The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we shall occupy ourselves with a general theme, and indeed with the question of the significance and the tasks of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science in the present, and then, on Tuesday, with a more individual theme concerning individual destiny and being.

We have indeed often emphasised that Anthroposophy has a special task and significance for mankind in the present age. Whoever occupies himself with anthroposophy as a thinking human being must put this question again and again to himself: What aims does this spiritual movement pursue, and how are they related to the other tasks of our age? These tasks can be illuminated from the most diverse points of view, as we have often done. Today we will try to grasp the evolutionary path of mankind at that point on which we ourselves stand, to look a little into the future, and then ask ourselves: What task has anthroposophy with especial reference to the evolutionary stage of mankind at which we stand at present?

We know that since the great Atlantean Catastrophe, which entirely transformed the earth as man's dwelling-place, up to our own time, five great epochs of civilisation are to be distinguished. We have often designated these five epochs of culture as the old Indian, old Persian, the Chaldaic-Egyptian, the Greco-Latin epoch, and then the epoch in which we ourselves stand, the fifth, which prepared itself in—let us say—the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, and in the middle of which we now are. We must be clear that such divisions are naturally not meant as if any one epoch of evolution sharply came to an end, and then a new one began, but that the one gradually and slowly passes over into the other, and long before one such epoch has run its course, the new one already prepares itself within it.

Thus we can say of our own epoch of culture, of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch: there is already now being prepared, and indeed in a very significant way, that which will constitute the real characteristic of the sixth epoch of civilisation. And in general, human beings of our present age will separate themselves into two parts: those who today form no idea of all this, who know nothing of the preparation of the sixth epoch, who live as it were blindly, for the day, and those who form ideas for themselves that something new is preparing, and who also know that what is being prepared is fundamentally something which must be accomplished through human beings, must be prepared by mankind. We can in a certain connection place ourselves in the time as a human being and say we are doing what is generally the custom, what the others do, what our parents have educated us for, or, we can so place ourselves that we know consciously the following: “If you will consciously be a link in the chain of humanity, then you must do something—either in yourself or in your environment—which contributes to what must come, i.e., to prepare the sixth period of culture as much as in you lies.” The possibility of thus making preparations for the sixth period of culture can only be understood by entering a little into the character of our own epoch. For this, the comparative method offers itself as the best.

We know that these epochs of time are essentially different from each other, and in the course of years, in our anthroposophical movement, we have brought forward various characteristics whereby they are distinguished. We have pointed to the old Indian Period of civilisation, and have shown that the soul-qualities of man then were different from what they later were, how man then was still endowed to a high degree with clairvoyant consciousness. And we have shown that evolution through the following epochs consisted in man losing this clairvoyance ever more and more, and having to limit his power of perception and understanding more and more to the physical world. We have seen how the fourth epoch of civilisation was slowly prepared, in which man, as it were, appeared entirely in the physical world, so that that Being Whom we call Christ Jesus could incarnate in the physical world as a being, as a human being of the physical world. We have then seen how since that time, through a certain stream, the following appeared: how all human powers strengthened themselves still further in the physical world, how indeed the materialistic tendency of our age, the whole urge of man only to hold as valid what offers itself in the physical surrounding world, is connected with a further descent of man into the physical world. But by no means should things remain thus in evolution. Humanity must ascend again into the spiritual world, ascend with all the attainments men have acquired, with all the fruits of the physical world. And Anthroposophy should be just that which can bring to people the possibility of again ascending into the spiritual world.

Now we can say: “Immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, there were numerous human beings who knew through their direct powers of perception: Around us is a spiritual world. We live in a spiritual world.” Fewer and fewer became the human beings who knew this; more and more were the powers of man limited to the perception of the senses. But if, on the one hand, today, the power of perception for the spiritual world is the least conceivable, yet, on the other hand, something is preparing in our age which is so significant that already for a great number of people, quite different faculties will exist in that incarnation which follows the present one. As the faculties of man have changed during the five epochs of culture, so they will also change into the sixth, and a great number of people today will clearly show already in their next incarnation through their whole mood of soul, that their faculties have essentially changed. Today, we will make clear to ourselves how different these souls of human beings will be in the future, with a great number already in the next incarnation, with others, in the incarnation following.

We could also look back in another way into past epochs of human evolution. Then we would see that the farther we go back to the ancient clairvoyance, at the same time, the more we have united with the human soul, what one can call the character of group-soulness [Gruppenseelenhaftigkeit]. It has often been pointed out to you that the consciousness of the group-soulness was existing in the ancient Hebrew people in an eminent degree. He who felt himself—really consciously felt himself as a member of the ancient Hebrew people—said to himself—especial attention has been drawn to this—” As an individual man I am a transitory phenomenon, but in me lives something that has an immediate connection with all the soul-being which has streamed down since the racial father Abraham.” A member of the old Hebrew people felt that. We can indeed esoterically admit as a spiritual phenomenon what was thus felt by the old Hebrew people. We understand better what then happened if we keep the following in mind.

Let us consider an old Hebrew initiate. Although initiation was not so frequent among the ancient Hebrews as among other peoples, we could not characterise such a real initiate otherwise—not merely one initiated into the theories and the Law, but an initiate really seeing in the spiritual worlds—than by taking into consideration the entire racial peculiarity. It is the custom today in external science, which busies itself with documents without any misgiving, to take everywhere what stands in the Old Testament, to test it by all kinds of external records, and then find it unsubstantiated. We shall have occasion to point out that the Old Testament gives the facts more faithfully than external historical records. In any case, spiritual science shows that a blood relationship of the Hebrew people can really be demonstrated back to the racial father Abraham, and that the assumption of Abraham as racial father is fully justified. This was something especially known in the old Hebrew secret schools: Such an individuality, such a soul-being as that of Abraham, was not merely incarnated as Abraham, but is an eternal being, who remained existing in the spiritual world. And in truth a real initiate was inspired by the same spirit, as he who inspired Abraham, and he could testify for him of himself, that he was permeated by the same soul-nature as Abraham. There was a real connection between every initiate and the racial father Abraham. We must hold that fast: that expressed itself in the feeling of membership of the old Hebrew people. That was a kind of group-soulness. One felt what expressed itself in Abraham as the group-soul of the people. One felt group-souls similarly in the rest of humanity. Mankind in general goes back to group-souls. The farther we go back in human evolution, the less do we find expressed the single individuality. That which we still find today in the animal kingdom: that a whole group belongs together—that was existing among mankind, and appears ever clearer and clearer, the farther we go back to ancient times. Groups of human beings then belonged together, and the group-soul was essentially stronger than what constituted the individual soul in the single human being.

We can now say: Today in our time, the group-soulness of people is still not yet overcome, and whoever believes that it is completely overcome does not keep in mind certain finer phenomena of life. Whoever keeps it in mind will very quickly see that certain human beings not only appear alike in their physiognomy, but that also the soul-qualities are similar in groups of human beings: that one can, as it were, divide human beings into categories. Each person can still today be reckoned into a certain category; with reference to this or the other quality, he will belong perhaps to different categories, but a certain group-soulness is not only valid because the races exist, but also in other connections. The boundaries drawn between the single nations fall away more and more; but other groupings are still perceptible. Certain basic characteristics stand so connected in some people, that he who will only look, can still today perceive the last relics of the group-soulness of man.

Now we, in our present age, are living in the most eminent sense, in a transition. All group-soulness has gradually to be stripped off. Just as the gaps between single nations gradually disappear, as the single parts of different nations understand each other better, so also will other group-soul qualities be shed, and the individual nature of each single person come to the foreground more and more.

We have therewith characterised something quite essential in evolution. If we want to grasp it from another side, we can say: That idea whereby the group-soulness chiefly expresses itself loses meaning ever more and more in the evolution of mankind, i.e., the idea of race. If we go back beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe, we see how the human races are prepared. In the old Atlantean age human beings were grouped according to external characteristics in their bodily structure, far more strongly than today. What we call races today are only the relics of those important distinctions between human beings as were customary in old Atlantis. The idea of race is only really applicable to old Atlantis. Since we deal with a real evolution of mankind, we have never employed the idea of race in the most eminent sense for the post-Atlantean age. We do not speak of an Indian race, a Persian race, etc., because that is no longer correct. We speak of an old-Indian period of civilisation, of an old-Persian period of civilisation, etc. And it would be utterly devoid of sense if we would speak of our time preparing a sixth race. If relics of the old Atlantean distinctions, of their group-soulness, are still existing in our time, so that one can still say the racial division continues to work on—that which is preparing for the sixth period of time consists just in the character of race being stripped off. That is the essential. Therefore it is necessary that that movement which is called the anthroposophical movement, which should prepare the sixth period of time, adopts in its basic character this stripping off of the character of race—that especially it seeks to unite people out of all “races,” out of all nations, and in this way bridges over these differences, these distinctions, these gaps, which are existing between various groups of human beings. For the old racial standpoint had in a certain connection a physical character, whereas what will fulfil itself in the future will have a much more spiritual character. Therefore it is so urgently necessary to understand that our anthroposophical movement is a spiritual one, which looks to the spirit, and overcomes just that which arises from physical distinctions, through the force of a spiritual movement, It is, of course, thoroughly comprehensible that any movement has, as it were, its childish illnesses, and that in the beginning of the theosophical movement, matters were so represented as if the earth fell into seven periods of time—they were called Root-races—and each of these Root-races into seven sub-races, and that would always repeat itself, so that one could always speak of seven races, and seven sub-races, etc. But one must get beyond the illnesses of childhood, and be clear that the idea of race ceases to have any meaning, especially in our age.

Something else, in addition, is being prepared—something connected with the individuality of man in a quite special way—in man becoming ever more and more individual. It is only a question of this occurring in the right sense, and the anthroposophical movement should serve to this end, that human beings become individualities—or we could also say personalities—in the right sense. How can it do this?

Here we must look to the most striking new quality of man's soul, which is preparing. The question is often put: Well, if reincarnation exists, why does a person not remember the former incarnations? That is a question which I have often answered. Such a question appears as when one brings along a four-year-old child, and because it is a human being, and cannot reckon, one would say: Man cannot reckon. But let the child become ten years old, and then it will reckon. It is thus with the human soul. If today it cannot remember, yet, the time will come in which it can remember—the time when it has the same powers as he possesses who is initiated today. But just today that transition is happening. There exist today a number of souls who are so far on in our time, who stand close to the moment where they will remember their former incarnations, or at least the last one. A whole number of human beings today are, as it were, before the self-opening of the door to that embracing memory, which comprises not only the life between birth and death, but the previous incarnations, or at least, the last, in the first place. And when, after the present incarnation, a number of human beings are reborn, then they will remember this present incarnation. It is merely a question of how they remember. Anthroposophical development should give help and direction to remember in the right way.

In order to characterise this anthroposophical movement from this point of view, it must be said: Its character is that it leads man to realise in the right way what one calls the human “I,” the innermost member of the human being. I have often pointed out that Fichte rightly said, most human beings would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon, than as an “I.” And if you consider how many people there are in our time who make any idea at all of what is in the “I,” i.e., of what they themselves are, then in general, you would come to a very dismal result.

When this question arises, I have always to call to mind a friend I had more than thirty years ago, and who as a quite young student was completely inoculated at that time by the materialistic mood—today it is more modern to say “monistic” mood. He was already injected by it, in spite of his youth. He always laughed when he heard something was contained in man which could be designated as spiritual being; for he was of the view, that what lives as thought in us, was produced by mechanical or chemical processes in the brain. I often said to him: “Look, if you earnestly believe this as a content of life, why do you continually tell lies?” He really lied, continually, because he never said: “My brain feels, my brain thinks, but: I think, I feel, I know this or that.” Thus he built up a theory which he contradicted with every word—as every man does; for it is impossible to maintain what one imagines as a materialistic theory. One cannot remain truthful, if one thinks materialistically. If one would say: My brain loves you, then, one should not say “you,” but, my brain loves your brain. People do not make this consequence clear. But it is something which is not merely humoristic, but something which shows what a deep basis of unconscious untruthfulness lies at the basis of our present education.

Now, most people really would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon, i.e., as a piece of compact matter, than as that which can be called an “I” And today one naturally comes least of all to a grasp of the “I” through external science, which indeed, as such, must think materialistically, according to its methods. How can one attain this grasp of the “I”? How can one gradually get an idea, a concept of what he instinctively feels, when he says: I think? Solely and alone through this, that he knows by means of the anthroposophical view of the world, how this human being is constituted, how the physical body has Saturn character, the etheric body Sun character, the astral body Moon character, and the Ego, Earth character. When we keep in mind everything we thus get as ideas out of the entire cosmos, then we understand how the “I,” as the real Master-worker, labours at all the other members. And so we come gradually to an idea [Begriff] of what we profess with the word “I.” We gradually struggle up to the highest ideas of this “I,” if we learn to understand [verstehen] such a word. We not merely feel ourselves as a spiritual being if we feel ourselves within an “I,” but when we can say: In our individuality lives something which was there before father Abraham. When we cannot merely say: I and father Abraham are one, but: I and the FATHER, i.e., the Spiritual, weaving and living through the world. What lives in the “I,” is the same spiritual substance that weaves and lives through the world as Spirit. Thus we gradually work our way up to understand this “I,” i.e., the bearer of the human individuality, that which goes from incarnation to incarnation. In what way, however, do we grasp the “I”? Do we grasp the world at all through the anthroposophical view?

This anthroposophical view of the world arises in the most individual way, and is, at the same time, the most un-individual thing that can be conceived. It can only arise in the most individual way by the secrets of the cosmos revealing themselves in a human soul, into which stream the great spiritual beings of the world. And so the content of the world must be experienced in the human individuality in the most individual way, but at the same time, it must be experienced with a character of complete impersonality. Whoever will experience the true character of cosmic mysteries must stand entirely on the standpoint from which he says: Whoever still heeds his own opinion, cannot come to Truth. That is indeed the peculiar [eigenartige] nature of anthroposophical truth that the observer may have no opinion of his own, no preference for this or the other theory, that he may not love this or the other view more than any other because of his own especial individual qualities. As long as he stands on this standpoint, it is impossible for the true secrets of the world to reveal themselves to him. He must pursue knowledge quite individually, but his individuality must develop so far, that it no longer has anything personal, i.e., anything of his own peculiar sympathies and antipathies. This must be taken strictly and earnestly. Whoever still has any preference for these or the other ideas and views, whoever can incline to this or the other because of his education or temperament, will never recognise objective truth.

We have attempted here, this summer, to grasp Oriental wisdom from the standpoint of Western learning. We tried to be just towards Oriental wisdom, and truly presented it in such a way that it received its full rights. (The East in the Light of the West, cloth, crown 8vo, pp. 222. 7s. 6d) One must strongly emphasise that in our time it is impossible for independent spiritual knowledge to decide through any special preference for either the Oriental or the Occidental view of the world. Whoever says according to his different temperament he prefers the nature, the laws of the world as existing in the Oriental or correspondingly in the Occidental view, has not yet a full understanding for what is here essential. One should not decide, e.g., for the greater significance of, let us say, the Christ, as compared with what Oriental teaching recognises, because one inclines to the Christ through one's Occidental education or one's temperament. One is only fitted to answer the question “How is the Christ related to the Orient?” when from a personal standpoint the Christian is as indifferent to one as the Oriental. As long as one has preference for this or the other, so long is one unsuited to make a decision. One first begins to be objective when one lets the facts alone speak, when one heeds no reasons derived from personal opinion, but lets facts alone speak in this sphere.

Therefore something meets us in the anthroposophical world-view, if it meets us today in its true form, which is inwardly woven with the human individuality, because it must spring out of the “I”-force of the individuality, and on the other hand, must be independent, so that this individuality is again quite indifferent. That person in whom anthroposophical wisdom appears must be unconcerned by it, must be independent of it. This is essential, that he has brought himself so far, that he forces nothing of his own colouring into these matters. Then they will indeed be individual, because the spiritual cannot appear in the light of the moon, or the stars, but only in the individuality, in the human soul; but then, on the other hand, this individuality must be so far on that it can exclude itself in the production of what constitutes the wisdom of the world. Thus that which appears to mankind through the anthroposophical movement will be something which concerns each human being, no matter from what race, nation, etc., he is born, because it applies itself only to the new humanity, to man as such, not to an abstract, general man, but to each single human being. This is the essential. As it proceeds out of the individuality, out of the kernel of man's being, so it speaks to the deepest kernel of man's being, so it grasps this kernel of man. As we usually speak from man to man, fundamentally it is only surface speaking to surface, something which we have not united with the innermost kernel of our being. Understanding between man and man, full understanding, is hardly possible today in any other sphere, than in that where what is produced comes from the centre of man's being, and, when it is understood aright by another, speaks again to his centre. Hence in a certain connection, it is a new speech that is spoken by Anthroposophy. And if today we are still obliged to speak in the various national languages what has to be announced, the content is a new speech, which is spoken by anthroposophy.

What is spoken today outside in the world is a speech which is only really valid for a very limited sphere. In ancient times, when people still looked into the spiritual world through their old, dreamy clairvoyance, their word then meant something which existed in the spiritual world. The word signified something which existed in the spiritual world. Even in Greece, things were still different from what they are today. The word “idea” used by Plato signified something different from the word “Idea,” as used by our modern philosophers. These modern philosophers can no longer understand Plato, because they have no perception of what he called “Idea,” and they confuse it with abstract concepts. Plato still had something spiritual before him, even if already rarefied; it was still something quite real. Then also, one still had in the words the sap of the spiritual, if one may express it thus. You can trace that in the words. If anybody today uses the word “wind,” “air,” then he means something external, physical. The word wind here corresponds to something external, physical. If, e.g., in old Hebrew, the word wind, “Ruach,” was employed, one did not merely mean something external, physical, but a spiritual, which swept through space. When man breathes in today he is told by materialistic science that he simply inhales material air; in ancient times, one did not believe one inhaled material air, but then one was clear that one inspired something of spirit, or at least, of soul. Thus the words then were absolutely designations for spirit and soul. That has ceased today; today speech is limited to the external world, or at least, those who seek to stand at the peak of the age busy themselves seeing only a materialistic meaning, even behind those things where it is still obvious they are derived from soul and spirit. Physics speaks of an “impact” of bodies. It has forgotten that the word “impact” is derived from that which a living being performs out of its inner living nature, when it pushes another being. The original significance of words is forgotten in these simple things.

And so today, our speech—and this is most of all the case with scientific speech—has become a speech which is only able to express what is material. Because of this, what is in our soul while we speak is only comprehensible to those faculties of our soul which are bound to the physical brain as their instrument. And then the soul understands nothing more of all that is designated with these words, when it is disembodied. When the soul has gone through the gate of death, and no longer employs the brain, then all scientific considerations of today are forms quite incomprehensible to the disembodied soul. It does not even hear or perceive what one expresses in the speech of the time. This has no longer any meaning for a disembodied soul, because it only has meaning for what is the physical world. That again is something which is still more important to consider in what one can call the mode of thinking, the method of representation. It is even more important to consider it there than in theory, because it is a question of life, not of theory, and it is characteristic that one can see in the theosophical movement itself how materialism has crept in. Because it is the mode of the time, it has often crept into the theosophical view, so that real materialism prevails even in theosophy itself, e.g., when one describes the etheric or life-body. Whereas a person should exert himself to come to a grasp of the spirit, one mostly describes it as if it were a finer matter; and the astral body also. One starts as a rule from the physical body, goes further to the etheric or life-body, and says: that is built after the pattern of the physical body, only finer—thus one progresses to Nirvana. Here one finds descriptions which take their images from nothing else than the physical. I have already experienced that when one wanted to express the good feeling present in a room among those present, one did not do so directly, but one said: Fine vibrations are existing in this room. One did not heed that one materialises what exists spiritually in a mood if one thinks the space filled with a kind of thin cloud, permeated with vibrations. That is what I should like to call the most material way of thinking possible. Materialism has even got by the neck those who want to think spiritually. That is only a characteristic of our time, but it is important that we are conscious of it. And therefore we must pay especial heed to what has been said: that our speech, which is always a kind of tyrant for human thinking, has implanted in the soul a tendency to materialism. And many, who today would so willingly be thorough idealists, express themselves entirely in a materialistic sense, misled by the tyranny of speech. That is a speech which can no longer be understood by the soul as soon as it no longer feels itself bound to the physical brain.

There is, indeed, something else, you may believe it or not. For one who knows occult perception, real spiritual perception, the method of presentation often employed today in theosophical-scientific writings causes real pain—because it appears irrational to him, if he begins to think, no longer with the physical brain, but with the soul, which is no longer bound to the physical brain, i.e., which really lives in the spiritual world. As long as one thinks with the physical brain, so long can he go on characterising the world thus. As soon, however, as one begins to develop spiritual perception, then, to speak of things in this way ceases to have any meaning. Then indeed it even causes pain if one must hear the utterance: There are good vibrations in this room, instead of: A good feeling prevails here. That at once causes pain in anyone who can really see things spiritually, because thoughts are realities. Space then fills itself out with a dark cloud, if one forms the thought: Good vibrations are in this space, instead of: A good mood is prevailing.

It is now the task of the anthroposophical way of thinking—and the method of thought is more important than the theories—that we learn to speak a language, which is really not merely understood by the human soul so long as it is in a physical body, but understood also when this soul is no longer bound to the instrument of the physical brain; for instance, either by a soul still in the body, but able to perceive spiritually, or by a soul gone through the gate of death. And that is the essential! If we bring forward those ideas which explain the world, which explain the human being, then that is a speech which cannot merely be understood here in the physical world, but also by those who are no longer incarnated in physical bodies, but live between death and a new birth. Yes, what is spoken on our anthroposophical basis, is heard and understood by the so-called dead. There they are fully one with us on a basis where the same speech is spoken. There we speak to all human beings. Because in a certain connection, it is chance whether a human soul is in a body of flesh, or in the condition between death and a new birth. And we learn through anthroposophy a speech comprehensible to all human beings, whether they are in the one or other condition. Thus we speak a speech within the field of anthroposophy which is spoken also for the so-called dead. We really contact the innermost kernel of man, the innermost being of man, through what we cultivate in a real sense in anthroposophical considerations, even if they appear apparently abstract. We penetrate into the soul of man. And because we penetrate to the soul of man, we liberate man from all group-soulness, i.e., man becomes in this way more and more capable of really grasping himself in his ego, his “I.” And that is the characteristic, that those who come to anthroposophy today, who really take up anthroposophy, appear in comparison with others who remain far from it, as if through anthroposophical thoughts, their ego would crystallise as a spiritual being, which is then carried through the gate of death. With the others, in that place where the I-being is, which remains there—which is now there in the body, and which remains after death—there is a hollow space, a nothingness. Everything else which one can take up as ideas today, will become more and more worthless for the real kernel of man's soul-being. The central point of man's being is grasped through what we take up as anthroposophical thoughts. That crystallises a spiritual substance in man; he takes that with him after death, and with that he perceives in the spiritual world. He sees and hears with it in the spiritual world, with it he penetrates that darkness which otherwise exists for man in the spiritual world. And thereby it is brought about that when through these anthroposophical thoughts and way of thinking man develops this “I” in him today, which now stands in connection with all the world wisdom we can acquire—if he develops it—he carries it over also into his next incarnation. Then he is born with this now developed “I,” and he remembers himself in this developed “I.” That is the deeper task of the anthroposophical movement today, to send over to their next incarnation a number of human beings with an ego in which they remember themselves as an individual ego. They will be the human beings who form the kernel of the next period of civilisation. These people who have been well prepared through the anthroposophical spiritual movement, to remember their individual “I,” will be spread over the whole earth. For the essential in the next period of culture will be that these people will not be limited by single localities, but spread over the entire earth. These individual people will be scattered over the whole earth, and within the whole earth sphere will be the kernel of humanity, who will be essential for the sixth period of civilisation. And so it will be the case among these people, that they will know themselves as those who in their previous incarnation strove together for the individual “I.”

This is the right cultivation of that soul-faculty of which we have spoken. This soul-faculty so develops, that not only those just described will have this memory. More and more human beings will have this memory of their former incarnation—in spite of their not having developed the “I.” But they will not remember an individual “I,” because they have not developed it, but they will remember the group-ego, in which they have remained. Thus people will exist, who in this incarnation have cared for the development of their individual “I”—they will remember themselves as independent individualities, they will look back and say: You were this or the other. Those who have not developed the individuality will be unable to remember this individuality.

Do not think that through mere visionary clairvoyance one acquires the faculty of remembering the previous ego. Humanity was once clairvoyant. If mere clairvoyance sufficed, then all would remember, for all were clairvoyant. It is not merely a matter of being clairvoyant—humanity will already be clairvoyant in the future—it is a matter of having cultivated the ego in this incarnation, or not. If one has not cultivated it, it is not there as an inner human being; one looks back, and remembers as a group-ego, what one had in common. So that these people will say: Yes, I was there, but I have not freed myself. These people will then experience that as their FALL, as a new Fall of mankind, as a falling back into conscious connection with the group-soul. That will be something terrible for the sixth period of time; to be unable to look back to oneself as an individuality, to be hemmed in by not being able to transcend the group-soulness [Gruppenseelenhaftigkeit]. If one will express it strongly, one could say: The whole earth with all it produces (this holds at least as an image) will belong to those who now cultivate their individuality; those, however, who do not develop their individual “I,” will be obliged to join on to a certain group, from which they will be directed as to how they should think, feel, will, and act. That will be felt as a fall, a falling back, in the future humanity.

So we should regard the anthroposophical movement, the spiritual life, not as mere theory, but as something which is given us in the present, because it prepares what is necessary for the future of mankind.

If we grasp ourselves aright in that point where we are now, whence we have come from out the past, and then look a little into the future, then we must say: Now the time is come where man begins to develop the human faculty of remembering backwards. It is only a question of our developing it aright, i.e., that we train in us an individual “I;” for only what we have created in our own soul can we remember. If we have not created it, then there only remains to us a fettering memory of a group-ego, and we feel it as a kind of falling down into a group of higher animality. Even if the human group-souls are finer and higher than the animal, yet they are but group-souls. Humanity of an early age did not feel that as a fall, because they were intended to develop from group-soulness to the individual soul. If they are now held back, they fall consciously into it, and that will be the oppressive feeling in the future of those who do not take this step aright, either now or in a later incarnation. They will experience the fall into group-soulness.

The real task of anthroposophy, is to give the right impulse. We must thus grasp it within human life. If we keep in mind that the sixth period of time is that of the first, complete conquest of the racial idea, then we must be clear, that it would be fantastic to think that even the sixth “race” starts from one point on the earth, and develops like the earlier races. Progress is made by ever-new progressive methods of evolution appearing. By progress we do not mean that what was valid as ideas for earlier times should also hold for the future. If we do not see this, the idea of progress will not be quite clear to us. We will as it were fall again and again into the error of saying: So and so many rounds, globes, races, etc., and it all goes on revolving round again and again in the same manner.* (*This refers to the descriptions set forth in the books of the “Theosophical Society,” 1909.) One cannot see why this wheel of rounds, globes, races, etc., should always revolve again. It is a question of seeing that the word “race” is a term only having validity for a certain time. This idea no longer has any meaning for the sixth period. Races have only in themselves the elements which have remained from the Atlantean age.

In the future, that which speaks to the depths of man's soul will express itself more and more in the external nature of man; and that which man on the one side as a quite individual being has acquired, and yet, again experiences unindividually, will express itself by working out even to the human countenance; so that the individuality of man—not the group-soulness—will be inscribed for him on his countenance. That will constitute human manifoldness. Everything will be acquired individually, in spite of its being there through the overcoming of individuality. And we will not meet groups among those who are seized of the ego, but the individual will express itself externally. That will form the distinction between human beings. There will be such as have acquired their egoity; they will indeed be there over the whole earth with the most manifold countenances, but one will recognise through their variety how the individual ego expresses itself even into the gesture. Whereas among those who have not developed the individuality, the group-soulness will come to expression by their countenance receiving the imprint of the group-soulness, i.e., they will fall into categories similar to each other. That will be the external physiognomy of our earth: a possibility will be prepared for the individuality to carry in itself an external sign, and for the group-soulness to carry in itself its external sign.

This is the meaning of earthly evolution, that man acquires more and more the power of expressing externally his inner being. There exists an ancient script in which the greatest ideal for the evolution of the “I,” the Christ Jesus, is characterised by the saying: When the two become one, when the external becomes like the inner, then man has attained the Christ nature in himself. That is the meaning of a certain passage in the so-called Egyptian Gospel. One comprehends such passages out of anthroposophical wisdom.¹

After we have attempted today to grasp the task of anthroposophy out of the depths of our knowledge, we will consider something on Tuesday which as a spiritual problem—as a specially individual affair of man—can lead us to his destiny, to his being.

• 1. f. Dr. Steiner's Gospel of St. Matthew, lecture 6, published by Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

I have tried to reconcile the theosophical view of rounds and races, as stated in the “Ancient Wisdom”, with the Bible, and have suggested that the Genesis, the presentation of the Mosaic creation document, is to be taken in a truly literal sense, and that one then fully obtains the theosophical view. It should be noted that the true, great religious documents receive their original and real meaning through Theosophy.

To give an idea of what the Mosaic creation document means, I would like to repeat again: we have to distinguish seven rounds and in each round seven races. In the first round we have the archetypes of the mineral kingdom, in the second round the archetypes of the plant kingdom, in the third round the archetypes of the animal kingdom, in the fourth round the archetypes of man. When our present fourth round is over, the archetypes of man will have been formed. We have not even reached the archetypes yet. When our round is over, we will have expressed the human archetypes. The mineral kingdom will have already reached its completion in the round. It will dissolve again, regress. In the next round, the fifth, the plant kingdom will find its completion, in the sixth the animal kingdom, and in the seventh round the human kingdom.

In the seventh round, humanity will be the complete image of the deity in earthly development. What the deity was at the beginning, humanity will be at the end of the seventh round. The deity will have completed its task and will then rest. Nirvana will have been achieved. It will be able to hand over its task to the Masters and to the Master Lodges, to the Brotherhoods, which will then have developed into the complete image. This is described to us in the Biblical record.

The seven days of Creation signify in the esoteric sense seven rounds, so that the first chapter is to be understood in the following way.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: Then God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. [Genesis 1:1-5]

I ask you to visualize exactly what I have described as the first round was. It was initially a reddish, brightly glowing sphere that then went through various stages of development to become a violet sphere, then disappeared into the pralaya, only to emerge again as a red sphere. The first day is thus complete. During this round, the archetypes of the mineral kingdom were formed.

Now the second round begins.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” Before the mineral kingdom came into being, there could be no firmament. The waters represent spiritual substances. These did not separate from each other until the archetypes of the mineral kingdom had been formed, so that chunks now appeared in them. Then God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. God called them heaven and earth. Only the mineral kingdom was pushed into the earthly, the other was still heavenly.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into separate places, so that the dry land may be seen. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself, and upon the earth:” And it was so. The earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they did so. And God saw the light, that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Here it is emphasized that the completion of the mineral kingdom comes on the fourth day. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. That is yet to come. Now the mineral kingdom will reach its completion. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. This is expressed by saying: the plant idea will reach its completion. Everything that is now connected with the peculiar life that is in the mineral kingdom will be fully expressed in the fifth round. In the fifth round the mineral kingdom will gradually dissolve, and man will have a completely different relationship to the environment. The plant idea will have been realized. The relationship to the mineral kingdom will no longer be there, so that instead of being surrounded by a world of minerals, in the fifth round we will be surrounded by a world of plants. Everything that man leaves behind today will then be a plant product. There will be no more minerals; then human beings will live in the plant nature as they now live in the mineral nature. Man will be master over the plant kingdom; he will have dominion over the plant kingdom. This is how Genesis expresses it:

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in all directions under the open heavens.” So God created the great whales and every living creature that moves with which the water swarms, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water in the seas, and the birds shall multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fifth day.

In the sixth round, we are dealing with the complete dissolution of the plant kingdom. A high, living animal thought has been realized, so that a difference between living and non-living will no longer exist. One will only live among the living. There will be no element at all as a medium; there will only be animal-like living entities. In the sixth round, everything related to sexual reproduction has long since disappeared; in the sixth round, we are only dealing with living things. Reincarnation ceases in the middle of the fifth round.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the image of ourselves; let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and all the earth and all the creatures that creep on the earth.” So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. God said: See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. These shall be for food for you and for all the beasts of the earth, for all the birds of the air and for all the creatures that move along the ground; I have given you every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. [Genesis 1:24-31]

Everything culminated in animal existence. After the fourth round, the mineral; after the fifth round, the plant; after the sixth round, the animal. In the seventh round, everything had passed into the human. God created man as man and woman, no longer bisexual, but unisexual, and so God rested on the seventh day.

That is the story of the seven rounds. The first three days are over, the fourth day is the present round, and the last three are yet to come. The second chapter presents the story of the fourth round as such. Specifically, the fourth round shows how heaven and earth came into being, that they were created by God, who made heaven and earth and so on. Man was not yet there when the plant was made.

Then came the description of the fourth round. We had the red ball first, which then turns orange, yellow, and turns into a fog. Now the fog turns into the physical. God breathed a living soul into man after he had made him out of the clod of earth - the first two races. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, and put the man he had made there. This is the man who is still asexual. We are still very much in the first two races.

Previously, the plant and animal kingdoms were not so strictly separated. Man had a continuation that merged into the plant world. Then the plant world separated and then the animal kingdom. Even during our fourth round, there was a time - at the very beginning, when the first animals had split off - when humans were still connected to the center of the earth, similar to certain aquatic plants that hang from a long stem. Originally, men were plants, in the days when they had not yet descended into animality. They were still more plant-men, men who had not yet set the plant kingdom free from themselves.

Such a man was called Adam Kadmon. The man who still contains the plant and animal kingdoms within himself, and only later expels them, is Adam Kadmon. Then, in a new verse, on the one hand we have the Tree of Life and on the other hand an increase of consciousness, the Tree of Knowledge.

The Lord God formed man - Adam - out of dust from the earth and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. So man was a living soul.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was divided into four heads. [...] And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may eat from every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” [Genesis 2:7-17]

Verse 16: Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Now the incarnation begins. The incarnation begins at the moment when Kama-Manas enters. That was in the middle of the third race, and it ends in the middle of the fourth race of the fifth round. Then the text also describes the individual races. But it describes the fourth race in particular.

Among the original Turanians, a kind of betrayal of the deeper secrets occurred. The priests allowed themselves to teach people what were priestly secrets. The soul of man is expressed as the feminine. The incarnated will is the masculine. The soul, the feminine. The initiated priests have now united with the human soul and handed over the secrets to it. This was in the fourth race of the Atlanteans. This betrayal is described in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

But when men began to multiply, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which were fair [Genesis 6:1-2]...

... for they are flesh. Now God decides on the downfall, the flood, the downfall of Atlantis. That Noah took a pair of each animal into the ark is based on a real event. It shows how theosophy is becoming infinitely relevant to our culture. Not so long ago, Darwinism and the history of creation were still at a different point of view than they are today. In recent years, science has undergone important transformations. It was thought that animals develop through the struggle for existence and through selection; the imperfect perish, the perfect remain. Naturalists are already talking about the powerlessness of the struggle for existence. De Vries, the Dutch naturalist, has shown that the so-called mutation plays the greatest role in the descent of living beings. It has been found that living beings, when placed in different living conditions, quickly develop into completely different forms. You have to put them in completely different living conditions, that is the only real method of producing new species. It is mutation that causes new breeds to emerge. This does not happen gradually, but in leaps. The tomato, for example, emerged rapidly from a plant that did not have the red fruit. It originated in one place and then spread throughout the earth. All other forms of reproduction and development are secondary to mutation.

Now, science wonders: how could mutation once play such a major role? The Atlanteans knew the secrets of the germination power of seeds well enough to accumulate it, even to use it as a driving force. But they also understood how to cross the seeds of animals and bring forth new forms. What lives on Earth now has come about through conscious methods of crossbreeding, through actual cultivation, so that humans have actually created the animal species. From the few animal species, the Atlanteans created the entire living animal world. It is rooted in human nature that he who possesses greatness is inclined to abuse it.

A few specimens were selected from the animals and taken to the Gobi Desert - an ark. The rest perished. This is the basis of the story of the flood. The aberration of the Atlanteans, the segregation of the animals that arose from the mistakes of the Atlanteans, and the rescue of the same with the pure priests in the Gobi Desert. We must now ask: Who bred the races? Theosophy answers: the Atlanteans. But time is also pressing. The wheat, for example, came directly from a world body, from Venus. So we have to make a connection here between science and theosophy. [...]

After man had enjoyed knowledge, he had to die, he could no longer live, he could not at the same time also enjoy the side of life.

Last time, I spoke about the stage of human development at which one is able to speak of an apocalypse. I showed that one should look at the world in such a way that one's gaze extends over such long periods of time that one can see the time before man began to undergo his individual incarnations, and one can also see the time that lies after these wanderings through birth and death. I have also said that it is necessary for the so-called chela to have attained the third degree of chelaship.

The Apocalypse of John also emerged from such a school. He who thus surveys the world does not see it differently from how other initiates see it. You must realize, above all, that the 'visions', the 'higher experiences' or whatever you want to call it, are no different from one another, and that, however strange it may seem to the uninitiated, when, for example, the four animals are mentioned, it will never sound different from the mouth of one than from the mouth of the other. Two initiates will not report the same thing in different ways.

To give you an idea, I would like to speak of what every such initiate experiences about the development of humanity. The one who made the statements contained in the Apocalypse surveyed the period of time that lies before our present root race, he surveyed the two races that preceded our race, he surveyed the time when man first took on his present form in the middle of the Lemurian period, and he surveyed life beyond birth and death. Now, before the point in time that we call the point of human incarnation in the middle of the Lemurian period, there is a very specific form of humanity that is different from what we now call human. I will start from a very specific point.

The present man, as you know, consists of seven bodies. We have the physical body first, then the etheric double body, thirdly the astral body and four more. First of all, we are only interested in the three lower bodies: the physical body, which can be perceived with the ordinary senses, then the so-called etheric double body, which cannot be perceived with ordinary senses. This etheric double can be seen by those who have acquired the ability to do so when they subtract the physical body. They then see in space a double of the person, which has approximately the color of a peach blossom. Embedded in this is, so to speak, the astral body, a luminous oval. When a person dies, the event of death initially means that the sum total of the higher bodies, the etheric body, is released from the physical body. In the first period after death, the astral body is united with the etheric double. Later, in a few days, the astral body leaves the etheric double. The astral body then goes through the experiences it has to undergo between death and a new birth. Today, the etheric double body has only an intermediary position. It mediates the activity of the astral body with the physical body. While man walks on the earth today, the physical body has the greatest significance for him. The physical brain is the instrument of man's highest spiritual activity. The etheric double body acts as a link, mediating the activity of the physical body with the higher bodies. The dissolution [of the etheric body] did not yet take place in the time of the first races and also not yet in the first time of the third race. This was not yet the case in the first time of the third root race. In the so-called polaric race, the etheric body was the most significant. The whole body was a fine, thin etheric matter. Only later did the etheric body become denser by becoming imbued with physical matter. At the end of the first root race, human beings on our earth were not yet tied to the ground in the same way as they are today; they floated through the etheric earth, and their organs were also etheric. Man was an etheric being. Gradually, he became denser until, in the middle of the Lemurian period, he had become so dense that he was able to take on a physical body. But even in the middle of the Lemurian period, man was not yet as dense as he is today. The matter at the beginning of our third root race was somewhat denser than the matter that you can see today in the clouds of fog that drift over the mountains. These people would appear to us today like fiery clouds. That is why those who came to Earth from other regions as the highest intelligences to teach people are called “Sons of Fire Nebula.

When the geologist takes us back to the specific point on Earth where the physical remains of humans first end, the physical trace is lost. Man was simply made of such fine matter at a certain time that no physical imprints of it can be found in the early layers of the earth. That transition from finer matter to physical matter, those beings that have developed up to physical density, the esotericist designates - to have a word for it in our language - as the “eagle” stage of man. He described the physical human being of that time as the eagle. In esoteric language, the eagle is the human being of the Lemurian race, the human being who works his way up out of ethereal matter into dense matter.

Then comes the Atlantean race. Initially, they were only endowed with a denser etheric body. At that time, the human being was still able to master the seed life forces in plants. They heated their ships with the prana of the plants, as described in the book 'Atlantis' by Scott-Elliot. This shows us that in those days man had greater control over his etheric double than he has today. Later man will gain control over the higher bodies. The details of this process, which is a real, actual process, are described by the apocalypticist.

The second stage, in which man still has control over the etheric body, is referred to in the esoteric art term as the stage of the “Lion Man”. This is a technical term for the Atlantean.

Then comes the man of the fifth, the Aryan race, who is referred to by the word “bull”, because physical strength is the predominant expression.

If you take these three designations, you have three very specific successive stages of human development. Those who are initiated into certain mystery schools learn a very specific language and writing in which those who learn the comprehensive truths know how to express themselves in their experiences. It is a language that all initiates around the world write and speak. It is a symbolic language. Anyone who has learned it understands it and knows when they find a certain sign in old documents that it refers to something very specific.

I will mention some of these characters, the most elementary ones, in the course of these lectures. A frequently used symbol to characterize this stage of humanity is two interlocking triangles that together form a hexagonal figure. These two triangles always have something else in them when they appear in occult works. [Here - see drawing - in the angles filled with A, L and St are the images of the eagle, lion and bull. And here below is a triangle that symbolizes the previous states. The three angles remain unfilled. They represent the original three states of humanity. In the middle is always the actual human being. This constant element, which runs through all incarnations, remains through all stages. This is what is meant by the human being.

Here you have the four natures through which man has become human in the course of his development. You have indicated these in the two interlocking triangles. If you look at this sign, you will understand why these animals appear wherever an apocalyptic speaks about these three stages of development. They also appear with the prophet Ezekiel. With John they are described in a very special way.

The apocalypticists overcome that shell that separates people from the areas where they can see those earlier stages. For people to really be able to see what has taken place on earth, other organs must develop for them. Those stages of development that humanity has gone through and that have become imperceptible and unconscious to it must be revived. So the etheric body of the apocalyptic must be revived, he must begin to really see, to become an eye, a real eye.

Therefore, the chela must not only be able to project himself back to the stage of the eagle, to the stage of the lion and the bull, but he must also be able to project himself back to the stage of the seer. It is only in the third stage that the chela truly attains this vision.

What I have described here is what you will find in the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse [of John]. The Apocalypse not only describes the past stages of humanity, but also the future stages of human development. Only he can grasp this future who has an eye for the ascent to the use of the etheric body and the higher bodies, which, so to speak, have fallen out of use in the course of development. The human being of the fifth race can only move freely, can only become aware of himself in the physical body. But now he is developing in such a way that he can later become aware of himself again in the higher bodies.

We have developed and achieved a very deep development, the development of the purely physical mind, in the present sub-race of the fifth root race. Our present sub-race will be followed by the sixth and this by the seventh. This marks the end of our root race. Then comes a new, higher root race and then another one. This development consists of man finding his way more and more into the use of his higher bodies.

We are heading towards a very specific goal, because we are, after all, on the way from the fifth to the sixth race. In everything, the human being uses the physical mind, he uses a very specific moral code and a religion. This dominates him for the reason that the physical mind rules. The individual must essentially seek his fortune at the expense of others. The individual who strives for the higher already strives beyond what is required by general life. In occult schools, there are three words that describe the new age, the age of a new, later humanity. In the realm of social life, it is

That is why the Theosophical Society has included universal brotherhood as the most important item on its agenda, because it wants to prepare for life in the sixth root race. Man will only feel happy there if happiness is not attained at the expense of others. That is morality. Our science is materialistic. This will be different in the next sub-race. We are striving for a different scientific state. That is to say, “pneumatology, the doctrine of the spirit and of spiritual things, will be decisive in the new race. And especially in the sphere of religion, something will be decisive that is not possible today because the intellect is in the way: ‘self-authority’. Man will himself hear the tidings of the existence of a divine world spirit. That is the free religious principle of the next race. Brotherhood, pneumatology and self-authority in religious matters characterize the race that is gradually and slowly preparing itself, and which will shape the future. A seventh race will take on completely different forms, which we will deal with another time.

The race in which Christianity developed is the fourth. This was preceded by the third race. In certain periods of time, what has already taken place is repeated. The first three sub-races briefly repeated the eagle, lion and bull stages. These were preparatory races, while what the following race had to accomplish emerged within the fourth sub-race, which is essentially characterized by man or by God incarnate. Christianity arose within the fourth sub-race. Around the middle of the Middle Ages, it was replaced by the fifth, our present sub-race, which we broadly characterize as the “Germanic” one. It replaced the so-called “Latin race”; by this was understood everything that had slowly absorbed the stream of Christianity and also slowly developed in a spiritual sense in Europe. Before that, three other races went through it, which essentially briefly repeated the earlier conditions.

Within the Apocalypse, these seven conditions are expressed as the seven churches. The churches represent the seven sub-races. What is spoken to the church of Ephesus, to the church of Smyrna and so on, are the words that are addressed to the different sub-races. There are still members of the various races living in the world today, and there are still members of the first sub-race of the fifth root race. The Indian people essentially belong to this. The Indian people have expressed the culture of thought in the highest sense. The highest deification of thought was expressed in ancient India. This had to briefly repeat what Lemurian man had developed. The Lemurians were sentient beings. The members of our race are thinking beings. Memory only developed in the Atlantean race. The Lemurians had no memory. Although people in the first sub-race thought, they thought in sensations, and you can find an account of their thoughts in the ancient Vedic culture. You will read these works correctly if you read them with the thought that the thought revels in a wonderful world of feeling. In the cultures that serve thought more with memory, in which external custom then holds the culture of memory in the service of heroes, because the memory of a great inventor or discoverer or king is fixed in morality and in which the long catalogs are created that then led to the calendar. Much was noted in the first races by the ancient Indians and Persian magicians. And from these notes the first beginnings of the calendar emerged. From these first sub-races emerged the present-day humans. Man has advanced to the fifth race because he has understood: within himself is the God; because he has understood the apocalyptic advance.

But the first race, which expresses itself in the Vedas, could also most easily fall into error. The feeling is not yet strong enough for the thought to internalize itself. So it has come about that the Indian cultural epoch has two sides next to each other. On the one hand, we have the wonderful, lofty conceptions of spiritual deities, as we find them in the ancient Vedic culture, that wonderful religion of which those who do not know it cannot form a conception of the depth of the Vedanta. This is a purely spiritual teaching of such clarity that it is said in Europe – but this is more or less true: Every day that one penetrates anew into these wonderful depths is, for those who have already become accustomed to remaining silent and calm, yet another source of new admiration. Compared to what the ancient Vedic culture of India offers, the admiration that applies to our present-day life cannot be lasting. There is nothing that can be compared to what this ancient Indian culture offers. On the other hand, the people have fallen into the most abject idolatry. What is usually found in books about Indian culture is a colorful jumble of idolatrous and religious ideas that gives no real picture. The idolatry of the people must be distinguished from the great and powerful spiritual world of the Brahmins. The great bright sides of humanity always have great dark sides as well. People who often have members within their nation, within their tribe, who have attained the highest spiritual perfection, have themselves often remained attached to the most external things. The Apocalypse seeks to illustrate these phenomena that I have described to you in the church of Ephesus, on the one hand in those who have kept their first love, and on the other hand in those who have abandoned the works of their first love and have sunk back. The Nicolaitans are mentioned, who only see in outward appearances what man should strive for. A monumental word is to be directed to those who live in such a community.

I just wanted to show how world-important events are addressed by such a passage, as directed to the community of Ephesus, as a representative of these conditions:

I know your works, labor and patience; and how you cannot bear those who are evil, and you have tested those who say they are apostles, and they are not, and you found them false; and you have tolerance and patience, and for my name's sake you labor, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from whence you are fallen, and repent. And do the first works. Otherwise I will come unto you quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. But this you have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has ears, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who overcomes, to him I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. [Rev 2,2-7]

In the previous lecture, we took a look at the essence of human nature. Today, we will continue this consideration. Once we have learned the meaning of human development, we will better understand the main idea of John's gospel. This developmental process of humanity is the theme of the opening chapters. It wants to say, firstly, that it is this Christ Jesus that I want to make you understand. Secondly, the developmental process of all humanity is influenced by this Christ in a very specific way. From Christ onwards, the developmental process of the individual human being also became quite different. We must clearly understand the parallel between the developmental process of all humanity and that of the individual human being.

In the human being, the three highest elements of being are still undeveloped today. The higher these elements are in nature, the later they are worked through by the human being. Let us take a look at the evolution of humanity on earth through the different races. The main races of prehistoric times are the polaric, the hyperborean and the lemuric. In the first main race, the physical body is developed, in the second main race the etheric body, in the third the astral body, the body of feeling. So far man has progressed in the Lemurian period.

During the Atlantean period, the fourth main race, the sentient soul is formed out of the sentient body, followed by the rational soul and finally, towards the end of Atlantis, the consciousness soul with the ego, with which the fifth main race began, our present race. Before the awakening of the consciousness soul, the main abilities of man were language and memory. He could not yet combine, reason logically or calculate. It is only with the dawning of consciousness that the fifth main race begins, whose mission is to integrate Manas, the spirit self, into the human being and to educate it. With the awakening of Manas, the first sub-race of our root race develops. It is the Indian pre-Vedic culture. It is followed by the Persian, then the Chaldean-Egyptian-Hebrew, and fourthly the Greek-Latin. We ourselves belong to the fifth sub-race. We are going through the fifth stage of the development of Manas. We will be followed by the sixth sub-race with still other, higher tasks of human development.

The task of expressing the principle of manas is common to all of them. Each of the races does this in a special way. In detail, it happens something like this:

In the first sub-race, the sentient body or astral body had to accomplish the general manasic work of empathy. Our present physical body comprises a manifold, complicated sum of organ systems. In the age in which we live, it includes the bone and muscle system. The entire sensory apparatus is formed by the forces of the physical body. The etheric body causes all vegetative functions, all organs that serve nutrition, digestion, and reproduction. The astral body builds the nervous system into this bodily complex. All unconscious movements, all reflexes depend on the sympathetic nervous system, which extends symmetrically on both sides of the spinal cord. We call the part that extends into the abdominal cavity the solar plexus. In the Lemurian period, the sympathetic nervous system was the actual astral organ of perception. At that time, it was of a different nature and served clairvoyance. Under the influence of the sentient soul, the spinal cord was incorporated, which then became the brain under the influence of the mind soul, with the two cords of the spinal cord puffing up and widening at their ends, as it were. The forebrain did not develop until the end of the Atlantean epoch. Parallel to this development was another, namely the higher development of breathing and blood circulation, the processes of nutrition and growth.

At the beginning of the fifth root race, the human being was strongest in the sentient body, so that in the first sub-race, the Indian, Manas is sunk into the sentient body. The leaders of this epoch sought to awaken the old power of clairvoyance within themselves. The higher powers of the intellect, which were not yet strong enough, were excluded. Thus, with the help of the sympathetic nervous system, a dream-like clairvoyance was developed. Manas descended into the sympathetic nervous system and thus into the sentient body. In this way the whole wonderful dream world of ancient India becomes understandable, the great and wide, but dim and dull grasping of Brahman, the being beside oneself of the ancient yoga system.

In the second sub-race, the manas rises higher, into the sentient soul. The ancient Persians represent this to us. For them, the spirit self or manas lives in the sentient soul. The first expression of this is the confrontation between world and soul, between world and ego. This is expressed in the contrast between the spirit figures of Ormuzd and Ahriiman. Man seeks to overcome the resulting conflict through labor. Chaos, the disorderly matter, is to be overcome by the good God, who leads to the spiritual.

The third sub-race lives in the Egyptian, Assyrian and Israelite peoples. The Manas or spiritual self rises up into the mind soul. Manas in it now seeks to understand the world around it rationally. Or in other words: man seeks to find Manas in the cosmos. From this the wisdom-filled systems of Chaldean astrology arise, the combinations between the eternal laws that guide and move the cosmos and human destinies. The Chaldean priest-sage looks up to the stars, and the wonderful knowledge of planetary motion arises. But the rule of manas applies to a particular extent in the case of the one people, the chosen people. The Israelites apply the manasic principle in such a way that the people themselves are organized according to reason, as a unified national community. The legislation of Moses is a reflection of the star wisdom of the Chaldean priests.

In the fourth sub-race, the Greco-Latin, the spirit self penetrates as far as the consciousness soul. It is the awakening of consciousness when it takes itself by the scruff of the neck, as it were. The fully awakened consciousness now not only puts its intellect and its mind into the world, as in Jehovah's law, but in Hellas it puts its whole ego into its gods, into pure images of man. But Rome recreates its idealized ego in its state. The Greek gods and the Roman state are thus the image of what the ego has within itself and now seeks to make objective.

The fifth sub-race is our Anglo-Germanic race, which is to express the spirit-self in the spirit-self, Manas in Manas. That is, man will learn to comprehend what the spirit-self actually is; man will stand within Manas. Manas will finally work within itself. Today, only a few people really understand the manas. To grasp thinking with thinking, to catch thinking in thinking, to completely round off the snake of eternity, that is the task of the fifth sub-race. Thinking is the organ where the human being first grasps himself at one point. To stimulate this in man is the purpose of my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'.

The sixth sub-race is the future one. The spiritual self rises up to the level of the Budhi; there, as in Manas, a light from above, Budhi shines into man. But at first Budhi is still a gift from above. This illumination by Budhi corresponds to the Christian concept of Grace. The beginning of this inflow goes back to the fourth sub-race. We have to describe this point in time as the beginning of Christianity. And the one who brought Budhi into the earthly human world is the Christ Jesus. And the Christ Jesus appeared as the bringer of that power, which had been completely foreign until then.

To sum up: What man has acquired during the five races is Manas - Manas, the spiritual self. It is met, as a gift from above, by Budhi, which corresponds to the Christian basic idea of grace. This, then, is the theme of the Gospel of John. But how was the approach made to this? Two things must, had to come together in order for Budhi to really take effect: first, as the bearers of the previous development, people now had to have an organ for Budhi formed from Manas. They had to be thirsty for Budhi, thirsty to go beyond the intellect. Brain development, without connection to the higher limbs, always ends in a dead end; it does not go beyond manasic development, beyond astral things.

There were such people who, out of the manas, brought a highly developed soul organ to the Budhi. It must be so. No matter how much light there is, if there is no eye, it will not be perceived. It is the same with Budhi. There was a name for all those people who had developed such an organ, who were thirsty for Budhi, a generic name: John. It can also be applied to the Baptist. Christ and Budhi are the same spiritual current.

We must now also consider the other: Manas also transforms the physical man. Gradually, the organs grew stronger, the strengthening spinal cord gradually integrated itself, and new centers of power were constantly forming. As always, these spiritual processes had to be matched by physical ones. The task of the fifth main race was the establishment of Manas, and in the body, the formation of the brain. The sixth main race will see the establishment of Budhi; the perfection of the heart as a completely voluntary muscle. In the seventh main race: the establishment of Atman; the perfection of breathing.

We saw how the heart and respiratory organs formed. In the circulatory system, the development of the budhi is modeled on the heart. The heart is actually only at the beginning of its development. Anatomy is faced with a mystery, because it creates a hole in its theory. The heart is a striated muscle, like all voluntary muscles, but the heart is also an involuntary muscle. Thus it is now the case that it is destined to become an arbitrary muscle, and that is in the future, when Budhi is developed. The heart is organized for the future; it will then be an extremely important organ. Just as manas is nourished in man through the blood circulation, so manas will then work in the heart and from the heart.

Let us consider the historical development before and after the illumination of Budhi. Let us first turn our attention to the blood. The blood is influenced by the nervous system. It is only when the manasic development advances that the relationship to the blood changes. In the primeval times of all peoples we have the very special phenomenon of the so-called Nahehe. We have the small ethnic groups that all marry within their blood relationship. But in every people we find a transition to distant marriage, so that an intensive blood mixture occurs. Earlier groups of peoples were therefore related by descent; they had a common ancestor who was particularly revered, for example, among the Germanic tribes, the progenitor Tuisto.

The legends faithfully preserve the conflicts that arose from the breaking of the blood ties. The blood of such neighboring communities was influenced by the lower parts of the nervous system. This gave man clairvoyance and the intuitive distinction between good and evil; he had a sure moral instinct. The moment man steps out of nearness, it becomes impossible for him to delve into clairvoyance from within, from the sympathetic nervous system. With remoteness, instinctive guidance ceases and the external law begins. The original moral instinct disappeared with remoteness; the external law had to enter. Out of the night of the old instinct there dawned a moral guiding star. Then came the Mosaic Law religion as the custodian of morality. This will finally be replaced by a new light, the Christ-light, the spiritual guidance.

What the moral instinct was for the individual tribe, that is Budhi or the Christ Principle for all mankind. In Christ, this process has become flesh. Christ came when the tribal blood ties had loosened sufficiently for the tribal god to change into a god of all men, for blood brotherhood to become a duty towards every fellow human being, and for tribal loyalty to be extended to self- and god-loyalty. What sunlight is to matter, what intelligible truth to intellect, that is the Christ-light to the Budhi, the grace coming from above. Through the Budhi, the earlier is no longer decisive, neither the moral instinct given by blood ties nor the law of the priests, neither Moses nor tribal authorities at all, the last of which was Jehovah. Now the sentence applies: “Whoever does not leave father and mother and brother for my sake cannot be my disciple.” That is to say, anyone who does not forget the old tribal principles and does not extend blood love to all people cannot follow Christ. The old tribal gods had entered into indissoluble marriages with their peoples, and with their peoples they had to pass away. The Christ represents a completely new spirit in the world, which entered into humanity, and this spirit united with the human soul, which passes through the whole evolution. Those who bore the name John, the leading people of that time, were so far as to feel with the greatest strength the burning yearning for something that lies above mere legality and justice, that is, they thirsted for the new Son of Man. And the One Who satisfied this longing was the Christ, the Bridegroom of the soul of humanity in general, humanity itself being the Bride. Thus Christ or Budhi is indeed the only begotten Son of God: “He must increase, but I must decrease,” was the saying of John the Baptist. One of the greatest symbols of this wedding feast is the wedding at Cana in Galilee, a place where all kinds of peoples flocked together in a colorful, international mix. We see how a wedding feast is celebrated there. “And the mother of Jesus was also there,” it says. In the Gospel of John, the mother of Jesus is never called “Mary”, just as the author of the Gospel of John, the disciple whom the Lord loved, is never called “John”. The mother of Jesus is the human soul, and this must first mature before Christ can work in it. Hence the words: “Woman, what do I have to do with you? My hour has not yet come.” Never would such a high individuality as Christ have spoken thus to his mother.

The fourth chapter of the Gospel of John shows Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. Here you have Jacob, the representative of the tribal deity; the well: the old tradition from which one must draw and which does not satisfy. “Then the Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink of me, since I am a Samaritan woman?’ (For the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans).” Here you have the old law. But in place of what flowed through the tribal blood, a new principle of life was to come: the Budhi. “But whoever drinks the water that I give him will never thirst. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The man-God married the human soul, the Budhi descended into the Manas, and henceforth humanity could draw the consciousness of good and evil from another source, the source of the “living waters”, and no longer from the well of Father Jacob, the Mosaic legislation. For it is in this sense, and in no other, that the conversation of Christ Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman is to be understood.

Who was Christ? And what did he do for evolution? These are the big questions, and we will gradually approach their answers. Some of it may still be difficult to grasp, so we must first gradually strike notes that will resonate even more strongly.

So far Budhi radiates into it.

For the next, the sixth round, Budhi would have to do everything that Manas did in the fifth; on it the world pointer stopped at the end of the fifth main race and the fourth sub-race. In the seventh round, Atman would then have to be developed.

This is the 8th of 17 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1911. The title of this series of lectures is: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. This address was given following a Concert at the Berlin Group of the Anthroposophical Society, at which Mendelssohn's Overture of the Hebrides had been played).

Through the tones and harmonies of this Overture we have been led in spirit to the shores of Scotland, and in our souls, we have thus followed again a path of travel which, during the course of human evolution, has been deeply influenced by the secrets of karma. For, from entirely different parts of the western hemisphere of our earth, as if through a karmic current of migration, various peoples were once transplanted into that region, and its vicinity, to which these tones now lead us. And many strange destinies are made known to us. We are told, both by what Occultism relates as well as by outer historical documents, of what these peoples experienced in very ancient times on this particular part of the earth.

A memory of the mysterious destinies of these peoples arose again, as if newly awakened, when about 1772 the cave on the Island of Staffa belonging to the Hebrides, known as Fingal's Cave, was rediscovered. Those who beheld it were reminded of mysterious ancient destinies when they saw how Nature herself seemed to have constructed something which may be likened to a wonderful cathedral. It is constructed with great symmetry in long aisles of countless pillars towering aloft: above there arches a ceiling of the same stonework, while below the bases of the pillars are washed by the inrushing foaming waves of the sea which ceaselessly beat and resound with a music which is like thunder within this mighty temple. Dropping water drips steadily from strange stone formations upon the stalactites beneath, making melodious magical music.

A spectacle of this kind actually exists there. And those who, upon discovering it, had a sense for the mysterious things which once took place in this region, must have been reminded of the hero who once upon a time, as one of the most famous individualities of the West, guided destiny here in such a strange way, and whose fame was sung by his son, the blind Ossian, who is like a western Homer—a blind singer.

If we look back and see how deeply people were impressed by what they heard about this place, we shall be able to understand how it was that Macpherson's revival of this ancient song in the 18^th Century made such a mighty impression upon Europe. There is nothing which may be compared with the impression made by this poem. Goethe, Herder, Napoleon harkened to it—and all believed to discern in its rhythms and sounds something of the magic of primeval days. Here we must understand that a spiritual world such as still existed at that time, arose within their hearts, and felt itself drawn to what sounded forth out of this song! And what was it that thus sounded forth?

We must now turn our gaze to those times which fall together with the first impulses of Christianity and the few centuries which followed. What happened up there in the vicinity of the Hebrides, in Ireland and Scotland—in ancient Erin, which included all the neighboring islands between Ireland and Scotland, as well as the northern part of Scotland itself. Here we must seek for the kernel of those peoples, of Celtic origin, who had most of all preserved the ancient Atlantian clairvoyance in its full purity. The others who had wandered farther to the East had developed further, and so no longer remained in connection with the ancient gods. The western peoples, however, had preserved for themselves the possibility of experiencing an ancient clairvoyance now entirely immersed in the personality, in the individuality. And they were led to this particular part of the earth, as if for a special mission, where a structure confronted them which mirrored their own music's inner depths and was itself architecturally formed entirely out of the spiritual world, a structure which I have just tried to characterize with a few words—Fingal's Cave. We shall imagine these events rightly if we realize that the cave acted as a focus point, mirroring what lived in the souls of these human beings who, through their karma, were sent hither as to a temple erected by the gods themselves. Here those human beings were prepared who should later receive the Christ Impulse with their full human being and were here to undergo something extremely strange by way of preparation.

Again we shall be able to imagine all this if we realize that here particularly those ancient folk customs were preserved whereby the tribe was divided into smaller groups based upon family. Those who were related by blood felt themselves closely connected, while all others were looked upon as strangers, as belong[ing] to another Group Ego. During the migrations from Atlantis toward the East, all that the Druid priests, who remained behind here in the West, were able to give to the people poured itself out over these individual groups as a harmonizing influence. And what they were able to give still lived on in the bards. We shall only rightly understand what worked through these bards, however, if we make clear to ourselves that here the most elemental passions met together with the ancient powers of sight into the spiritual world, and that those who, with powerful life forces, sometimes with rage and passion, fought as representatives of their clan against other clans, perceived at the same time impulses working out of the spiritual world which directed them in battle.

Such an active connection between the physical and the soul realms cannot be conceived of today. When a hero raised his sword he believed that a spirit out of the air guided it, and in the spirit he beheld an ancestor who had fought upon this same battlefield in former times and who had gone up yonder to help now from over there. In their battle ranks they felt their ancestors actively aiding them, their ancestors on both sides—and they did not only feel them ... they heard them clairaudiently! It was a wonderful conception which lived in these peoples, that the heroes had to fight upon the battlefields and to shed their blood, but that after death they ascended into the spiritual world, and that their spirits then vibrated as tone—sounding through the air as a spiritual reality.

Those who had proven themselves in battle, but had trained themselves at the same time so that they could listen to what sounded out of the winds as the voice of the past, who were blind for the physical world, who could no longer see the flashing of the swords but were blind for the physical plane—these were highly honoured! And one of these was Ossian. When the heroes swung their swords, they were conscious that their deeds would resound further into the spiritual world and that bards would appear who would preserve all this in their songs. This was perceived in living reality by these peoples.

But all this creates an altogether different conception of humanity. It creates the conception that the human being is united with spiritual powers which sound forth out of the whole of Nature. For he cannot look upon a storm or a flash of lightning, he cannot hear the thunder or the surging of the sea without sensing that out of all the activities of Nature spirits work who are connected with the souls of the past, with the souls of his own ancestors. Thus the activity of Nature was at that time something altogether different than for us today. And it is for this reason that the rhythms and sounds of this song are so important, which, after being handed down for centuries through tradition only, were revived by the Scotsman Macpherson so that they create for us again a consciousness of the connection of the human being with the souls of his ancestors and with the phenomena of Nature.

We can understand how this Scotsman had in a certain sense a congenial feeling when he described how a line of battle stormed into the field, sweeping darkness before it, even as did the spirits who took part in the battle. This song is in reality something which was able to make a great impression upon spiritual Europe. The whole character of the description, even though given in a rather free poetical form, awakes in us a feeling for the kind of perception which lived in these ancient peoples. There was active in them a living knowledge, a living wisdom, concerning their connection with the spiritual world and the world of Nature in which the spiritual world works.

Out of such wisdom the finest sons from the different tribes—that is, those who had the strongest connection with the spirits of the past, who more than others allowed these spirits of the past to live in their deeds—were chosen as a picked band. And those who had the strongest clairvoyant forces were placed at its head. This band had to defend the kernel of the Celtic peoples against the peoples of the surrounding world. And one of these leaders was the clairvoyant hero, who has come down to us under the name of Fingal. How Fingal was active in the defense of the ancient gods against those who wished to endanger them—all this was handed down in ancient songs, heard out of the spiritual world—the ancient songs of the bard Ossian, Fingal's son, so that it remained alive even into the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. What Fingal achieved, what his son Ossian heard when Fingal had ascended into the spiritual realm, what their descendants heard in the rhythms and sounds of Ossian's songs with which they ever and again ensouled their deeds, this it was which worked on so mightily even into the 18^th Century. And we shall win a conception of this if we realize how Ossian allowed the voice of his father, Fingal, to sound forth in his songs.

We are told how the heroes find themselves in a difficult position. They are almost overthrown ... when new life fills the band: “The king stood by the stone of Lubar. Thrice he reared his terrible voice. The deer started from the fountains of Cromia. The rocks shook on all their hills. Like the noise of a hundred mountain streams, that burst, and roar, and foam! Like the clouds, that gather to a tempest on the blue face of the sky! So met the sons of the desert round the terrible voice of Fingal. Pleasant was the voice of the king of Morven to the warriors of his land. Often had he led them to battle; often returned with the spoils of the foe.”

“‘Come to battle,’ said the king, ‘ye children of echoing Selma! Come to the death of thousands. Comhal's son will see the fight. My sword shall wave on the hill, the defense of my people in war. But never may you need it, warriors; while the son of Morni fights, the chief of mighty men! He shall lead my battle, that his fame may rise in song! O ye ghosts of heroes dead! Ye riders of the storm of Cromia! Receive my falling people with joy, and bear them to your hills. And may the blast of Lena carry them over my seas, that they may come to my silent dreams, and delight my soul in rest’ ...”

“Now like a dark and stormy cloud, edges round with the red lightning of heaven, flying westward from the morning's beam, the king of Selma removed. Terrible is the light of his armor; two spears are in his hand. His gray hair falls on the wind. He often looks back on the war. Three bards attend the son of fame, to bear his words to the chiefs. High on Cromia's side he sat, waving the lightning of his sword, and as he waved we moved ...”

“Fingal at once arose in arms. Thrice he reared his dreadful voice. Cromia answered around. The sons of the desert stood still. They bent their blushing faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of the king. He came like a cloud of rain in the day of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower. Silence attends its slow progress aloft: but the tempest is soon to arise. Swaran beheld the terrible kings of Morven. He stopped in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear, rolling his red eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed, as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. It bends over the stream: the grey moss whistles in the wind: so stood the king. Then slowly he retired to the rising heath of Lena. His thousands pour around the hero. Darkness gathers on the hill!”

“Fingal, like a beam from heaven, shone in the midst of his people. His heroes gather around him. He sends forth the voice of his power: ‘Raise my standards on high, spread them on Lena's wind, like the flames of an hundred hills! Let them sound on the winds of Erin, and remind us of the fight. Ye sons of the roaring streams, that pour from a thousand hills, be near the king of Morven! Attend to the words of his power! Gaul, strongest arm of death! O! Oscar of the future fights! Connal, son of the blue shields of Sora! Dermid, of the dark brown hair! Ossian, king of many songs!—Be near your father's arm!’ We reared the sunbeam of battle; the standard of the king! Each hero exulted with joy, as, waving, it flew in the wind. It was studded with gold above, as the blue wide shell of the nightly sky. Each hero had his standard, too, and each his gloomy mien!”

Thus Fingal stormed into battle, thus he is described by his son Ossian.

No wonder that this life, this consciousness of a connection with the spiritual world which sank deep into these peoples, into the souls of the ancient Celts, is the best preparation whereby they could spread the personal divine element throughout the West in their own way and from their own soil. For what they had experienced in the form of passion and desire, what they had heard sounding forth in the melodies of the spiritual world, prepared them for a later time when they brought into the world sons who revealed these passions in their souls in a purified and milder form. And thus we may say—it seems to us as if Erin's finest sons were to hear again the voices of their ancient bards singing of what they once heard out of the spiritual world as the deeds of their forefathers, but as if in Erin's finest sons the ancient battle cries had now been formed and clarified, and had become words which could express the greatest impulse of mankind.

All this sounded forth out of olden times in the songs about the deeds of the ancient Celts who fought out many things in mighty battles in order to prepare themselves for further deeds of spiritual life in later times, as we recognize them again today in that which the finest sons of the West have achieved. These were the impulses which flowed into the souls of human beings in the 18^th Century, when these ancient songs were revived. And it is this which was remembered by those who saw again the wonderful cathedral, built as if by Nature herself, and which caused them to say to themselves—“Here is a site, a gathering place, given to man by karma, in order that what the bards were able to sing about the deeds of their ancestors, about all that the heroes did to steel their forces, might sound back to them as in an echo out of this temple which they themselves did not have to build—out of their holy temple which was built for them by the spirits of Nature and which could be an instrument of enthusiasm for all who beheld it.”

So the tones and harmonies of this Overture which we have just heard offer an opportunity which allows us to sense, in our own way at least, something of the deep and mysterious events which do indeed reign in the history of mankind, events which occurred long before our present era on almost the same soil upon which they now continue to live. As we must deepen ourselves in all that lives within us, and as all that lives within us is only a further resounding of what was there in the past, so this feeling, this sense, for what once was and now works further in mankind is of great significance for occult life.

Today's subject, the Rosicrucians, is one which few people are able to connect even remotely adequate ideas. And indeed, it is not easy to arrive at anything conclusive about what the name implies. For most people it remains extremely vague. If books are consulted, one is informed that the Rosicrucians are thought to be some Und of sect that flourished in the early centuries of German culture. Some say that it is impossible to verify whether anything serious or rational ever existed behind the fraud and charlatanry associated with the name. On the other hand, some learned books do proffer a variety of information.

If what is written about Rosicrucianism is true, one could only come to the conclusion that it has consisted of nothing but idle boasting, pure fraud or worse. Even those who have attempted to justify it, do so with an air of patronage, though they may have found that Rosicrucianism is able to throw light on certain subjects. But what they have to say about it, for example, that it is involved with alchemy, with producing the philosopher's stone, the stone of the wise, and other alchemical feats, does not inspire much confidence.

However, these feats were for the genuine Rosicrucian nothing but symbols for the inner moral purification of the human soul. The transformations represented symbolically how inner human virtues should be developed. When the Rosicrucians spoke of transforming base metals into gold, they meant that it was possible to transform base vices into the gold of human virtue.

Those who uphold that the great work of the Rosicrucians is to be understood as being symbolic are met with the objection that in that case Rosicrucianism is simply trivial. It is difficult to see the need of all these alchemical inventions, such as the transformation of metals, simply to demonstrate the obvious fact that a human being should be moral and change his vices into virtues.

However, Rosicrucianism contains things of far greater import. Rather than further historical description, I shall give a factual account of Rosicrucianism. The historical aspect need concern us only insofar as we learn from it that Rosicrucianism has existed in the Occident since the fourteenth century, and that it goes back to a legendary figure, Christian Rosenkreuz,¹ about whom much is rumored, but history has little to say.

One incident that appears as a basic feature of various accounts can be summed up by saying that Christian Rosenkreuz—that is not his real name, but the one by which he is known—made journeys at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. On journeys through the East he became acquainted with the book M————, a book from which, so we are mysteriously told, Paracelsus, the great medieval physician and mystic, gained his knowledge. This account is true, but what the book M————actually is, and what study of it signifies, is known only to initiates.

External information about Rosicrucianism stems from two writings that appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the so-called Fama Fraternitatis in 1614, and a year later the Confessio, two books much disputed among scholars. The disputes were by no means confined to the usual controversy about books, that is, whether Valentin Andreae,² who in his later years was an ordinary normal clergyman, was really the author. In this case it was also disputed whether the author meant the books to be taken seriously or whether they were meant as satire, mocking a certain secret brotherhood known as the Rosicrucians. These two publications were followed by many others proffering all kinds of information about Rosicrucianism.

Someone without knowledge of the true background of Rosicrucianism, who picks up the writings of Valentin Andreae, or indeed any other Rosicrucian document, will find nothing exceptional in them. In fact, right up to our own time, it has been impossible to gain even elementary knowledge of this spiritual stream that still exists, and has done so since the fourteenth century. Everything published, written or printed is nothing but fragments, lost through betrayal into public hands. Not only are these fragments inaccurate; they have undergone all kinds of distortions through charlatanry, fraud, incomprehension and sheer stupidity. As long as it has existed, genuine Rosicrucianism has been passed an by word of mouth to members sworn to secrecy. That is also why nothing of great importance has found its way into public literature.

We shall speak today about certain elementary aspects of Rosicrucianism that can now be spoken of in public, for reasons which at the moment would take us too far to explain. Only when they are known can one make any sense of what is found in the often grotesque, often merely comic, but also often fraudulent, and seldom accurate information.

Rosicrucianism is one of the methods whereby what is called "initiation" can be attained. What initiation is has often been a subject of discussion in our circles To be initiated means that faculties slumbering in every human soul are awakened. These faculties enable a person to look into the spiritual world that exists behind our physical world. The physical world is an expression of the spiritual world of which it is a product. An initiate is someone who has applied the method of initiation, a method as exact and as scientifically worked out as those applied in chemistry, physics or any other science. The difference is that the method of initiation is not applied to begin with to anything external, but only to the human being; he is the instrument, the tool through which knowledge of the spiritual world is attained. An individual who genuinely strives to attain knowledge of the spirit recognizes the deep truth contained in Goethe's words:

Mysterious by Day's broad light,
Nature retains her veil, despite our clamors,
and what she won't reveal to human mind or sight
Cannot be wrenched from her with levers, screws or hammers.

( Faust, Part I, Night. trans. Bayard Taylor. )

Deep indeed are the secrets nature holds, but not as impenetrably deep as those maintain who are too comfortable to make the effort. The human spirit is certainly capable of penetrating nature's secrets: not, however, through the soul's ordinary faculties, but through higher ones, attained when its hidden forces have been developed through certain strictly circumscribed methods. A person who gradually prepares will eventually reach a point where knowledge attainable only through initiation is revealed to him; to speak in Goethe's sense: The great secret is revealed of what “ultimately holds the world together”—a revelation that is truly a fruit of initiation.

It has often been explained that the early stages of initiation can be embarked upon by anyone without any danger whatever. A prerequisite for the higher stages is the very highest conscientiousness and devotion to Truth in spiritual research. When an individual approaches the portals through which he looks into quite different worlds, he realizes the truth of what is often emphasized: that it is dangerous to impart the holy secrets of existence to great masses of people. However, to the extent that modern humanity is able, through inner preparation, gradually to find their way to the highest secrets of nature and the spiritual world, to that extent can they also be revealed.

The spiritual scientific movement is a path that guides human beings to the higher secrets. A number of such paths exist. That is not to say that the ultimate truth attainable takes different forms. The highest truth is one. No matter where or when human beings ever lived or live, once they reach the highest Truth, it is the same for all. It is comparable to the view from the mountaintop, which is the same for all who reach it, no matter what different paths they choose to get there. When one stands at a certain spot an the mountainside, when a path is available, one does not walk round the mountain for another path. The same applies to the path of higher knowledge, which must be in accordance with a person's nature. What comes into consideration here is too often overlooked, that is, the immense differences in human nature. The people of ancient India were inwardly organized differently from modern people. This difference in the higher members is apparent to spiritual research, though not to the external science of physiology or anatomy. It is thanks to this fact that we have preserved up to our own time a wonderful spiritual knowledge, and also the method whereby initiation was achieved—the path of yoga. This path leads those who are constituted like the people of ancient India to the summit of knowledge. For today's European it is as senseless to seek that path as it would be to first walk to the opposite side of the mountain and use the path there rather than the path available where one stands. The nature of today's European is completely different from that of the Oriental. A few centuries before the Christian era began, human nature was different from what it was to become a few centuries later. And today it is different again.

As we have seen, initiation is based upon awakening in human beings certain forces. Bearing this in mind, we must acknowledge that a person's nature must be taken into account when methods are developed whereby he becomes the instrument able to perceive and to investigate the spiritual world.

The wonderful method developed by the Rishis, the great spiritual teachers in ancient India, is still valid for those belonging to the Indian race. At the beginning of the Christian era the right method was the so-called Christian-Gnostic path. The human being who stands fully within today's civilization needs a different method. That is why in the course of centuries and millennia the great masters of wisdom who guide mankind's evolution change the methods that lead to the summit of wisdom.

The Rosicrucian method of initiation is especially for modern people; it meets the needs of modern conditions. Not only is it a Christian path, but it enables the striving human being to recognize that spiritual research and its achievements are in complete harmony with modern culture, and with modern humanity's whole outlook. It will for long centuries to come be the right method of initiation into spiritual life. When it was first inaugurated, certain rules were laid down for its adherents—rules that are basically still valid, and because they are strictly observed, Rosicrucians are not recognized by outsiders. Never to let it be known that one is a Rosicrucian is the first rule that only recently has been slightly modified. While the wisdom is fostered in narrow circles, its fruits should be available to all humanity. That is why until recently no Rosicrucian divulged what enabled him to investigate nature's secrets. Nothing of the knowledge was revealed; no hint was given theoretically or otherwise, but work was done that furthered civilization and implanted wisdom in ways hardly noticeable to others.

That is the first basic rule; to elaborate it further would lead too far. Suffice it to say that today this rule has been partly relaxed, but the higher Rosicrucian knowledge is not revealed. The second rule concerns conduct, and may be expressed as follows: Be truly part of the civilization and people to which you belong; be a member of the class in which you find yourself. Wear the clothes that are worn generally, nothing different or conspicuous. Thus, you will find that neither ambition nor selfishness motivates the Rosicrucian; he rather strives wherever possible to improve aspects of the prevailing culture, while never losing sight of the much loftier aims that link him with the central Rosicrucian wisdom.

The other basic rules need not concern us at the moment. We want to look at the actual Rosicrucian training as it still exists and has existed for centuries. What it is possible to say about it deals only with the elementary stages of the whole system of Rosicrucian schooling. Something ought to be said about this training that applies to spiritual scientific training, namely, that it should not be embarked upon without knowledgeable guidance. What is to be said about this subject you will find in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.

The preliminary Rosicrucian training consists of seven stages that need not be absolved in the sequence here enumerated. The teacher will lay more emphasis on one point or another, according to the pupil's individuality and special needs. Thus, it is a path of learning and inner development, adapted to the particular pupil. These are the seven steps:

1. Study, in the Rosicrucian sense of the word
2. Acquisition of imaginative knowledge
3. Acquisition of the occult script
4. Bringing rhythm into life, this is also described as preparing the philosopher's stone. This has nothing in common with the nonsense written about it.
5. Knowledge of the microcosm, that is, of man's essential nature
6. Becoming one with the macrocosm or great world
7. Attaining godliness (Gottseligkeit).

The sequence in which the student passes through these preliminary stages of Rosicrucian training depends on the students personality, but they must be absolved. What I have said about it so far, and also what I am going to say, must be looked upon as describing the ideal. Do not think that these things can be attained from one day to the next. However, one can at least learn the description of what today may seem a far distant goal. A start can always be made provided it is realized that patience, energy and perseverance are required.

The first stage or study, suggests to many something dry and pedantic. But in this case what is meant has nothing to do with erudition in the usual sense. One need not be a scholar to be an initiate. Spiritual knowledge and scholarship have no dose connection. What is here meant by study is something rather different, but absolutely essential; and no genuine teacher of Rosicrucianism will guide the pupil to the higher stages if the student has no aptitude for what this first stage demands. It requires the student to develop a thinking that is thoroughly sensible and logical. This is necessary if the pupil is not to lose the ground under his feet at the higher stages. From the start it must be made clear that, unless all inclination towards fantasy and illusion is overcome, it is all too easy to fall into error when striving to enter spiritual realms. A person who is inclined to see things in a fanciful or unreal light is of no use to the spiritual world.

That is one reason; another is that though a person is born from the astral world, that is from the spiritual world next to the physical, as much as he is born from the physical world, what he experiences there is completely different from anything seen with physical sight or heard with physical ears. One thing, however, is the same in all three worlds—in the physical, the astral or spiritual, and the devachanic world—and that is logical thinking. It is precisely because it is the same in all three worlds that it can be learned already in the physical world, and thus provide a firm support when we enter the other worlds. If one's thoughts are like will-o-the-wisps so that no distinction is made between what is merely depicted and reality, then one is not qualified to rise into higher worlds. This happens for example in modern physics when the atom, which no one has even seen, is spoken of as if it were a material reality.

However, what we are discussing now is not what is generally meant by thinking. Ordinary thinking consists of combining physical facts. Here we are concerned with thinking that has become sense-free. Today there are learned people, including philosophers, who deny the existence of such thinking. Modern philosophers of great renown tell us that human beings cannot think in pure thoughts, only in thoughts that reflect something physical. Such a statement simply shows that the person concerned is not capable of thinking in pure thoughts. However, it is the height of arrogance to maintain that something is impossible just because one cannot accomplish it oneself. Human beings must be able to formulate thoughts that are not dependent on what is seen or heard physically. A person must be able to find himself in a world of pure thought when his attention is completely withdrawn from external reality. In spiritual science, and also in Rosicrucianism, this is known as self-created thinking. Someone who resolves to train his thinking in this direction may turn to books on spiritual science. There he will not find a thinking that combines physical facts, but thoughts derived from higher worlds, which present a self-sustaining continuous thinking. And as anyone can follow it, the reader is able to rise above the ordinary trivial way of thinking.

In order to make accessible the elementary stages of Rosicrucianism, it was necessary to make available in print and through lectures, material that had for centuries been guarded in closed circles. However, what has been released in recent decades is only the rudiments of an immeasurable, far-reaching world knowledge. In the course of time more and more will flow into mankind. Study of this material schools the pupil's thinking. For those who seek a still stricter schooling, my books Truth and Knowledge and The Philosophy of Freedom are particularly suitable. Those two books are not written like other books; no sentence can be placed anywhere but where it stands. Each of the books represents, not a collection of thoughts, but a thought-organism. Thought is not added to thought, each grows organically from the preceding one, like growth occurs in an organism. The thoughts must necessarily develop in like manner in the reader. In this way a person makes his own thinking with the characteristic that is self-generating. Without this kind of thinking the higher stages of Rosicrucianism cannot be attained. However, a study of the basic spiritual scientific literature will also school thinking; the more thorough schooling is not absolutely necessary in order to absolve the first stage of Rosicrucian training.

The second stage is the acquisition of imaginative thinking. This should only be attempted when the stage of study has been absolved, so that one possesses an inner foundation of knowledge and has made one's own thoughts that follow one another out of inner necessity. Without such a foundation it is all too easy to lose the ground under one's feet. But what is meant by imaginative thinking?

Goethe, who in his poem, The Mysteries, showed his profound knowledge of Rosicrucianism, gave a hint at what imaginative thinking was, in the words uttered by the Chorus Mysticus, in the second part of Faust: “All things transitory but as symbols are sent.” The knowledge that everything transitory was mere symbol was systematically cultivated wherever a Rosicrucian training was pursued. A Rosicrucian had to acquire an insight that recognizes in everything, something spiritual and eternal. In addition to ordinary knowledge of what he encountered an his journeys through life, a Rosicrucian had to acquire imaginative knowledge as well.

When someone meets you with a smiling face, you do not stop short at the characteristic contortion of his features, you see beyond the physiognomic expression and recognize that the smile reveals the person's inner life. Likewise you recognize tears to be an expression of inner pain and sorrow. In other words, the outer expresses the inner; through the physiognomy you perceive the depths of soul. A Rosicrucian has to learn this in regard to the whole of nature. As the human face, or the gesture of a hand, is the expression of a person's soul life, so, for the Rosicrucian, everything that takes place in nature is an expression of soul and spirit. Every stone, plant and animal, every current of air, the stars, all express soul and spirit just as do shining eyes, a wrinkled brow or tears. If you do not stop short at today's materialistic interpretation that regards what the Earth-Spirit says in Goethe's Faust as poetic fantasy, but recognize that it depicts reality, then you know what is meant by imaginative knowledge.

In the tides of life, in action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea.
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing,
Thus at time's humming loom 'tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears!

If for you these words of the Earth-Spirit depict spiritual reality, then you will know that you possess a deeper logic, and can calmly accept being called a fool by materialists who only think they understand. As the human physiognomy expresses the life of the human soul, so does the physiognomy of the earth express the life of the Earth-Spirit. When you begin to read in nature, when nature reveals its mysteries, and different plants convey to you the Earth-Spirit's cheerfulness or sorrow, then you begin to understand imaginative knowledge. Then you will also recognize that it is this that is presented as the purest and most beautiful expression of the striving for imaginative knowledge in Rosicrucianism, and also in what preceded Rosicrucian¬ism, the ideal of the Holy Grail.

Let us look for a moment at the true nature of the Holy Grail. This ideal is always found in every Rosicrucian school. The form it takes I shall describe as a conversation which, however, never took place in reality because what I shall summarize could only be attained in the course of long training and development. However, what I shall say does convey what is looked up to as the Quest of the Holy Grail:

Look how the plant grows out of the earth. Its stem strives upward; its roots are sunk into the ground, pointing towards the centre of the earth. The opening blossom contains its reproductive organs, which bear the seeds through which the plant continues beyond itself. Charles Robert Darwin,³ the famous natural scientist, is not the first to point out that, if a person is compared to the plant, it is the root, not the blossom, that corresponds to his head. This was said already by esoteric Rosicrucianism. The calyx, which chastely strives towards the sun, corresponds to the reproductive organs that in human beings are situated downwards. Human beings are inverted plants. A person turns downwards and covers up in shame the organs that the plant chastely turns upward to the light.

To recognize that the human being is the plant inverted is basic to Rosicrucianism, as indeed to all esoteric knowledge. Human beings turn their reproductive organs towards the centre of the earth; in the plant they turn towards the sun. The plant root points towards the centre of the earth; human beings Lift their heads unfettered towards sunlit spaces. The animal occupies a position between the two. The three directions indicated by plant, animal and human are known as the cross. The animal represents the beam across, the plant the downward, the human being the upward pointing section of the vertical beam. Plato, the great philosopher of antiquity, stated that the World¬Soul is crucified on the World-Body. He meant that human beings represent the highest development of the World-Soul, which passes through the three kingdoms of plant, animal and human. The World-Soul is crucified on the cross of plants, animal and human kingdoms. These words of Plato are spoken completely in the sense of spiritual science and present a wonderful and deeply significant picture.

The pupil in the Rosicrucian school had repeatedly to bring the picture before his mind of the plant with its head downward and the reproductive organs stretching towards the beam of the sun. The sunbeam was called the “holy lance of love” that must penetrate the plant to enable the seeds to mature and grow. The pupil was told: Contemplate man in relation to the plant; compare the substance of which man is composed with that of the plant. Man, the plant turned upside down, has permeated his substance, his flesh, with physical cravings, passion and sensuality. The plant stretches in purity and chastity the reproductive organs towards the fertilizing sacred lance of love. This stage will be reached by an individual when he has completely purified all cravings. In the future, when earth evolution has reached its height, a person will attain this ideal. When no impure desires permeate the lower organs, a person will become as chaste and pure as the plant is now. That individual will stretch a lance of spiritual love, the completely spiritualized productive force, towards a calyx that opens as does that of the plant to the holy lance of love of the sunbeam.

Thus, the human being's development takes him through the kingdoms of nature. He purifies his being until he develops organs of which there are as yet only indications. The beginning of a future productive power can be seen when human beings create something that is sacred and noble—a force they will fully possess once their lower nature is purified. A new organ will then have developed; the calyx will arise on a higher level and open to the lance of Amfortas, as the plant calyx opens to the sun's spiritual lance of love.

Thus, what the Rosicrucian pupil depicted to himself represents on a lower level the great future ideal of mankind, attainable when the lower nature has been purified and chastely offers itself to the spiritualized sun of the future. Then human nature, which in one sense is higher, in another lower than that of the plant, will have developed within itself the innocence and purity of the plant calyx.

The Rosicrucian pupil grasped all of this in its spiritual meaning. He understood it as the mystery of the Holy Grail⁴—mankind's highest ideal. He saw the whole of nature permeating and glowing with spiritual meaning. When everything is thus seen as symbol of the spirit, one is on the way to attain imaginative knowledge; color and sound separate from objects and become independent. Space becomes a world of color and sound in which spiritual beings announce their presence. The pupil rises from imaginative knowledge to direct knowledge of the spiritual realm. That is the path of the Rosicrucian pupil at the second stage of training.

The third stage is knowledge of the occult script. This is no ordinary writing, but one that is connected with nature's secrets. Let me at once make clear how to depict it. A widely used sign is the so-called vortex, which can be thought of as two intertwined figure 6's. This sign is used for indicating and also characterizing a certain type of event that can occur both physically and spiritually. For example, a developing plant will finally produce seeds from which new plants similar to the old one can develop. To think that anything material passes from the old plant to the new is materialistic prejudice without foundation and will eventually be refuted. What passes over to the new plant is formative forces. As far as matter is concerned, the old plant dies completely; materially its offspring is a completely new creation. This dying and new coming-into-being of the plant is indicated by drawing two intertwining spirals, that is, a vortex, but drawing it so that the two spirals do not touch.

Many events take place, both physical and spiritual, that correspond to such a vortex. For example, we know from spiritual research that the transition from the ancient Atlantean culture to the first post-Atlantean culture was such a vortex. Natural science only knows the most elementary aspects of this event. Spiritual science tells us that the space between Europe and America, which is now the Atlantic Ocean, was filled with a continent on which an ancient civilization developed, a continent that was submerged by the Flood. This proves that what Plato referred to as the disappearance of the Island of Poseidon is based on facts; the island was part of the ancient Atlantean continent. The spiritual aspect of that ancient culture vanished, and a new culture arose. The vortex is a sign for this event; the inward-turning spiral signifies the old civilization and the outward-turning the new.

As the transition took place from the old culture to the new, the sun rose in spring in the constellation of Cancer—as you know the sun moves forward in the course of the year. Later it rose in early spring in the constellation of Gemini, then in that of Taurus and later still in that of Aries. People have always felt that what reached them from the vault of heaven in the beams of the early spring sun was especially beneficial. This is why people venerated the ram when the spring sun rose in the constellation of Aries; it is also the reason for legends such as “The Golden Fleece” and others. Earlier than that the sun rose in spring in the constellation of Taurus, and we find in ancient Egypt the cult of the bull Apis. But the transition from Atlantis to post-Atlantis took place under the constellation of Cancer, whose sign is the intertwining spirals—a sign you find depicted in calendars.

There exist hundreds and thousands of such signs that the pupil gradually learns. The signs are not arbitrary; they enable those who understand them to immerse themselves in things and directly experience their essence. While study schools the faculty of reason, and imaginative knowledge the life of feelings, knowledge of the occult script takes hold of the will. It is the path into the realm of creativity. If study brings knowledge, and imagination spiritual vision, knowledge of the occult script brings magic. It brings direct insight into the laws of nature that slumber in things, direct knowledge of their very essence.

You can find many who make use of occult signs, even people like Eliphas Levi. This can provide an idea of what the signs look like, but not much can be learned, unless one is knowledgeable about them already. What is found in books an the subject is usually erroneous. The signs used to be regarded as sacred, at least by the initiates. If we go back far enough, we find that strict rules concerning their secrecy were imposed, incurring severe punishment if broken, to ensure they were not used for unworthy purposes.

The fourth stage is known as the preparation of the philosopher's stone (the stone of the wise). What is written about it is completely misleading; often it is such grotesque nonsense that if true anyone would be entitled to be scornful. What I am going to say will give you a great deal of insight into the truth of the matter.

At the end of the eighteenth century there appeared in an earnest periodical a notice concerning the philosopher's stone. It was clear from the wording of the notice that its author had some knowledge of the matter, yet gave the impression that he did not fully understand. The notice read: The philosopher's stone is something that all are acquainted with, something they often handle, and is found all over the world. It is just that people do not know that it is the philosopher's stone. A peculiar description of what the philosopher's stone was supposed to be, yet word for word quite correct.

Consider for a moment the process of human breathing. The regulation of the breath is connected with the discovery, or preparation of, the philosopher's stone. At present human beings inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, that is, what is exhaled is a compound of oxygen and carbon. A person inhales oxygen, life-giving air, and exhales carbon dioxide, which is poisonous to both human and animal. If animals, who breathe like human beings, had alone populated the earth, they would have poisoned the air, and neither they nor humans would be able to breathe today. So how does it come about that they are still able to breathe? It is because plants absorb the carbon dioxide, retain the carbon and give back the oxygen for human and animal to use again.

Thus, a beautiful reciprocal process takes place between the breath of humans and animal, and the breath, or rather assimilation, of the plant world. Think of someone who every day earns five shillings and spends two. He creates a surplus, and is in a different position than someone who earns two shillings but spends five. Something similar applies to breathing. However, the significant point is that this exchange takes place between human beings and the vegetable kingdom.

The process of breathing is indeed quite amazing, and we must look at it in a little more detail. Oxygen enters the human body; carbon dioxide is expelled from it. Carbon dioxide consists of oxygen and carbon; the plant retains the carbon and gives a person back the oxygen. Plants that grew millions of years ago are today dug out of the earth as coal. Looking at this coal we see carbon that was once inhaled by the plants. Thus, the ordinary breath, just described, shows how necessary the plant is to a person's life. It also shows that when humans breathe they accomplish only half the process; to complete it they need the plant that possesses something they lack to transform carbon into oxygen.

The Rosicrucians introduce a certain rhythm into the breath, detail of which can only be imparted directly by word of mouth. However, certain aspects can be mentioned without going into details. The pupil receives definite instruction concerning rhythmic breathing accompanied by thoughts of a special nature. The effect must be thought of as comparable to the persistent drip of water that wears away the stone. Certainly even the most highly developed person will not attain, by breathing in the Rosicrucian manner, a complete transformation of the inner life processes from one day to the next. However, the gradual change wrought in the human body leads eventually to a specific goal. At some time in the future a person will be able to transform within his own being carbonic acid into oxygen. Thus, what today the plant does for human beings—transforming the carbonic acid in the carbon¬will be done by man himself when the effect of the changed breath has become great enough. This will take place in an organ he will then possess, of which physiology and anatomy as yet know nothing, but which is nevertheless developing. An individual will accomplish the transformation himself. Instead of exhaling carbon a person will use it in his own being; with what he formerly had to give over to the plant he will build up his own body.

All this must be thought of in conjunction with what was said about the Holy Grail: that the purity and chastity of the plant nature would pan over into human nature. When a person's lower nature has reached the highest level of spirituality, it will in that respect be once more at the level of the plant as it is today. The process that takes place in the plant, a person will one day be able to carry out in his own being. He will more and more transform the substance of his present body into the ideal of a plant body, which will be the bearer of a much higher and more spiritual consciousness. Thus, the Rosicrucian pupil learns the alchemy that eventually will enable a person to transform the fluids and substances of the human body into carbon. Thus, what the plant does today—it builds its body from carbon—human beings will one day accomplish. He will build a structure from carbon that will be a person's future body. A great mystery lies hidden in the rhythm of the breath.

You will now understand the notice about the philosopher's stone alluded to earlier. But what is it that human beings will learn in regard to building up the human body in the future? They will learn to create ordinary coal—which is also what diamonds consist of—and from it build their body. Human beings will then possess a higher and more comprehensive consciousness. They will be able to take the carbon out of themselves and use it in their own being. They will form their own substance, that is, plant substance made of carbon. That is the alchemy that builds the philosopher's stone. The human body itself is the retort, transformed in the way indicated.

Thus, behind the rhythm of the breath lies hidden what is alluded to as the search for the philosopher's stone; though what is usually said about it is pure nonsense. The indications given here have only recently reached the public from the School of the Rosicrucians; you will not find them in any books. They represent a small part of the fourth stage: The quest of the philosopher's stone.

The fifth stage, or knowledge of the microcosm, the small world, points to something said by Paracelsus to which I have often referred, namely, that if we could draw an extract out of everything around us, it would prove to be like an extract taken from mankind. The substances and forces within us are like a miniature recapitulation of what exists in the rest of nature. When we look at the world around us we can say: What is within us is like a copy of the great archetype that exists outside. For example, take what light has brought about in human beings: ft created the eyes. Without eyes we would not see the light; the world would remain dark for us, and likewise for the animals. Those animals that wandered into dark caves to live, in Kentucky, lost the ability to see. If light did not exist we would not have eyes. The light enticed the organs of sight out of the organism. As Goethe said: “The eye is created by the light for the light, the ear by the sound for the sound.”

Everything is born from the microcosm. Hence, the secret that under certain instruction and guidance it is possible to enter deeply into the body, and investigate not only what pertains to the body, but to the spiritual realm, and also to the world of nature around us. A person who learns under certain conditions to immerse himself with certain thoughts meditatively in the inner eye will learn the true nature of light. Another area of great significance is between the eyebrows at the root of the nose. By meditatively sinking into this point one learns of important spiritual events that took place as this part of the head was formed from the surrounding world. Thus, one learns the spiritual construction of the human being. He is completely formed and built up by spiritual beings and forces. That is why he can, by delving into his own form, learn about the beings and forces that built up his organism.

A word must be said about delving into one's inner being. This penetrating down from the “I” into the bodily nature, and also the other exercises, ought only to be undertaken after due preparation. Before a start is made the powers of intellect and reason must be strengthened. That is why in Rosicrucian schools the training of thinking is obligatory. Furthermore, the pupil must be inwardly morally strong; this is essential as he may otherwise easily stumble. As a student learns to sink meditatively into every part of his body, other worlds dawn in him.

The deeper aspects of the Old Testament cannot be understood without this sinking into one's inner being. However, it must be done according to certain directions provided by a spiritual scientific training. Everything that is said here in this respect is derived from the spiritual world and can only be fully understood when one is able to discover it again within oneself. Man is born out of the macrocosm; within himself as microcosm he must rediscover its forces and laws. Not through anatomy does man learn about his own being, but through looking into his being and inwardly perceiving that the various areas emit light and sound. The inward-looking soul discovers that each organ has its own color and tone.

Human beings will have direct knowledge of the macrocosm when they learn to recognize, through a Rosicrucian training, what it is in their own being that is created from the universe. Once they know their inner being through meditatively sinking into the eye, or into the point above the root of the nose, human beings can spiritually recognize the laws of the macrocosm. Then, through their own insight, they will understand what it is that an inspired genius describes in the Old Testament. An individual looks into the Akasha Chronicle and is able to follow mankind's evolution through millions of years.

This is insight that can be attained through a Rosicrucian training. However, the training is very different from what is customary. Genuine self¬knowledge is neither reached by aimless brooding within oneself nor in believing, as is often taught nowadays, that by looking into oneself the inner god will speak. The power to recognize the great World-Self is attained by immersing oneself in the organs. It is true that down the ages the call has resounded: “Know thyself,” but it is equally true that within one's own being the higher self cannot be found. Rather, as Goethe pointed out, one's spirit must widen until it encompasses the world.

That can be attained by those who patiently follow the Rosicrucian path and reach the sixth stage, or becoming one with the macrocosm. Immersing oneself in one's inner being is not a path of comfort. Here phrases and generalities do not suffice. It is in concrete reality that one must plunge into every being and phenomenon and lovingly accept it as part of oneself. It is a concrete and intimate knowledge, far removed from merely indulging in phrases like: “Being in harmony with the world”; “being one with the World-Soul,” or “melt together with the world.” Such phrases are simply valueless compared with a Rosicrucian training. Here the aim is to strengthen and invigorate human soul-forces, rather than chatter about being in tune with the infinite and the like.

When a human being has attained this widening of the self, then, the seventh stage is within reach. Knowledge now becomes feeling; what lives in the soul is transformed into spiritual perception. A person no longer feels that he lives only within himself. He begins to experience himself in all beings: in the stone, plant and animal, in everything into which he is immersed. They reveal to him their essential nature, not in words or concepts, but to his innermost feelings. A time begins when universal sympathy unites him with all beings; he feels with them and participates in their existence. This living within all beings is the seventh stage, or attaining godliness (Gottseligkeit), the blessed repose within all things. When the human being no longer feels confined within his skin, when he feels himself united with all other beings, participating in their existence, and when his being encompasses the whole universe so that he can say to it all: “Thou are that,” then the words which Goethe, out of Rosicrucian knowledge, expresses in his poem The Mysteries will have meaning: “Who added to the cross the wreath of roses?”

However, these words can be spoken not only from the highest point of view, but from the moment that “the cross wreathed in roses”—what this expresses—has become one's ideal, one's watchword. It stands as the symbol for a human being's overcoming the lower self in which he merely broods, and his rising from it into the higher self that leads a person to the blissful experience of the life and being of all things. He will then understand Goethe's words in the poem: West-East Divan

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

Unless one can grasp what is meant by the overcoming of the lower, narrow self and the rising into the higher self, it is not possible to understand the cross as symbol of dying and becoming—the wood representing the withering of the lower self, and the blossoming roses the becoming of the higher self Nor can the words be understood with which we shall dose the subject of Rosicrucianism—words also expressed by Goethe, which as watchword belong above the cross wreathed in roses symbolizing sevenfold man:

The power that holds constrained all humankind,
The victor o'er himself no more can bind.

Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet
Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich überwindet.

• 1. Christian Rosenkreuz (15th century) was the founder of Rosicrucianism, a group of secret brotherhoods claiming esoteric wisdom in the late Middle Ages.
• 2. Valentin Andreae (1586–1654) theologian, wrote about Rosicrucianism.
• 3. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) the English naturalist who first formulated the theory of evolution.
• 4. Holy Grail, a cup or chalice, associated in medieval legend with unusual powers, especially the regeneration of life and water, and later with Christian purity. Became identified with the cup used at the Last Supper and given to Joseph of Arimathea.

Basically Spiritual Science aims at understanding humanity in its essence, tasks, and strivings in the course of evolution. We have often talked about how the outside world misunderstands our spiritual science. This is largely because people nowadays have a hard time getting used to certain fundamental truths—truths that simply must be perceived and acknowledged if we are to understand the life and nature of humanity at all.

Let us begin today by asking what modern scientific thinking, whose great and significant triumphs over the last four centuries we must fully acknowledge and appreciate, is based on. It is based on what it can perceive, on what is manifest, in physical existence. Now, of course, it goes without saying that first we trust in what we perceive as so-called reality in our environment, and then we try to explain this reality on the basis of all that we find within its domain. It is naturally difficult for us to be aware at the outset that this reality itself may well contain an element of semblance or illusion, that it may well be deceiving us. Those who truly want to understand spiritual science must first overcome this stumbling block. They must realize that the reality around us can indeed deceive us—it can mislead us into interpreting it falsely. Much of what we have learned in spiritual science over the years has convinced us that immediate reality, as it surrounds us, may indeed be deceptive.

Today we will start from a particular point that can only be reached through spiritual science. In spiritual science we must first understand things; then, when we have understood them, we can find them confirmed in reality. Some of the most important things in spiritual science must first be understood before they can be seen. It would be easy to show that this same method is frequently applied in the outer world, notably in the sciences, but we will not go into that today. It is not always possible to develop everything from the beginning.

Now one aspect of the outer appearance or physiognomy of reality that is most apt to deceive us about this reality is the differences, the diversities among human beings. When we look at the human beings inhabiting the earth, we realize that no two of them are alike on the physical plane. Here in the physical realm all human beings are different from one another. Once we have accepted this diversity of human beings as a fact—I mean the diversity of their physical bodies—it is quite natural that people then try to find out, on the basis of the facts of earthly life, why human beings are different, why they look so different.

However, from the point of view of spiritual science we see something very different. According to spiritual science, if we consider only the forms the physical body can take through the forces of the earth, we find that human beings could not be different but rather would all have to be alike and have the same outer form. Indeed, the forces that exist on earth to give us our physical shape are such that if only these formative forces were to work on us, we would all have the same outer, physical form. This is because the physical human body has undergone a long preparation. We know it was prepared through the epochs of Saturn, Sun, and Moon.¹ It was prepared by forces that worked during these three epochs in such a way that the forces of the earth itself could influence our physical body in no other way than to give it a uniform shape if they had indeed been the only forces at work. I might put it this way: Through all the forces that have been incorporated into our physical body during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs, we human beings are so fortified against any diversities coming from earthly forces that if we were left to the earthly forces alone, we would be alike everywhere on earth. Spiritual science, therefore, must start from the fact that a single and uniform shape is predestined for humanity so far as the terrestrial forces are concerned.

Even if we consider just the difference between male and female what I have just said is true. This difference is not caused by the work of earthly forces; it is the result of quite other forces, which we will speak of presently. Thus, we can assume a certain totality of earth forces that works formatively upon human beings and wants to produce absolutely identical human forms everywhere on earth.

Of course, we must now ask why human beings are so different after all. We know we must consider not only our physical body, but also the etheric body that stands behind it. Spiritual science shows us that while we should all be alike in our physical body, in regard to our etheric body we must be different because earthly forces are not the only ones that work on our etheric body. Forces coming out of the cosmos work on our etheric body, forming and shaping it.

We must therefore distinguish between the uniform earthly forces working all over the earth that would make all human forms the same and the forces working out of the universe on the earth, making each etheric body different. We can see the differences between etheric bodies through spiritual scientific research. At the one extreme are those etheric bodies that have strong forces and are tough, retaining their form almost as much as we do our physical form. This is one kind of etheric body. There is a second kind that is mobile, like something that is fluttering and always in movement, flowing and moving. But these two kinds of etheric bodies still reveal themselves in such a way that we can describe their inner tone and shading as being more or less alike. There is another kind of etheric body that is inwardly tinted, inwardly shimmering, not uniform in color but having various tones and colors. There is a fourth kind of etheric body that has one primary color throughout its whole substance, but this color changes over time though we cannot pinpoint other than purely inward causes for this. These etheric bodies are not shimmering in different colors or shaded in many tones; they have only one color, but they change it in the course of time. We may call them chameleon-like etheric bodies.

Then there are those etheric bodies that have a strong tendency to light up inwardly, growing at times brighter and brighter. Other etheric bodies have a powerful faculty to reproduce the harmonies of the spheres. Finally, there are those etheric bodies that appear especially in inventive people and persons of genius—etheric bodies that, if I may say so, reveal forces within them that are rare and strange in this earthly world. Whereas the above-mentioned six kinds of etheric bodies are found among ordinary, even average, human beings, the last kind of etheric body produces the type of human being with powerfully developed faculties, those we often say are “not of this earth”—poets, artists, and the like.

It is not by arbitrarily picking the number seven that we distinguish these seven forms of etheric bodies. We simply have to count, and we find no others besides those I have just described as typical. For this simple reason, there are seven kinds of etheric bodies. There are seven different kinds of human etheric bodies, and in the etheric bodies we have forces that are not earthly, but come in from the cosmos.

Our etheric body forms and molds the physical body. If only earthly forces worked on us, we would all be alike in our physical body. However, the influence of the etheric body makes us different. The astral body brings about further differences, such as those between male and female bodies, through forces it develops between death and a new birth, during the time when we prepare ourselves for the gender that karma requires us to have in the next incarnation.

But for the moment, let us just look at the etheric body. If we take only earthly forces into account, we can say that our physical bodies would have to be alike. However, because our etheric bodies differ in their constitution, composition, and structure in the cosmos, there would have to be seven groups of human beings. This is the fact we gradually arrive at when we investigate the relationship between our etheric body and our physical body with the methods of spiritual science. Now this difference is connected with the racial diversities on the earth. Basically, because of this difference in etheric bodies, the several races can always be reduced to the number seven. Even though certain typical forms atrophy, and though natural science may distinguish fewer than seven basic races, there are really seven basic racial distinctions in the human species. These diversities are brought about by the etheric body; they do not result from the earthly forces that work during our evolution, but originate in cosmic forces.

Now, when we trace the evolution of the earth back into the Atlantean or even into the Lemurian epochs, we find that initially impulses and tendencies existed that would have prevented our physical body from developing the physiognomy it now has through the power of the etheric body—that is, the diversities. Instead, if everything had gone a certain way (we shall see directly in what way), the seven-colored etheric body would have brought about diversities in our physical form, but successively, one after the other. Thus, the etheric body would have created one form of human being in the fifth period of Atlantis, a second in the sixth period of Atlantis, a third in the seventh, a fourth in the first post-Atlantean period, a fifth in the second post-Atlantean period, a sixth in the third, and a seventh in the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, in the Greco-Roman time.

That is what would have happened; various types of human beings would have appeared one after the other. Thus, in the fifth Atlantean period we would have had human beings in whose physical formation one type of etheric body would have predominated. In the sixth Atlantean period, the second of the etheric bodies just described would have been at work, and so on right until the fourth post-Atlantean period. That was the original conception. However, Lucifer and Ahriman opposed this; they did not want it to happen that way. They fought against this harmonious tendency of development in the evolution of humanity, and they managed to change the whole process so that various developments were shifted and displaced. While there should have been basically only one form of human being in the fifth Atlantean period that was to develop gradually into another type, Lucifer and Ahriman preserved the form of the fifth Atlantean period into the sixth, and again that of the sixth Atlantean period into the seventh, and even into the time after the Atlantean flood.

Thus, forms that should have disappeared remained. Instead of racial diversities developing consecutively, older racial forms remained unchanged and newer ones began to evolve at the same time. Instead of the intended consecutive development of races, there was a coexistence of races. That is how it came about that physically different races inhabited the earth and are still there in our time although evolution should really have proceeded as I have described it. Even when we consider only what resulted from the development of the etheric body, we see everywhere that Lucifer and Ahriman play their part in the earthly evolution of humanity.

Now we must ask what the intended consecutive development of humanity up until the Greco-Roman epoch meant in the larger cosmic context. As we know, around the Atlantean time, human souls gradually came down from the planets to which they had ascended. You may remember that I described in my An Outline of Occult Science that the souls had ascended and then came down again and that the life of earthly incarnations, properly speaking, begins with their descent.² Thus, the I of human beings, their individualities, would have gone through the various human forms mentioned above in consecutive periods. In the fifth Atlantean period, the I would have had one human form, in the sixth another, in the seventh again another; in the first post-Atlantean epoch it would have had yet another form, and so on. We would all have lived through these types of humanity, one after the other.

Indeed, it was planned that human beings would thus complete the necessary schooling of human individuality by passing through various etheric formations that had different effects on their physical body. In fact, according to the original plan, there could have been a type of human being on the earth who would have been the result, as it were, of seven successive periods of development, each of which would have contributed to the perfection of that human type. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, then, there would have been one united type of human being spread over the whole face of the earth.

However, Lucifer and Ahriman interfered and thwarted the original design. As a result, the ancient Greeks could only dream of an ideal, superhuman type, which they tried to represent in various ways, for example, in the form of Apollo, Zeus, or Athena. They could not fully encompass this type simply because it did not really exist. But if we have a sense for Greek sculpture, we can feel how the ancient Greeks dreamed of a uniform, perfect, beautiful type of human being that should have developed. This development did not occur because Lucifer and Ahriman preserved older racial forms that had developed, so that there was a coexistence of races rather than a succession.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the Greco-Roman era, human evolution was faced with the fact that what the gods guiding the evolution of the earth had intended for the outer forms on this earth had not been realized because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. The spirits of the hierarchy of form had intended that the harmonious working of the various hierarchies of form should really lead to a human type with perfect physical development. As it turned out, the ancient Greeks could only dream of this perfect type and express it in their art.

It is a deeply moving experience to realize in the course of spiritual research why the Greeks created such perfection in their plastic art. They did it because through a soul-spiritual instrument they perceived that Lucifer and Ahriman had disappointed the good divine-spiritual beings, whose plans for humanity were different from the development that actually occurred. What should have developed through the work of these good divine-spiritual beings weighed on the ancient Greeks' minds, and so they wanted to at least represent it even though it did not exist in outer reality. It is great and wonderful and also deeply moving to behold these inner forces of human evolution that appear there in artistic forms, striving to express what could not be achieved in outer reality. Such insights shed new light on Greek art as it was developed so uniquely and unrepeatably at that time.

The Greek era was also the time when humanity faced a crisis because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. Lucifer and Ahriman had caused races to live side by side instead of one after the other. At the same time, however, all the forces the spirits of form were pouring into human evolution on the earth were immobilized. Now they could do no more than stimulate and inspire the creative imagination of the Greeks so that it developed as I have described it. The spirits of form had to decide whether the human race should continue to develop so that human beings would never again be united in earthly evolution. For this indeed is what would have happened. If earthly evolution had continued beyond the fourth, the Greco-Roman period, in the same way it was prior to that, then humanity would have become separated into seven groups due to luciferic and ahrimanic forces. These seven groups would have been as different from each other as the various species of animals. Animal species do not understand each other, but regard each other as foreign. Similarly, toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period and in the fifth one, in which we live, people would have had to develop more and more the view that there are seven groups of human beings on earth that see each other as completely different species. This view would still have prevailed in our time; in fact, the separation between the seven groups would not yet have reached its culmination or completion, but would still be developing and widening. The term “human being” for all people on earth would have seemed wrong; we would have had seven different terms, one for each of the seven groups.

Therefore, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, in the Greco-Roman period, something had to be done in the universe to forestall the development that threatened to result in the future, at the end of earth evolution, namely, the evolution of seven groups of human beings, each called by a different name, just as each animal species has a different name. These groups would not have regarded each other as belonging to the same species, and at most there would have been handed down to them some copy of the Greek forms, such as the statues of Zeus or Apollo. They would have regarded these statues as something alien to them—something that could never have existed on earth. Precautions had to be taken to prevent such a development. Physical evolution had already gone too far and could not be changed anymore. Therefore, precautions had to be taken for our etheric body; an impulse had to enter our etheric body that would counteract the separating of earthly humanity into seven groups. This impulse that was to counteract the growing fragmentation of humanity and that was to make it possible for the term “human being” to retain—and, in fact, increase—its true meaning over the whole face of the earth was the Mystery of Golgotha, which we can now see in a new light.

The first attempt that had been made with earthly humanity before the luciferic and ahrimanic impulses interfered in evolution was to create unity among human beings everywhere through the forming of the physical body. This attempt by the spirits of form failed because of luciferic-ahrimanic interference. But it could not be allowed to fail altogether; precautions had to be taken to prevent complete failure and to immobilize and offset the work of Lucifer and Ahriman. The physical body could no longer be worked on as was originally intended; therefore, the etheric body had to be worked on. This was done by the divine-spiritual being we have so often spoken of—the Christ Being—taking on human form at the time in human evolution when the possibility to express the archetype of humanity was the greatest.

At what period in human evolution was this? All the forces that counteract the original, identical design of our physical body are at work in us mostly in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is still soft and pliant. They do not allow our physical body to become the same everywhere, but from within the body they immobilize the forces for the original identical design.³ These opposing forces can still go on working in the second seven years until puberty; indeed, they can even continue to work in the third and fourth seven-year periods during the development of the astral body and the sentient soul. However, in the middle of the development of the intellectual or mind soul, which evolved above all in the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman time, the extra-earthly forces are less and less able to reach us. And in the very midst of this development, that is, in the period between our twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, they have least access to us. If we add two years at the beginning of this period and subtract two years at the end, the time in question is that between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year. In the time following those years, extra-earthly forces once more have the greatest influence. The period from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, however, is the time of the greatest influence of earthly forces on the human being. And if in this period of three years there remained only the degree of diversity that existed in younger years and only what is to appear in later years would be added—in short, if only what works on human beings between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year remained effective, then people would indeed be much more alike.

Christ had to use these three years—very special and unique years—to unite with those earthly forces in human beings that had retained most of the earthly element in the human being. To this end, as we have discussed, the body for Christ was prepared through the two Jesus bodies up to the thirtieth year. Then, from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, Christ took possession of this body. Where the earth forces were most active and where deformations could have set in, there no further development was possible, and physical death occurred. Thus, the sun-being, Christ, really entered into the earth sphere and united with the whole etheric body of the earth, as I have often explained. He then entered into the earth aura and now continues to work there. This sun-being must work for us in such a way that we realize more and more that in Christ the divine spirit was sent to us who was to counterbalance and redeem from within the separation and diversification in humanity created by Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition to the original impulses.

In outer human nature, the good spiritual beings work together with Lucifer and Ahriman. But what human beings originally, at the beginning of earth evolution, were intended to have on the outside, namely, uniformity and the applicability of the term “human being” everywhere on earth, was now to be brought forth out of the innermost essence of the human being through the Christ-Spirit. It is one of the many meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha that with the Christ-Spirit something was given to the earth that, when rightly understood, makes the name “human being” again applicable to all earthly humanity. The real substance of Christianity, which has already been partially revealed through its teachings, will be explored by those who, in regard to Christ, seek in the spiritual world what Christ is continually revealing in accordance with his words: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” When what can be conveyed to human beings in the name of Christ from within thus gradually becomes known, then, as a result, what Lucifer and Ahriman did in earthly humanity can more and more be made up for and redeemed.

We may, of course, ask now if there is any meaning in this detour. This is really a childish question, and it is often raised by people who think themselves cleverer than the cosmic wisdom—and indeed there are many who aspire to such superior cleverness. Such people say, “If there are mighty divine beings, could they not have eliminated the luciferic-ahrimanic influence at the beginning of earthly evolution in order to protect their work?” This may be human wisdom, but in St. Paul's sense it is “folly with God.” It is nothing more than mere human wisdom.

In our lectures, we must look at things as we are now doing, and then what has developed through the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman does not seem absolutely evil to us, but only relatively evil. For let us now consider the other side of the matter. Let us assume the original, divine cosmic plan for the earth had been fulfilled. Imagine that in the regular course of evolution the Greco-Roman era would have arrived, as I have pointed out, and that beautiful, harmonious type of human being the Greeks dreamed of would not only have been created by their sculptors, but would have lived among them and would gradually have spread over the whole earth. All other human forms would gradually have disappeared, and only what lives in the Apollo type, the Zeus type, the Diana type, and the Athena type would have spread over the earth. Since such beings would have recognized each other as belonging to the same species, they would have given themselves the name “human being.” Then the term “human being” would indeed have been applicable, and at the same time there would have been a sense of the equality of all people.

In that case, a human race of Grecian beauty would have spread over the earth, and in our age we would already see humanity approaching more and more this beautiful Grecian type, which would reach its perfection when the earth arrives at its goal in the seventh post-Atlantean epoch, after which it will pass over into other stages of existence. However, human beings would have advanced to this common humanity in unfreedom—that is what we must bear in mind. We would have been compelled to see all human beings everywhere as the same beings. It is only because such an identical form did not develop that all the other things could happen that allow us to see others as different, so that each sees the other as unlike himself and does not love his neighbor as himself. You will probably understand that if human beings had really become outwardly as alike as the original divine-spiritual forces had intended if Lucifer and Ahriman had not interfered, the feeling that one must love one's neighbor as oneself would necessarily have developed. There would not have been any choice; for anything else would have seemed to be nonsense, both in terms of feeling and of perception.

However, this development was not supposed to come from the outside because then it would have made us into beings who love automatically—that is, we would have loved others because they are our own kind, but without knowing the force that urges us to this love. Thus, what would otherwise have come to us in unfreedom was prepared for freedom through Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition. This sanction of the opposition is therefore inherent in the original plan of divine wisdom. Indeed, we may say that in still earlier periods of earthly evolution, the opposition against the harmonious progressive divine-spiritual powers was created precisely so that it could later bring about freedom.

At this point, we must realize that our concepts must change when we leave the sphere of physical observation and ascend to a higher order of perception. Many of you probably know that philosophy speaks of antinomies, and that Kant has even gone so far as to claim that it can be proven with equal conclusiveness that the two statements “the world is infinite in terms of space” and “the world is finite in terms of space” are correct. Similarly, both “the world has had a beginning” and “the world has had no beginning” can be proven conclusively. Why is this? It is because logic does not apply when we come into a sphere that can no longer be comprehended by physical means. We finally have to realize that our physical logic works neither in the realm of philosophy nor anywhere else where we concern ourselves with other than physical forms of existence. We must not make the mistake of looking at the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman as we would at the antagonism between a good and an evil person on earth. This kind of mistake occurs when we continue to carry over the earthly into the super-earthly realm.

Most people picture Ahriman and Lucifer as evil beings—albeit much more intensely evil than human beings. But this is not true; we must keep in mind that certain earthly feelings we associate with our concepts lose their meaning when we go beyond the earthly realm. Thus we cannot say that there are good gods on the one hand and the evil gods Ahriman and Lucifer on the other. We must not assume that a trial should be held in the universe where a highly qualified cosmic judge would sit on the cosmic judgment seat and sentence Lucifer and Ahriman to be locked up once and for all, so that only the good gods can get to work. True, locking somebody up can at times make sense in earthly life; in the cosmos it would not make any sense because there such ideas and concepts have no meaning. The opposing forces were created by the good gods themselves in an earlier period so that they would be able to bring to bear their full force for the development I have described.

For freedom to enter in so that human beings did not develop an unfree love through their outer shape or form, the luciferic and ahrimanic elements had to be part of our evolution. Only in this way can we arrive from within ourselves at the unity indicated by the term “humanity.” Thus, the gods allowed humanity to be fragmented by the opposing forces, so that later, after their bodily nature had been thus separated, human beings could again be brought into a unity in their spiritual nature through Christ.

This is one of the meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha: the attainment of the unity of humanity from within. Externally human beings are becoming more and more different. The result will be not sameness but difference over the earth, and human beings must exert all the more force from within to attain unity. There will always be setbacks in this process of achieving unity—we can see them coming if we look for them. What was actually intended only for an earlier epoch is preserved into a later epoch, and what was to create differences in consecutive periods coexists. Human beings form different groups, and while they are struggling for unity all over the world in the name of Christ, through the Christ impulse, differences remain as aftereffects and setbacks. Such differences will always exist because human beings will only gradually be able to attain unity. At the same time, different groups will fight each other tooth and nail about everything concerning their outer life. There are setbacks from earlier epochs that run counter to the Christ impulse, rather than in harmony with it.

Indeed, here we see a very profound meaning of this Christ impulse. Based on true knowledge, we can say Christ is our savior who keeps humankind from being fragmented into groups. This is not yet fully understood by all people because the old still exists alongside the new. Today, people hardly understand the community of life in the Christ impulse, and this is connected with the fact that this understanding must proceed from our innermost being. We must realize that the Christ impulse has worked in the earth aura for the last two thousand years, but has not been understood. As we have often emphasized, this Christ impulse can only be fully understood through what spiritual science gives us. It is only when a growing number of people can more and more grasp, think, and feel what actually entered our earthly evolution in the fourth post-Atlantean period that understanding for that event will increase. To expect modern humanity to understand the Christ impulse is really asking too much. After all, just think how unwilling people are to acknowledge that this fourth post-Atlantean period of evolution, the Greco-Roman epoch, is of such paramount, such mighty significance in human evolution. Just think how unwilling people are to recognize any such post-Atlantean age at all with the Greco-Latin epoch as its pivotal point. To accept such truths, people need to take in the ideas of spiritual science. Without them one cannot understand these things at all—that is, one cannot understand the evolution of humanity if one has not taken in these concepts.

We have to understand the significance of the spirits of form, who had intended to develop a homogeneous human race in seven successive stages. This homogeneous human race was fragmented by Lucifer and Ahriman, but the force that wants to spread the one name “human being” over all the earth and unto the end of time—in spite of the outer differences between people—was revived from within by the Christ impulse. One of the chief tasks of the immediate future is to understand that Christ stands between Lucifer and Ahriman and to grasp his significance in relation to them. Therefore, we must always call Lucifer and Ahriman by their true names—we must call a spade a spade, so to speak—and look to the Christ impulse as the one combating them and saving the earth from this one-sided luciferic-ahrimanic impulse. This is what must be presented more and more often.

In our Dornach building we have therefore placed the statue The Representative of Humanity in the most prominent place; it presents the archetype of humanity that is to be recreated by Christ from within, surrounded by the luciferic-ahrimanic elements.⁴ That is the meaning of this central statue in our building. Looking at this central figure, people will realize that this is indeed what the good gods had intended. The human race was fragmented, Lucifer and Ahriman made their appearance, but the Christ impulse triumphs and recreates from within, from within us, what was originally intended for the outside. In the process, our freedom is created. Our building and what will be in it are to place before humanity what must be accomplished in terms of understanding human evolution. What is most needed for humanity in the immediate future is to be revealed in our building; we want people to understand human evolution showing and telling them what is most important for the near future.

Of course, many objections can be raised, and some of them have already been brought to our attention. After seeing the paintings and sculptures in the Goetheanum, some people have said that a true work of art must be understandable immediately to everyone without requiring an explanation. Here, on the other hand, people need theoretical explanations to understand our art works. Well, if people would only think a little! Imagine a Turk, for example, understanding nothing at all except what is contained in the Koran, a Turk who has heard nothing about Christ except that he must fight against Christianity. Suppose you took this Turk to see the Sistine Madonna and showed it to him without any explanations. Naturally, a work of art can only be understood by those who live in the same spiritual stream out of which the work was created. Thus, our ideal figure surrounded by Lucifer and Ahriman will only be understood by those who live in our spiritual stream.

This is true for all works of art in all ages: they are comprehensible only to those who live in the same spiritual stream. Only within that stream are they true works of art. The spiritual orientation must be inherent in them. Those who understand Raphael's Sistine Madonna or, let us say, his Transfiguration must know something of the spiritual stream in which the pictures were created. Similarly, to understand what they have seen in our building, people must have some element belonging to our spiritual stream in their souls and hearts. If they have this element within them, then the work of art must speak for itself, and no labels, identifying names, or other comments will be needed to explain or interpret it.

For example, when people look at one of our glass windows, they see in the bottom part a kind of coffin with a dead man in it; above that, they see an old man, a youth, a young woman, and a child standing on a winding path. If people have taken in our spiritual stream, they will realize that this is the review of life. Immediately after we have passed through the gate of death, we will see the course of our earthly life in reverse. Of course, you have to know this fact to make sense of the picture in the window. But if you know this, then the picture works by virtue of what it contains, just as the Sistine Madonna works upon those who know the Christian history behind it, but it has no such effect on the Turk. By the same token, what is presented in our building cannot work upon those who have not taken in our spiritual stream. These things just have to be seen in the right way.

Today, I wanted above all to explain that Christ was that spirit from the cosmos who, in the course of earthly evolution, brought spiritually what was originally intended for our outer form but could not develop externally, because we would then have become automatons of love and equality. On the physical plane there prevails the fundamental law that everything must operate through antitheses, through polarities. The gods could not simply have sent down Christ at the very beginning of earth evolution, as our naive wisdom might suggest they should have done. For then the antithesis of external fragmentation and inner concentration could never have developed. Humanity, however, must live in this antithesis and polarity. We have the right feelings for Christ only when we see in him the savior, rescuing humanity from dispersion and separateness; only then can Christ fill our own innermost I. Christianity lives wherever people are able to understand this union of all humanity through Christ. In the future, it will not matter much whether what Christ is will still be called by that name. However, a lot will depend on our finding in Christ the spiritual uniter of humanity and accepting that external diversity will increase more and more.

We will also have to accept that there will still be many setbacks for this spiritual understanding of the Christ impulse. What developed at the same time instead of consecutively will for a long time continue to evoke forces that fight against a spiritual understanding of global human equality. There will be many and terrible onslaughts, and, for the most part, their purpose will be to continue the luciferic-ahrimanic war against the Christ impulse. And it will be one of the greatest, most beautiful and significant achievements of our age if we can be among the few who understand this thought of the unifying of all human beings, who understand how remnants of the luciferic-ahrimanic elements strive to bring to the fore what is unique in various groups of human beings so as to exclude all others. It is very difficult to say anything at this time about the final outcome of these matters. As human hearts are now, to speak about that outcome would only be upsetting and bewildering; it may lead to opposition, perhaps even to hatred and abuse rather than to working in accordance with the Christ impulse. However, what can be said about this principle in the Christ impulse, namely, the salvation of humanity out of bodily fragmentation into spiritual unity, must be told, for it must become more and more effective in human evolution.

We have to be able to face calmly and courageously the increasing diversity in human nature because we know that we can carry a word into all these diversities that is not merely a word of speech but one of power. Though there may be groups that fight against each other and though we may even belong to one of them, we know that we can bring something that will express: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into every group. We know that this “Christ who lives in me” will not lead to the forming of groups; rather, it will bring about the spreading of the glory of the name “human being” over the whole earth.

The understanding of spiritual science brings to life the realization that we can carry the power that comes from the words “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into the groups that are fighting each other—no matter into which group we bring our I. This is one of the practical and moral-ethical aspects of our strivings in spiritual science. With the force of these words we bring something into the group that does not belong exclusively to one or the other group but to all humanity. It is only through this that we can arrive at a true spiritual understanding of Christianity.

It is the hallmark of mighty spiritual paths that they are finally expressed in simple words. Think of the simple words that can express the whole of Christianity, which has permeated the world for nearly two thousand years. But these simple words can only be found on the basis of big, long-term developments. These simple words that express Christianity were not just there all at once; they had to be worked for. We must be aware that we are among those people working to make it possible that someday simple words may be found to express, in a basic, elementary way, the truths we have to spread and develop today. Without such development the simple could never come about. We may not yet be able to put our spiritual science into simple words in any language—words that would condense it on a quarter of a page—so that all striving people would understand it, as was done for Christianity when it originated two thousand years ago. Yet, we can be sure that those simple words will contain something of what I said today, something that will direct our attention to the Greco-Roman age, especially to the Mystery of Golgotha during that time, as well as to the contrast or polarity between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman.

What can be seen everywhere will be concentrated in a few simple words that can then be handed down to future humanity in the same way as the commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Just as this commandment expresses something that had to be attained as a result of a long development, so, in the future, the findings of spiritual science will be put into simple words, and then all people will understand them.

This requires our spiritual work, for the simple can only arise in the spiritual evolution of humanity when people have been willing to spend long periods of time learning about the details. You are called upon to help in this development, which will lead to something appearing to people in bright clarity, something we cannot yet express because we do not have the words for it in our languages, yet something spiritual science works toward. When you feel you belong to such a spiritual stream, and feel at home in it, because you see that it is necessary for human evolution, then you have the right understanding of our spiritual movement—you belong to it in such a way that you rightly understand the greatest of its goals based on your increasing understanding of the contrast between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman. You understand that this contrast is vital and had to exist.

This is what I wanted to bring before your souls today. It is all connected with the question of the meaning of our whole earthly evolution. For when spirits from other planets look down upon the earth and ask what the meaning of this earthly evolution is, they will understand it when they learn about the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything that happens in the course of earthly evolution has its meaning only through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha radiates out into the cosmos and imparts to everything else that radiates out from the earth its meaning, its central meaning.

• 1. These names do not refer to present-day planets but to ancient evolutionary stages and are therefore capitalized.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, vol. 13 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 3. Editor's note: The transcript seems to be faulty here. The original reads: “They [the opposing forces] let it [the physical body] become the same; they make it identical from within.” This obviously contradicts not only the statements directly preceding this passage, but also the lecture as a whole.
• 4. The statue is Rudolf Steiner's wood sculpture The Representative of Humanity. It survived the burning of the first Goetheanum and stands now in the second Goetheanum.

Every occultist knows the great dangers that lie in the frivolous popularization of occult truths and insights. On the other hand, however, it should also be taken into account that Theosophy, among other things, imposes the duty of spreading and advocating certain occult teachings that come only from occult research. When we do this, those who have familiarized themselves with such teachings feel the need to learn something about the methods by which such insights are actually gained. Theosophy speaks of the development of humanity and of the world, of races, rounds and so on, of planetary systems and other things. Those who hear these truths will, even if they believe that the intellect can grasp them, still feel the need to ask what the paths are by which such insights are attained.

Now, in general, it is not easy to talk about this path. However, today a few remarks will be made about the nature of what the occultist calls clairvoyance. One must not confuse occultism and theosophy. Theosophy is basically only the external expression for the experiences gained in the field of occultism. Occultism is the source of the theosophical teachings. Today we will talk about one chapter of this occultism.

The experiences on which the theosophical teachings are based are made in completely different states of consciousness than those that are characteristic of the ordinary person. Two such different states of consciousness come into particular consideration. We will start with what the ordinary person experiences. This person has their everyday, waking daytime consciousness – through which they are able to perceive the things around them and to educate themselves about cause and effect and the other laws of this physical world through their mind, through their reason, in short, through their intellectuality.

But this state of consciousness is not the only state of experience for the everyday person. The human experience extends far beyond what is accessible to his consciousness. The normal person has two other states of experience, which are the so-called dream sleep and dreamless deep sleep.

This second state of consciousness, sleep interspersed with dreams, does not plunge the person completely into the unconscious. The person is able to bring something into the waking consciousness. However, what he brings into consciousness is not the content of the actual experience he had during the dream-filled sleep. The experience is something quite different from what he later becomes aware of. It is, so to speak, only a bringing across of individual fragments, of fragmentary mirror images. What a person experiences in a completely different world during dream-filled, not very deep sleep, are coherent, ordered facts. And of these facts, which he experiences but of which he does not become aware, he has some memory. He has brought them into his memory for the waking consciousness and later remembers what happened over there. However, the content is remembered only sparsely and distorted. This content cannot be compared in any way with what is experienced over there.

This is a world that, if it could be seen through, would be filled with the facts of the so-called astral world. Just as the physical world is filled with the facts of the sensual world, here one experiences the spiritual facts. But over there we experience feelings, passions, desires, cravings, instincts as facts. We experience them only as they exist as mental processes, not as they otherwise are in our personal form, refracted through our earthly life. It is simply a different world that the human being experiences there and from which he only brings pieces over into the ordinary waking consciousness of the day. No one should ever characterize the experiences in the so-called astral realm by what he brings over from the content of his dreams into his waking consciousness. This is just as rich, indeed much richer, than the world of the senses, and in terms of the contrasts it offers, it cannot be compared to what goes on in our world of the senses. The manifoldness of what appears good, bright, radiant, and, on the other hand, of the terrible, repulsive, and gruesome phenomena, cannot be compared to what our sensory world offers.

The third state is dreamless sleep. In most people, very little of the experiences that occur during the dreamless sleep state come through into the waking day consciousness. What comes across is usually not consciously perceived. The experience of dreamless sleep appears in the waking 'day consciousness' not in its causality, but in its effect. What is experienced there are the great laws of reality, the true, to a certain extent much more true, original causes and essences of our world. What takes place in the outer physical forms of existence in the animal and plant kingdoms (the mineral kingdom does not belong here, for nothing can be learned about the true nature of the mineral kingdom in dreamless sleep) — the way in which life manifests itself in these kingdoms, how forms develop from one to another, what great laws life actually has – that, if we were to penetrate it in its true form, would suddenly illuminate many connections in life that are otherwise mysterious and obscure in the ordinary consciousness. Man undergoes all this without retaining anything consciously in his waking day consciousness.

This is nothing more than a description of the three states, of which only one is a real state of consciousness that we encounter in people.

Now it is self-evident that none of the experiences gained in this way can be the content of occult teaching. Occult experience begins only when a very specific transformation of the state of consciousness has taken place. This transformation will be briefly characterized.

There is a point in ordinary human consciousness that marks a turning point in the development of every person who is in any way reflective or sensible. This is the awakening of self-awareness. You all know that at first the child does not speak in the first person, but says: “Charles wants,” “Mary wants.” It is a very specific stage in the development of the human being when the possibility arises that he may say “I”. This awakening of self-awareness is different from all other facts that one can experience. It is a very intimate experience. Everyone can say “I” to themselves. You can give any other thing a different name. I can only say “I” to myself and no one can say “I” to another “I”. Only a person can refer to themselves with the very specific name, “I”.

Self-awareness is something completely different. The thought of the ego is exclusive and cannot be compared to any other. There is now a way to work on the ego in such a way that, just as it is only within itself in ordinary self-awareness, its entire world of thought is shaped from the center of the ego in the same way that the thought of the ego usually occurs. When, through diligent and sustained meditation, a person brings himself to face his entire world of thoughts in the same way that an ordinary person faces only the point of the ego, and not only his world of thoughts but the world of thoughts in general, then he is called an intuitive person. Then the world of thoughts emerges from the center of his being itself. He then produces thoughts in the same sense as he previously produced thoughts of the ego.

This stage of ego development can be attained. Through correct meditation in a certain sense, a person can come to relate to his world of thoughts in the same way as he previously related to his ego. Two sentences in “Light on the Path” have the power, when applied in the right way, to bring the ego to this point of view. They are not mere abstract sentences, but are written out of the astral experience of thousands of years. These two sentences, which are an extraordinary means of education, are:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.
Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.

There is strength and life in these sentences; they need only be applied in the right way. When man has reached this stage, then something else necessarily occurs: he is able to experience in an orderly way what is otherwise only experienced in dreamless sleep and what otherwise comes only in fragments. In this way, this world, which takes place in the astral, becomes just as real to him as the world of the senses was real to him before. Man then has the memory of the facts of the Kama world.

The next higher level is where the person no longer has dream-filled sleep, but is able to look into the higher world through intuition. This world is full of spiritual clarity; there is no longer any arbitrariness. Two perceptions are associated with this intuitive state. When a person has reached this stage of development, he perceives in his own experience the dangerous enemies of human life: the elemental spirits of birth and death, which continually lurk in the adjoining natural realms, which are always there, which try to seduce the human being, and so on. These elemental beings, which move into the astral body and influence its desires, are always there. In ordinary life, they are hidden by the veil of Maya.

These enemies in the neighboring natural realms are what a person first becomes aware of at this stage of development. And this is of the utmost importance for development in occultism. In this state, which can be compared to dreamless sleep, the person perceives – this is his first experience in this state of consciousness – what the enemies are that pull him down and lead him to the lower realms. It is good that these forces, which thus prevail in man, are hidden from the ordinary person. It is good that a veil is spread over them here. For it is not speaking of them, but really getting to know them, that only those who have attained a certain level of self-confidence and moral strength within themselves can bear. Therefore, no true occultist will give instructions on how to reach such a level before a person has achieved a decisive development of character in the direction of self-confidence, morality and presence of mind, so that he does not run the risk of losing himself, but can hold his powers together. These three qualities are required for every occultist.

That which is hidden from the consciousness of the day in this way, and which confronts man at this stage, is called the Guardian of the Threshold. He guards the threshold because he must not allow the ordinary man to see what is behind it. However, it loses much of its horror if the person has the designated character traits or has acquired them to a certain degree. By the end of the Atlantean era, people had ceased to develop these moral powers sufficiently. Hence the peculiar conditions arose that are known from the description of Atlantis.

In the continuation of this path, man must not only be brought to experience the world of thought as his own, but in order to be able to connect with reality at a higher level, he must also transform the entire world of feeling. Then the ability to see things directly in the higher worlds during the waking day consciousness begins, for example the human aura; initially only in the lower stages. When a person has reached this stage, he has basically already opened up a source of extraordinarily profound experience. Then he lives just as consciously in the spiritual as the ordinary person lives within the sense things.

On the third level, however, he lives where there is no longer any conscious experience for the ordinary person. He experiences the same as the ordinary person in the outer sense world, only on a higher level. He then experiences the laws of the world of causes. There is no longer any difference between the experiences in the so-called unconscious state of sleep and the conscious state of the day. This is the continuity of consciousness, which is gradually and very gradually attained. But relatively soon the separation of the soul will have progressed so far that it can live not only in thoughts but also in sensations. Then he can form concepts from these, as things actually look in reality.

“Light on the Path” gives the right instruction to reach this stage. It requires patience, perseverance and steadfastness in an extraordinary degree. The possibility for this lies in the forces hidden in the next two sentences:

Before the masters can speak, the wound must be unlearned.
Before the soul can stand, the blood of its heart must moisten its feet.

They contain the forces that lead people to direct experience and direct perception.

Those who have reached this stage and are able to say “I” to their world of feeling are now able to consciously experience all the truths related to devachan. The teachings of devachan can be consciously experienced at this level of consciousness.

One may well believe that when man has passed through evolution to this stage, he becomes a dreamer, that he loses his usual soberness and power of judgment. On the contrary, the possibility of yielding to superstition or dogma ceases. Even doubt and skepticism disappear from the soul when man has arrived at a concept of this stage of development. There is now a state analogous to dream-filled sleep and to deep sleep. When man has progressed so far as to see the Devachan, there are still other states into which he can consciously place himself. These are states in which he can experience something much higher. These states consist in the following.

From direct observation, one learns to recognize how the various forms of the universe transform and metamorphose into one another. It becomes clear how a thought form is formed out of mental substance, then encloses astral substance and plastically dominates the astral substance. But it is also learned how the beings of higher planes, from the mental plane through the astral plane, move down to the physical world. The entire sum of possible transformations of form in the universe lies before the initiate. He can answer the question of what forms a plant has undergone in earlier, long-gone epochs. The various forms of transformation that belong to our planetary system are revealed at this level of knowledge. This is called the conscious experience of form development in esotericism.

The state that is analogous to dreamless deep sleep shows how life, the essence itself, pours into the various forms. In this case, the difference is that during the second state, the various forms are perceived in very different colors than in the third stage. When a thought form is perceived, for example, it can appear in bright yellow colors. There are thought forms that are perceived in this way. There are also thought images that have a certain spiritual form. In the third stage, the vital ether flows into these thought forms, which may, for example, have the beautiful light color of a peach blossom. You can then not only see rigid or completely mobile forms that transform into one another, but also perceive how these forms are animated from their center.

The result is that you can place yourself in the various etheric forms of consciousness, so that you can not only recognize the laws of devachanic life, but also the transformations of our earth – only our earth, it does not go further – that it has undergone during the time of the so-called round developments. The process of passing through several planets or globes, of Arupa planets and Rupa planets and the like, is undergone. These transformations can be learned in this state of consciousness. And then the different rounds themselves can be undergone, learned.

Thus, through appropriate exercises, man can learn to understand part of the teaching that the theosophical movement has brought into the world. The further path can no longer be presented. On the other side, the state of consciousness begins, which consists of becoming insensitive to the possibility of external sensation. And with that, the actual life of the adept begins. From the experiences of the adept, only that which goes beyond the designated boundary can be gained.

The purpose of what has been presented here is to indicate the methods that lead to the knowledge that is available in the theosophical textbooks.

After all, the communication and reception of theosophy is partly based on trust. This must also be the case today. But it can be demanded that explanations be given as to the origin of this knowledge, which we in the West have the opportunity to access again. In this, the leading spiritual individuals, the masters, have the opportunity to provide not only the teachings, but also the esoteric perspectives, which, if used correctly, can promote development in a corresponding spiritual direction.

In addition to the significant work of “Secret Doctrine” by H.P. Blavatsky, the book “Light on the Path” has also been inspired, which really is a light on the path that humanity is to follow from now on into the future. When this path is trodden, or at least understood, only then will it be possible to know something of how this knowledge and this will, which are to lead to our goal, can be attained and how they must be attained in the future. For only a few today may the path be passable. This should not be talked about further. But we can be clear about the fact that that human experience in which the appearance of meaning ceases and higher experience occurs cannot be attained other than through a certain development of the spiritual life.

In a more intense way than in any other way, it is precisely through this spiritual development, which should live through teaching and word in the theosophical movement, that the great goal of development can be achieved, which has been expressed in that deep realization, that great esoteric truth, which can easily be said but is difficult to understand, and which belongs to the most ancient wisdom of mankind:

One life dwells in all beings, one and many, like the moon that reflects in many images on the water.

One of the less well known poems written by Goethe is called The Secrets.¹⁵³ It has remained a fragment. Goethe speaks of a pilgrim, Brother Mark, whose peregrinations remind us of the destiny of Parsifal. Having travelled a long way he comes to an isolated house, a monastic kind of building. There he finds a federation, a gathering of twelve persons. He ultimately gets to know the nature, the character of the twelve and of a thirteenth who is their leader. Each of the twelve has something to do that is extraordinarily important. It is to give a kind of description of the life of the thirteenth. This thirteenth individual has worked his way through chaos and obstacles of all kinds. Goethe says of him:

Man needs to overcome and free himself
of the great power binding all creation,

meaning someone who develops the higher human being in himself.

This thirteenth individual, called Humanus, has grown completely beyond himself. The greatness, the influence of this wise individual, as we feel and intuit him to be, is even greater because, as we are immediately told, he is dying and before entering the higher worlds of the spirit has the ultimate, most beautiful and greatest gift to give to the twelve. And the ‘pure fool’ is to win through and take the place of the thirteenth. There is some kind of Good Friday magic about this fragment. And the whole should indeed have been presented in the Good Friday setting. Goethe himself explained the poem more or less by saying that there are many confessions in the world but we must see the same kernel of truth in all of them.¹⁵⁴ He suggested this in the poem by putting one of the twelve world religions before us that represents the common kernel of truth in the twelve. And the thirteenth is the representative of this original truth itself. The poem really outlines the theosophical view of the world. Using a poetic image, Goethe wanted to show how a synthesis of all religions can be brought about in peace. When Brother Mark comes to the monastery gate, a cross with roses wound around it shines out. Goethe knew the deep significance of this symbol, and also hinted at it in his verses:

Yet something new comes to his inner mind
When he beholds the image with his eyes:
The cross stands there, with roses closely wound.
Who put together roses and the cross?

These are words of truly esoteric meaning.

The question we are going to consider today is ‘How do we gain knowledge of the higher worlds in the Rosicrucian way?’ We are going to discuss some aspects of the Rosicrucian method. It is one of the ways of gaining insight into and access to the higher worlds. The term ‘Rosicrucian’ may sound strange and peculiar to some of you. One has heard of the Rosicrucians as a secret brotherhood which first appeared under that name in about the 14th century. Anything one finds in encyclopaedias and the current literature about them is of no account. A number of highly influential people have represented a quite specific spiritual stream as Rosicrucians. It is only too easy to flail into the most serious error when seeking to discover the greatest truths, as may be seen from many publications on the Rosicrucians. They were one of the closest secret brotherhoods and had to go through severe trials and tests. Anyone wishing to become a member of the order had to go through many things. The aspirant had to go through specific occult training to gain self-knowledge. Ignorance may, however, make the sublime appear in caricature. And that is also how Rosicrucianism was completely misunderstood and distorted to become caricature. What has been written about Rosicrucianism is utter charlatanism. Someone who is able to judge it rightly will see the kernel of truth in it. But it has always been difficult to find out about Rosicrucianism, as you can see from the fact that Helmont,¹⁵⁵ Leibniz¹⁵⁶ and others were unable to do so. Rosicrucian initiation is said go back to a book written in the early 17th century which says, among other things, that the Rosicrucians were involved in alchemy and also other things such as higher education. That's what is says in the Fama Fraternitatis.¹⁵⁷

Even there you'll find nothing about genuine Rosicrucianism, for the secrets of the Rosicrucians were passed on by the oral tradition. Things that are outwardly given the name ‘Rosicrucian’ are hardly suitable for getting at the essence of the Rosicrucians. Today we'll consider the methods used by the genuine Rosicrucians, in so far as this is possible on a public occasion. The theosophical movement initially started in the Oriental way. The truth can be found anywhere if one knows how to look for it and is sufficiently mature. People had a different way of thinking things at the time when the ancient Indians received the teaching of the holy Rishis, a different way of feeling and using their will, of seeing and perceiving. The things they did in those days can no longer be done today. The methods used in the past can no longer be used today. Nothing in the world is absolute; humanity is in a continuous process of evolution. People now have a very different, more subtle structure to their brains, and even the way the blood is formed is different. Because of this, all truth must be transformed today, and initiation methods must be such that they are suitable for present-day Europeans. These are the reasons why there had to be Rosicrucianism, a completely different way of initiation. The Rosicrucian stream is in the care of great teachers who have always stayed in the background.

Rosicrucian initiation is in seven stages. These provide a standard method that makes it possible for Europeans to go through the trials they have to go through. The stages do not necessarily have to be consecutive, for the teacher would choose what was best for the individual nature of the pupil. The seven stages are study, imagination, inspired insight or reading the occult script, preparing the philosopher's stone, correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, entering into the macrocosm in a living way, and the 7th or highest stage which is godliness.

Study meant developing concepts and ideas that made a person able to form a sound, comprehensive idea of essential relationships. For the Rosicrucians, study involved everything we have in theosophy today, having taken away the Oriental garb. Theosophy today offers Rosicrucian wisdom. We have also spoken about the elementary Rosicrucian teaching in public lectures.¹⁵⁸ The main point is to gain a sum of concepts relating to the world that form a complete whole, in a strictly established, firm set of ideas. A system of thinking is created that is entirely sensible. A Rosicrucian had to be a sober, thinking individual. These teachings are truths accessible to the simplest hearts as well as intellectual minds. What is the aim of such study? It leads to insight into higher worlds—the astral world and then the spiritual or devachanic world—that are invisibly all around us.

Man has the same number of abilities to perceive as there are worlds around him. To begin with, these abilities are of course undeveloped. For someone born blind, gaining sight is like a new birth. In the same way, the appearance of yet another world is always like a new birth for the human being. The astral world—we call it that for specific reasons—is around us, and so is the spiritual or devachanic world. It would be arrogance for someone who does not know the higher worlds to insist that they do no exist. The astral world and the devachanic world both differ tremendously from the physical world we are able to see around us. We gain completely new impressions in the astral and again in the devachanic world. Yet although our perceptions in these worlds differ greatly from those we have in the physical world, the logic is always the same. Thinking is the same in all three worlds; it only changes in worlds that lie beyond. Having learned to think in one of these three worlds, the laws of this are the same also in the higher ones. The problem is, however, that in the physical world human errors are corrected from experience. In those other worlds there is no such easy correction, and we therefore need a solid standard of objectivity. You will be completely unsupported if you enter those worlds without this objectivity. This is why a guru was needed for initiation in earlier times. The guru had to be the ultimate authority in the soul of an individual who was being initiated into Indian yoga wisdom. In Rosicrucian training, the guru-pupil relationship is replaced by the support gained from trained thinking. The pupil must be his own guide. Because of this, study is an important part of training. Fundamental truths of theosophy have been written in Truth and Knowledge and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for both the simplest hearts and people who aim higher. Reading those books it is necessary to be completely given up to inner work, letting one thought evolve from another.

The 2nd stage of the Rosicrucian path was imagination. A comprehensive method meant that one was then able to take the first step into the higher worlds. Experiencing imagination we perceive the deeper meaning of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’.¹⁵⁹

Looking at a plant we can experience in its form and essential nature how true it is that the spirit of the earth, as it were, reveals itself in it when it is sad and when it is cheerful. It is a great truth that man is part of the earth just as a finger is part of the human body. Man is only part of the whole but he has the illusion of living a separate life. The finger is protected from such illusion because it cannot walk about on the human body. If you feel yourself to be an integral part of the earth, you have a feeling not only for the poetry but for the truth of Goethe's words of the earth spirit.¹⁶⁰ When human beings enter into the things which the earth spirit produces on its surface, many a plant will be the earth spirit's tears for them, and many a plant its smile.

Something else was brought to the pupil's awareness by all possible means. He would be told: ‘Look at the calyx with its organs of fertilization, chastely held up to the sun. The sun ray kisses the inner calyx. The plant innocently holds out its organs of fertilization to cosmic space. Think of this transformed and taken to a higher level. Consider the animal first, and the human being, and see how the human being veils the principle which the plant holds out to the sun. And then say to yourself: “One day man must reach a higher level where anything base will have gone from his organs. At this higher level he will offer to the sun the principle which today is the calyx of the plant. All drives and instincts will then have been purified, the human individuality will have overcome its natural desires.”’ In Rosicrucian wisdom this transformation was called the grail, the sacred chalice.

When a person has lived for some time with such ideas, he will be ready to move on to even higher experiences. The physical eye only sees the seed of the plant. When the soul has been prepared, it will be able to penetrate to the image that arises for it from the seed grain. A flame form will arise from the seed for that soul. The individual thus learns to see the spiritual aspect that is behind things; he comes to know that everything physical has been born from a world of the spirit.

The 3rd stage is called reading the occult script in Rosicrucian training. The cosmic powers active in the world are revealed in certain currents and in colour and sound combinations. This occult script is written into the structure of the world. An example is the spiral we see as two intertwined vortices in the Orion nebula far out in the cosmos. At the microcosmic level, the incorporation of the human seed takes a corresponding form. The image of a double spiral is the sign of cancer in the zodiac. In occult script, it shows the transition from one stage of evolution to another. The sun's spring equinox was in fact in the sign of cancer when a new period of human evolution started in ancient India after the end of Atlantis.

Another sign in occult script is the triangle. This, too, is written into the macrocosm. At the microcosmic level the figure of the equilateral triangle with its centre marked is the symbol of balance restored between the three powers of soul. Harmonization of thinking, feeling and will gives rise to the higher power of love.

This 3rd stage, where conscious awareness of inspiration was gained, was followed by the development of rhythm in life and in breathing. In the language of the Rosicrucians this is called preparing the philosopher's stone. Later on it will be a stage in the evolution of humanity as a whole. Today people need oxygen to breathe. They exhale carbon dioxide, which is a poison. It is the other way round with plants, for they breathe in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In the distant future man will consciously use the carbon which today is taken in with the food to build his physical body and no longer exhale it. The human body will then consist of an entirely different substance than it does today. It will be a soft, transparent form of carbon. Man's body will then have become the philosopher's stone. The symbol for this is the crystal clear diamond, which is also carbon.

The whole process was prepared for by bringing rhythm into our breathing and altogether into all vital processes. These are regulated from outside in plants and animals. But this no longer happens for modern man. He must create the rhythm for himself which nature gives to all its life forms. Strict adherence to such a rhythm was an important part of Rosicrucian training.

At the 5th stage of Rosicrucian training the pupil would have living experience of the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Paracelsus said: ‘Everything that exists around us in space is related to us.’ The individual letters are in the world,¹⁶¹ and man is the word. Man has everything that exists out there in the world in him on a small scale, in its essence. To know yourself so that you might know the world, that was the task set for this stage.

At the next, the 6th stage, the pupil had to enter into the macrocosm in a living way. Here the human being had to leave himself behind, abandoning all that was his own. He then truly came to know the macrocosm.

The highest stage that could be reached by a Rosicrucian was that of godliness. Here the initiate grew to unite with the whole universe, he knew the summit of human evolution which humanity is to reach in the far distant future. The Rosicrucian pupils would make every endeavour to prepare for this evolution.

A lower, passive nature lives in man and also an active element. If he develops in the way I have described he will overcome his lower nature and be reborn through the spirit. This aspect of human evolution has been put into words by Goethe:

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

The symbol for ‘to die’ is the cross, the symbol for a new birth are the roses. The human physical body is the cross. Everything connected with powers of growth is the passive element in us. This means above all the milk. In the blood, on the other hand, the human being develops an active element as he seeks to attain to higher things. That is the secret of the white and the red rose. Our higher nature seeks to find the balance between the white and the red rose. In Goethe's poem The Secrets the thirteenth is the image of someone who has reached this exalted level. We may therefore take the words spoken by this thirteenth as a guide for all Rosicrucian endeavour:

All power pushes forward far and wide
To live and work both here and there;
the stream that is the world, however, hems us in,
builds obstacles all round and carries us away.
Caught in this inner storm and outer strife
the mind does hear a word that's hard to understand:
Man needs to overcome and free himself
of the great power binding all creation.

• 153. Steiner R. The Mysteries. A Christmas and Easter Poem by Goethe (in GA 98). Title should read The Secrets. Translator not known. London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1946.
• 154. Die Geheimnisse. Fragment von Goethe. Published (in German) in Morgenblatt für die gebildeten Stände 27 April 1816.
• 155. Helmont, Johann Baptist van (1577–1644), Flemish physician and chemist. His son Franciscus Mercurius Helmont, developed his natural philosophy and theosophical teachings further.
• 156. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), German philosopher and mathematician. The source on which Rudolf Steiner based his statement has noi yet been established. See Arnold, Paul, Esoterik im Werke Shakespeares, Berlin n.d.: ‘Leibniz felt moved write that everything said about the Brothers of Rosenkreutz was pure invention on the part of some people with rich imaginations.’ It is known, however, that Leibniz was a member of a Rosicrucian group when he obtained his doctorate at Altdorf University in 1667. Baron Johann Christian von Boyneburg, former president of the Elector of Mainz's privy council, was also a member. It was at the suggestion of Boyneburg that Leibniz was called to serve the Elector of Mainz as a diplomat and legal adviser.
• 157. Anonymous work entitled Fama Fraternitatis oder Entdeckimg der Bruderschaft des Hochldblichen Ordens der R. C., Kassel 1614.
• 158. E.g. lecture of 14 March 1907, printed in German in GA 55: Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen in unserer Zeit.
• 159. Faust 2, final chorus. Tr. Philip Wayne. London: Penguin 1959
• 160. Given in the next lecture.
• 161. ‘For of this will I bear witness for nature: wanting to study it you must tread your books underfoot. Written works are studied by studying its letters, but nature is studied land by land, a land as often as a page. Thus is the codex of nature, and one must turn its leaves.’ Source as in note 151, but vol. 11, Die vierte Defension, Seite 145 f. München 1924.

My dear Theosophical friends!

In the course of yesterday's lecture, we saw how complicated the event in Palestine is for spiritual scientific research. We have seen that clairvoyant consciousness has shown us two infant Jesus, one belonging to the Solomonic line of the House of David, and the other to the Nathanic line of the House of David, and that in the pure physical body of the child of the Solomonic line, that individuality incarnated again which we know under the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra.

Today we will deal with the other of the two children, with the one from the Nathanic or priestly line. The etheric body of this child was of a peculiar purity. To understand this, we have to go back far in the evolution of mankind. Never before has a being been born with a similar etheric body. We have to go back to the beginning of human development on earth, to the so-called Lemurian age.

We know that humanity has developed only gradually and slowly into what it is now. Jesus lived in the fourth post-Atlantic age. It was only during this cultural period that the I came into full possession of its powers.

This time marked the descent of the personality to Earth. Before this period was the Chaldean-Egyptian age, the third post-Atlantean; before that the Ur-Persian, the second post-Atlantean; and before that the first post-Atlantean age, the ancient Indian, whose culture came directly from the Atlantean period. Before this period was the event that we call the great Atlantic catastrophe, since our ancestors, that is, our own souls, which were embodied on the Atlantic continent, Atlantis, were washed away from the earth.

The continent inhabited by our ancestors was located between present-day Europe, Africa and America. The Atlanteans saw spiritual entities as a misty aura surrounding all beings. They also saw all the soul and spiritual energies that flow in and out through the person. Just as our finger, if it were conscious, would see the blood pulsating in it and feel itself as a limb in the organism, so the Atlantean felt himself to be part of the environment; he knew that, cut off from the environment, he would wither away. On the other hand, he could not distinguish himself from the environment; he felt himself cast into the whole external world.

Enormous natural revolutions, which completely changed the world map, put an end to the Atlantic cultural period, during which people had lived together in sharply distinct groups and races. The same individualities that had been active in the Atlantides continued their development - although under completely different circumstances - in other parts of our earth, where their first steps were guided by the high Rishis.

But we have to go back even further if we want to get to know the conditions that [gap in the transcript].

Before the Atlantic catastrophe, humanity – that is, we, our souls – lived in very different bodies on the Lemurian continent, which was located roughly between present-day southern Asia, Africa and Australia. Going back even further, we see beings with forms that would seem quite fantastic to present-day humans. What does this mean? Yes, during this Lemurian period, large areas of this earth were abandoned by human souls. Before this time, human souls had inhabited the earth in completely different forms; but now they went in great flocks to completely different regions of the world [incarnated themselves on other planets]; only very few people remained behind to survive the most difficult and barren period of development on our earth. It was the time when the first germ appeared that we call self-awareness.

In this world, beings asserted themselves that we describe as Luciferic beings. At that time, people had clairvoyance. These Luciferic beings approached the astral bodies of people and penetrated the astral bodies of people who were on earth. Since that time, the Luciferic element has been in the soul of man. Man owes his freedom to this Luciferic element. What would have become of people if these Luciferic beings had not come? Through them, man developed into an ego, but slowly; and man would never have been able to develop this out of his own nature, what is called the inner impulse to freedom. Man had to pay for the possibility of evil, in other words, he had to be confronted with the possibility of choosing between good and evil.

But a counterweight also had to be created, otherwise man would not be able to maintain his connection with good. So that the luciferic element would not become too strong, a counterweight was created in that part of the etheric body of the few people remaining on the devastated earth was withdrawn from their bodies and sunk into the spiritual world. This part remained during the Lemurian and Atlantean ages. The descendants of the Lemurian people thus lacked a part of their etheric body, which remained in the spiritual world. That part of the human etheric body, which no human being had been part of until the Palestine event, and which had thus remained untouched by all Luciferic influence, became the etheric body of the Nathanic Child Jesus; and so there was a sum of forces present in this child that had never existed before in the etheric body of a human being. The religious documents that are really based on clairvoyant knowledge, and which are always right about human physical research, speak of this if we understand them correctly.

The effect of the luciferic forces on people is described in the story of the Fall of Man. The astral body had been corrupted by the luciferic influence. The snake of the Garden of Eden is a symbol of the Luciferic influence, through which human beings acquired the ability to distinguish between good and evil by their own judgment. Jehovah's words to man that they should not eat from the tree of life indicate that a part of the etheric body remained until it was taken up into the Nathanic boy Jesus. In this boy were united the purest heart feelings and the greatest powers of love as never before in a human being; the pure soul qualities that man had before the Fall, that is, before the Luciferic influence, were present in him in the richest measure.

There is something else to be said, namely about the astral body of the Nathanian Jesus Child. There was an important power in it, over which nothing less than the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha exercised its influence. After Buddha had completed his incarnation as Buddha, he no longer needed a physical incarnation, but could only embody himself in an etheric body. As such a being, Buddha descended - attracted by the pure etheric body to which Buddha had risen - and united with the astral body of the Nathanian child Jesus. Anyone who could have observed the process with clairvoyant eyes at that moment would have seen the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha floating in the aura of the child. This is hinted at in the Gospel of Luke in the account of the vision of the shepherds. Due to special circumstances, the shepherds had become clairvoyant. They saw a host of angels, that is, the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, the etheric body of the Buddha. Thus, a wonderful etheric body was at work in this Nathanic Jesus child, which had never before been used by a human being. In the same way, Gautama Buddha worked through the Nathanic Jesus Child, and through him he let flow the contribution that he, as Buddha, had to give after six hundred years of development.

In a wonderful way, the Evangelist Luke describes a blending of oriental legend with religious document. This merging of the Buddha with the spiritual body of the Nathanian Jesus child, which Luke saw with clairvoyant eyes, is confirmed by legend. Legend tells us that when the son of King Suddhodana was born, the old seer Asita saw a host of angels descending from heaven. At this sight, he began to weep. When asked if something had happened to make him weep, he replied, “No, I weep because my eyes will no longer see my Bodhisattva.” In a clairvoyant way, he had recognized his master in the newborn prince and wept because he was too old to see him grow into a Buddha.

When the Nathanian Jesus child was born, Asita was also there. The Simeon of the Gospel of Luke is none other than the reincarnation of Asita from Indian legend. He was now standing before his Buddha again, and saw the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha floating in the aura of the child. Therefore he added to his testimony and said: “Now, God, thou lettest thy servant depart in peace, for now he has seen his Lord.” Thus the oriental legend winds itself into the religious document in the great images which have become real events of the physical world.

Now we must turn back for a few words to the other Child Jesus, in whose physical body was enclosed the ego of Zarathustra, the Zarathustra who was once a contemporary of Buddha and, as Zaratas-Nazaratos, taught Pythagoras during the Babylonian captivity.

So we know the ego of this Solomon-like baby Jesus, but now we have to look at that physical body. This body originated from the ancient Hebrew people, and this body had to be able to develop organs that Zarathustra could use at that particular time. That is to say, they had to be built up through inheritance from generation to generation within a specially selected people. This was the mission of the ancient Hebrew people.

[In order for the ego to emerge, ancient clairvoyance had to be abandoned. Instead of the old consciousness, which consisted of dark dream images, brain-bound thought power now had to be developed. In the year 3101 BC, the old clairvoyance began to fade... Kali yuga]

Here we come back to an area where we have to turn to spiritual science to gain reliable insights. This teaches us that the Hebrew people can be traced back to a patriarch who had been specially selected: Abraham. He was entrusted with a very special mission. We can best understand this if we realize that the further we go back in the development of the earth, the more varied the soul forces in man were. Before Abraham, people still had a vague dream-like consciousness. Those old clairvoyant abilities had to be sacrificed. Now, from the entire mass of ancient peoples, the individuality was selected that was best suited in its physical makeup, not to be a tool for the old clairvoyance, but for intellectual combination, suitable only to direct the eyes and ears to the outer world in order to develop reason or intellect. That individuality was Abraham.

All the old qualities of dreamy clairvoyance were closed to him. Mathematical calculation was his tool. That is why he could become the progenitor of a nation that was geared to deduction, to rational, intellectual thinking, but was alien to all forms of clairvoyance. While all other people tried to grasp the spiritual world by closing their outer eyes and letting inspiration flow into them, Abraham looked out, saw everything and tried to grasp the spiritual by combining the outer appearances. This required a particularly developed brain.

Abraham received everything from the outside, and because this ability, which became a physical property, was inherited from generation to generation. So the characteristic of the ancient Hebrew people is

to take nothing from within, but everything from without. The consciousness of the people should also be given from the outside. Everything [should be] received from the outside, even one's own nationality. The sacrifice of Isaac is a symbol of this, in that Abraham is induced to sacrifice Isaac and then gets him back as a gift from God. What was sacrificed with this? Yes, the whole nation, its own mission. Israel received its own nationality as a gift from outside.

What is significant is what is handed down to us in the promise of Jehovah to Abraham regarding the descendants of Abraham, namely that his descendants should be structured according to the number of stars in the sky: “Numerous as the stars in the sky” is an incorrect translation, it should be “corresponding to the numerical proportions of the stars in the sky”. The order of his descendants should correspond to the actual order of the stars in the sky. Twelve is a basic number in all things esoteric. They were to be organized according to the twelve constellations of the zodiac; hence the twelve tribes, which thus correspond to the number of stars in the sky and have a spiritual connection with them. Here that which is otherwise spiritual-soul should express itself in the physical descendants. We now see the mission of the ancient Hebrew people gradually developing physically in such a way that ultimately the body for Zarathustra could emerge.

But something that had happened to Abraham could not be completed immediately. Some of the old clairvoyance remained; Joseph's dreams point to this. Therefore, he had to be excluded from the ancient Hebrew people. At first, this people developed without Joseph, who was sent to Egypt; then it was limited entirely to external combinations. Now the ancient Hebrew people had to receive from Egypt, from the outside, what the other peoples received from within. Moses gave the Hebrews Egyptian wisdom as something external. Thus, this people had to receive clairvoyant wisdom from the outside. So it was to develop under constant external influences until, as its most mature fruit, it could produce the physical body for the re-embodied Zarathustra.

When an individual develops, the physical body is born first. Up to the seventh year, when the teeth change, the human being is enclosed in an etheric mother-shell; this is an etheric birth. At fourteen years of age, the astral shell is shed: astral birth. At twenty-one years of age, the human ego is fully born. We see, then:

1. From birth to the change of teeth, seven years.
2. From the change of teeth to the fourteenth year, the development of the etheric body follows.
3. From there, the astral body develops until the twenty-first year.

From the age of twenty-one, the ego develops after the veils have been discarded.

Likewise, there had to be three epochs in the development of the ancient Hebrew people:

1. From Abraham to the Davidic era.
2. From David to the Babylonian captivity.
3. From the Babylonian captivity to the birth of the Solomonic child Jesus. This is so that a lofty ego like the Zarathustra ego may receive a worthy shell. The people had to be developed from generation to generation so that the physical shell would become more and more suitable. Seven years correspond to seven generations in each epoch. But seven generations were not enough; one generation is always skipped in inheritance, because children do not inherit their predispositions from their parents, but from their grandparents. There had to be 3 x 14 = 42 generations before the physical body was developed in which the ego of Zarathustra had a worthy shell. The Gospel of Matthew, which describes the Palestine event from the physical aspect, gives the list of generations for the Solomon Jesus child and goes back to Abraham, that is, to the time when the physical body began to be developed. Luke, who describes the Palestine event from the astral point of view, gives the generation list of the Nathanian Jesus child and goes back to Abraham and to God. Luke goes even further back than Abraham, because the etheric body must be sensed even earlier. In the Nazarene of Nathan there was something present that did not come from people, but from the very beginning, before the Luciferic influence. It is therefore good that these records differ from each other. In the three wise men of the Orient we find three disciples of Zaratas-Nazaratos. These Chaldean disciples knew that the star they were following contained the ego of Zarathustra. The three disciples followed the star to Bethlehem, and when the star stopped over the manger in Bethlehem, they understood that Zarathustra descended there to incarnate.

Both boys grew up to the age of twelve. By then, the Solomon-like boy had developed the Zarathustra qualities; he had developed the qualities that belonged to his physical body. He had come so far that he was able to make a great sacrifice. The Nathanian boy had in particular those abilities that originated from the pure etheric body and on the other side from the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha. This Nathanian Jesus boy did not have an ordinary ego in the human sense. He had preferably the three higher covers.

The Zarathustra embodied in the Solomon Jesus Child made a great sacrifice in his twelfth year. A spirit as high as his can leave his body and take on another body. The ego of the Solomon Jesus Child, that is, that of Zarathustra, left the body of the Solomon Jesus Child and entered the body of the Nathan Jesus Child. This happened when the Nathanian Jesus child was allowed to accompany his parents to Jerusalem at the age of twelve. His parents lost sight of him, and when they found him again in the temple three days later, they did not recognize his speech: Zarathustra had inspired the Nathanian Jesus child.

The Solomon-like Jesus child died after he had lived an “automatic” life for a time. The mother of the Nathanian Jesus child also died. Soon after the birth of the Solomonic Jesus child, his parents had moved to Nazareth, where not long after, the Solomonic father died. In Nazareth, the boys grew up, side by side. After the Nathanian mother had died, the father of the Nathanian child took the Solomonic mother to live with him, and so she became the stepmother of the Nathanian Jesus child.

For the period from the age of twelve to thirty, the Gospels tell us nothing about the life of Jesus. At the age of thirty, he had matured for the great event.

We see how complicated the starting point of Christianity is, and how the most significant spiritual currents of the preceding time, through Zarathustra and Buddha, have flowed into the Nathanian Jesus child.