. One stream of evolution is formed by the transmigration of certain peoples from old Atlantis to more northerly regions, touching territories which now include England, the north of France, and thence extend to the present Scandinavia, Russia and into Asia as far as India. In this movement were to be found peoples of various kinds, forming the vehicle of a definite spiritual life. A second stream went a different way, in a more southerly direction, through southern Spain and Africa to Egypt and thence to Arabia. Each of these two streams of civilisation goes its own way until they meet to fructify each other at a later point of time.

Now wherein consists the difference between these two streams of culture? Men belonging to the northern stream were more adapted for the use of the outer senses of external perception their tendency was to look outwards to the veil of the surrounding world. There were initiates among these northern men who showed them the way to the spiritual worlds where the upper gods were to be found—gods who are reached by penetrating through the veils of the outer sense world. To this category belong the beings reverenced as the Northern Germanic gods. Odin, Thor, etc., are the names of divine beings to be found behind the outer veil of the sense world. Men belonging to the southern stream were differently constituted. These peoples had a greater tendency to delve into their soul life, into their inner nature. Let us say—and do not take the word amiss—the northern peoples had a greater gift for observing the world, the southern peoples for brooding over their own soul life, seeking the spiritual world through this inner veil. Hence it is not a matter for wonder that the gods of the descendants of the southern stream belonged to the Nether World and were rulers of the soul life. Consider the Egyptian Osiris. Osiris is the divinity found by man on Passing through the gate of death; Osiris is the god who cannot live in the external sense world. He lived there in ancient times only, and as the new era approached he was overcome by the powers of the sense world, by the evil Set; and since then he has lived in the world entered after death, accessible only by plunging into the immortal, permanent human principle which passes from incarnation to incarnation. This was why Osiris was felt to be most intimately bound up with the inner life of man.

Here we have the fundamental difference between the northern and the southern peoples. There was, however, one race who in the first period of the post Atlantean epoch combined both qualities. This race was specially selected to follow both paths leading to the spiritual world and along each of them to discover that which was serviceable and right for that epoch, being possessed of the capacity both for attaining the spiritual world behind the external sense world and also for finding the spiritual world behind the veil of their own soul life by sinking into the mystical depths of their inner nature.

This faculty, in the first epochs at all events of the old Atlantean era, was possessed by all men—and connected with it was a very definite experience. If a man who is only able to reach the spiritual world through the external sense world and to find the upper gods hears that somewhere else on the earth there are other gods, he does not understand them aright. But where the two faculties of penetrating through the external sense world and through the veil of the soul life are united, a man makes the very significant discovery that what is to be found behind the veil of the soul life is exactly the same, in essence, as that behind the veil of the outer sense world. A uniform spiritual world is revealed from without and from within. If a man should get to know the spiritual world by both paths, he realises their unity. The people of ancient India were in a position to realise the unity of spiritual life. When the super-sensible sight of the ancient Indian was directed outwards he perceived spiritual beings holding together and coordinating external phenomena. When he sank into his inner nature he found his Brahman; and he knew what he found behind the veil of his soul life to be identical with that which, passing through the Cosmos on mighty pinions, created and fashioned the external world. Such mighty conceptions—fruits of ancient Atlantean culture, preserved over the post Atlantean times—still influence us. But evolution, remember, does not progress by the mere transformation of preservation of the old, but by the bringing to birth of other streams of evolution so that mutual enrichment may take place. If we follow up the northern stream of evolution into Asia, we find that the Indian people traveled the farthest, and after amalgamation with other elements, built up ancient Indian culture. But more to the north, in the region of Persia, we find an ancient civilisation known in later history as the Zarathustrian culture. When we investigate this Zarathustrian culture with super-sensible sight, we find that the characteristic of its people was to look more to the outer world, and to advance towards the spiritual world by this path. In view of this characteristic it is evident why Zarathustra, the leader of this ancient Persian culture, attached less importance to inner, mystical absorption, and why he was in a way opposed to it. Zarathustra pointed more particularly to the external sense world and to the visible sun, in order to call men's attention to the existence behind this visible sun of a spiritual Solar Being, Ahura Mazdao. This is an exact instance of the path followed by initiates of the northern peoples. The highest form of this more external realisation of the spiritual world was developed in ancient Persian culture under the leadership of the original Zarathustra. This form of outer perception was less and less perfect the further the peoples had lagged behind the ancient Persians who pressed on to Western Asia.¹ Other peoples remained behind in Asia and Europe, but the tendency of them all was to look more towards the external world, and all their initiates chose the path of pointing out to their followers the spiritual world behind the veil of the outer sense world. In Europe, if we make use of spiritual sight, we find in that wonderful Celtic culture which really underlies all other European culture the remnant of what arose as a result of the cooperation of the mind of the peoples with the wisdom of the initiates. Today Celtic wisdom has very largely been lost, and can be deciphered only to a certain extent by those who have spiritual vision. Wherever ancient Celticism still shines out as the fundamental basis of other European civilisations, there you have an echo of still older European civilisations which, although their paths were in reality the same, remained with the mighty Zarathustrian culture in so far as the characteristics of their peoples were concerned. According to the external distribution of the people their path to the spirit differed.

It must be understood that the interplay of man with the external world, whether it be the external spiritual world or the external sense world, has no effect upon him. Experiences that arise are not a kind of cosmic reflection, but exist in order to bring about the progress of humanity in a perfectly definite way. Now what, in reality, is man of a particular epoch? Man is the result or product of the activities of cosmic powers surrounding him, and is fashioned according to the way in which these cosmic powers permeate him. A man who inhales healthy air develops his organs correspondingly, and the same thing happens to the spiritual organism of a man who absorbs one or another kind of spiritual life and culture. Since the bodily organism is a product of the spiritual it is affected accordingly. Human evolution is a continuous process and so it is clear that in all the peoples of this northern stream he development of the external bodily qualities is noticeable, for the forces and powers of the outer world—everything that can fashion from without—were the special ones which streamed into them. Through these outer forces was developed what can be seen and perceived outwardly. Hence in these peoples, we find not only a development of warlike qualities, but also an instrument of ever increasing suitability for penetrating the external world; the brain itself grows to greater perfection under the influence of these external forces. The fundamental factors, therefore, for understanding the external world are present in men belonging to this northern stream, and only from them could be derived that spiritual culture which led finally to the mastery of the powers and forces of external nature. It may be said that the principal task of these people consisted in perfecting man's outer instrument, that part of him Which is perceptible from without, not only in a physical but also in an intellectual, moral and aesthetic sense. More and more of the spirit was poured into the outer corporeality. Physical corporeality was developed to greater and greater perfection, and so the individual souls passing from one incarnation to another were generally able to find better vehicles in succeeding births, not only in a physical, but also in a moral sense.

Now let us enquire what special characteristic developed among the peoples who took the more southern way. It was of course the refinement of the life of the soul, the inner life. The conception of conscience is not to be found in olden times among those peoples whose task was the spiritualisation of the outer corporeal qualities. Conscience as a conception arises from among the southern peoples; among them the inner life of the soul was enriched with ideas and conceptions to such an extent that it finally developed into that wealth of secret hermetic science possessed by the ancient Egyptians which amazes us even today. The wisdom of the Egyptians, held in such high honour by those who have knowledge of such matters, could only arise as the result of the development of the inner soul life. All the art and the wisdom which man had to develop from within appeared in the stream of evolution, wherein less importance was attached to the spiritualisation of the external corporeality than to the refinement and elaboration of the inner forces of the soul.

Let us now consider Greek sculpture. When a Greek sculptor wished to represent a physical body purified and spiritualised; he produced a type of the northern peoples. All the external forms of Zeus, of Aphrodite, of Pallas Athene, are racial types of the north. Where it was a matter of indicating the inner development of the life of the soul, it was necessary to show that forces develop invisibly within the soul, and then such a figure as Hermes or Mercury was produced. The form of Hermes is that of the African peoples, and it differs from the figures of the other gods; the ears are different, so is the hair, and the eyes are narrow and unlike the eyes of the northern types.—It was known that this type of humanity represented the vehicle of the scientific element, of wisdom, of everything which works upon the soul, and with this was connected the conception of Hermes as messenger to the lower gods.

Again we might characterise the difference between the two evolutionary streams by saying that the northern peoples worked at the production of a human being whose outer bodily form is an image of the spirit; whereas the southern peoples were busy developing the invisible forces of soul, perceptible only when the gaze is directed inwards (to the inner life). The northern races created the outer aspect of the image of divinity in man; the southern peoples created the invisible soul-image of the godhead in the inner life.

Thus the gods of the southern peoples are invisible divinities which man contacts in his inner nature, who arouse a certain fear and dread, but who from another aspect inspire trust and confidence. It has been pointed out that a man sees these gods of the inner world according to his own nature; if he is morally, developed he confronts these gods with moral qualities of soul and their true image is revealed; their essence flows into him and he experiences inner illumination and enlightenment. If a man is immoral and his conceptions are bad, or ugly, or untrue he perceives a distorted image of this world of the gods; fearful demoniacal shapes and figures appear, even as the most beautiful face is twisted and caricatured if observed in a spherical mirror. This is why a man confronting these inner gods might feel them to be friendly, intimate spiritual companions, pouring forces into the very depths of soul life, belonging to him in the most intimate sense, strengthening and illuminating him; but if he saw them in images distorted by his own qualities, horror and terror might arise; he could be tormented, persecuted and led to the wildest excesses of life just because of their manifestation in the grotesque image of his lower passions. From this we may judge why care was taken that no unprepared human being should meet these particular gods; but where access was made possible to the spiritual world a preliminary development of the moral nature was imperatively demanded, and a very thorough preparation was ensured; the initiates were never tired of giving warning about the dangers awaiting weak souls at the meeting with these gods.

In accordance with the nature of the powers holding sway in the spiritual world accessible to the southern peoples it is called the world of Lucifer, the Light-bearer. It is a world, spiritual and divine in its nature, illumined in the inner being of man by a light invisible to outward sight and which has to be acquired by the process of individual perfecting. This was the path which people of the southern evolutionary stream took to the world of Lucifer.

As we have seen, the ideal before the more northern stream was the production of a human individuality, so perfect, so full of spirit, so noble in regard to everything in life between birth and death, that the outer body should be a worthy vessel for spirituality of the very highest order. And in Zarathustra,² the being who had most truly shown the way to the spiritual world behind the veil of sense phenomena, there arose the thought that an outer body must be created by so moral, intellectual and spiritual a force as should bring it to the highest point of spirituality of which an external body is capable. And since this thought first arose in Zarathustra, he set himself the task of reaching an increasingly lofty standard of perfection, living through every succeeding incarnation in bodies of higher moral, aesthetic and intellectual qualities. Zarathustra, then, brought these physical qualities to such a point of excellence that his body became not a mere image of the divine world of spirit, but a vessel for the reception of the Godhead otherwise to be seen only behind the veil of the sense world. That to which the old Zarathustra had pointed as the world of Sun Beings behind the physical sun, as the hidden spirit of the Good—Ahura Mazdao, needed, as it approached nearer and nearer to the earth, to find a dwelling place within a body of great spiritual perfection. And so in one of his incarnations, Zarathustra appeared in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, a body so spiritualised, so noble that into its external corporeality could be poured that spiritual essence formerly to be found only behind the veil of the sense world. [This will show how erroneous is the statement that Dr. Steiner has ever identified Christ with Zarathustra. This he has never done, any more than he has declared Christ to be the same being as Buddha.] The human body which had been developed in the northern evolutionary stream by the turning of the external gaze to the spiritual world was prepared for the reception of the spiritual essence concealed behind the sense world. For in this manner, preparation was made for the mighty event of the reception of the spirit behind the sense world, invisible to all save spiritual sight, upon earth, and its maturing there for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence it devolved upon the northern peoples not only to develop an understanding of what lay behind the sense world, but to prepare for the possibility of that spirit flooding our earthly world, of the being heretofore hidden behind the sun, treading the earth for three years, as man among men. Thus Lucifer had entered into humanity in the southern peoples, and Christ into the northern peoples, each in conformity with the characteristics of the two streams of evolution. We ourselves live at a time when the two streams must unite as the male and female fertilising substances of plants coalesce; we live at a time when the Christ who was drawn from outside as an objective Being into the purified body of Jesus of Nazareth must be understood through deep contemplation on the part of the soul, and its union with the world of spirit to be discovered in the inner being, the world arising from Lucifer's kingdom. In this way will come to pass the mutual fertilisation of these two evolutionary streams of men. It has already begun; it began at the moment indicated in the story which tells us that the sacrificial blood of the Christ flowing from the Cross was received into the vessel of the Holy Grail and brought to the West from the East, where preparation for the understanding of the incarnation of Christ had been made in a very definite way by cultivating that which represents the light of Lucifer. In this way the union of these two streams in humanity will become more and more complete. Whatever mankind of the present time may say or do, the healing of the future humanity will be accomplished by the fact that within the union of the two streams, the mighty Christ Being, guiding as He does the evolution of the universe and of man, is understood through the light received by the soul from within, out of the kingdom of Lucifer.³ Christ will give the substance, Lucifer the form, and from their union will arise impulses which shall permeate the spiritual evolution of mankind, and bring about what the future has in store for the healing and the blessing of the peoples.

• 1. These are not the Persians of whom history tells but ancient, pre-historic peoples, inhabiting the region which, in later times, was known as Persia. The ‘Ancient Indians’ mentioned in these lectures are even earlier.
• 2. The Zarathustra to whom reference is here made, is not, of course, the historical figure, but an ancient pre-historic ancestor. In olden times it was the custom for the successors of a great Individuality to retain his name through long periods of time.
• 3. The above statement has led some of Dr. Steiner's critics to infer that he sees the human soul as an union of the Christ with Lucifer. A careful study of Dr. Steiner's lectures will show there is no reason for the inference.