The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the last lecture, we observed some spiritual beings who are standing below the human being, some of which have abilities that are comparable with human abilities, but they are lacking any feeling of responsibility. We have seen how they are to be considered detritus of evolution, that would be obstructive if left to their own devices, but how they, used by a higher wisdom, will be transformed out of harmful into good beings.

Today, we want to widen the multitude of entities we observe by adding some more, to show how humans are interacting with them. We want to assume initially, that at nightfall each time the human being will experience a change from waking state to sleeping state. We know that when someone is in a state of day consciousness his four bodies are connected with and are mutually penetrating each other. Further, let us remember that each night the astral body and the ego raise themselves out of the physical and the etheric body. Now we have seen how at night, out of this human connection, out of the four-bodied human entity, two separate beings, different from each other, arose. The physical body and the etheric body stay back lying on the bed—outside remain the astral body and the ego.

Modern man experiences completely different states of consciousness at night than during the day. We can compare his state of night time consciousness with the consciousness of plants. A plant has the state of consciousness of ‘dreamless sleep’. During sleep, a kind of plant consciousness adheres to human beings too—at night, during the dreamless sleep, man is also in the spiritual worlds.

To these concepts we add that every element of the human being finds expression in the physical body. The physical body is, so to say, the result of all basic elements of a human. The ego has its expression in the blood, the astral body is expressed in the nervous system, the etheric body finds its expression in the lymphatic system, and the sensory system represents the expression of the physical body. If we perceive the human physical body as an expression of the manifestation of its different parts, then we have to say to ourselves that the blood circulation is there because of the individual ego. No nervous system can exist without the astral body structuring and creating it. At night, we draw the astral body and the ego out of the physical body, but not the nervous system and the blood. However, the blood and the ego belong together, and the astral body and the nervous system belong together.

At night, man behaves extremely disdainfully towards his corporeality. In order for the human being to have tools for the ego and the astral body, the blood and the nervous system had to emerge. Now he deserts the blood and the nervous system at night. It is impossible for a physical body with blood and nervous system to exist even for one second without the astral body and the ego. The plant is able to exist without these, because it has neither a nervous system nor a blood circulation. If we would at night solely be dependent upon ourselves, we would find the physical body dead in the morning. We take away those higher powers, the astral body and the ego, which must provide for the physical body at night. What we don’t do during the night, other beings must do. At night such beings penetrate into the physical and etheric body and lower themselves into them. Every night, higher spiritual beings enter into the human being’s physical and etheric bodies and carry out the work, that during the day is performed by the individual’s own ego and astral body. They are high, noble beings, who once created the physical and the etheric bodies of the human being, who take care of them again at night. At night the astral body and the ego stay in the higher world above, and down below remain the physical body and the etheric body. They have been abandoned at night by the astral body and the ego. To the same extent that the physical and etheric bodies are being deserted by the astral body and the ego, the powers of higher beings enter into them.

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The etheric human body is not the same as the etheric body of a plant. Higher powers from a higher world stream into the physical and the etheric body of a human being at night. The following could happen: During the day, man constantly influences the physical body and the etheric one. When someone thinks and feels, then this happens in the astral body, but it reaches beyond into the etheric body and the physical body. It impresses itself into these.

In the past, the physical and the etheric body emerged purely by will of higher beings. But once a human being becomes conscious of its ego, the influences of the higher beings exit out of the physical and etheric body. That which lives in the soul is not without impact on these bodies. An anatomist, of course, cannot establish what kind of changes are taking place in a person’s physical and etheric body, but they are taking place. A large effect happens in these bodies when someone lies. Lies and hypocrisy are processes within the soul and the ego. From a materialistic perspective one could believe that lies only happen on the inside. But the occult observer knows that through lying, changes happen inside the physical body that affect the bodily structure. Such changes also come about through the countless conventional lies that live in the world.

Surveying the material reality, we know that our life is riddled with all sorts of untruths. If people tell each other something they do not mean, then this is like an impression of a signet in sealing wax. This imprint stays. All hypocrisy, untruths, slander remain like an imprint in the physical body. When someone leaves his physical and the etheric body at night, such imprints can be seen. Now the beings from the higher worlds come and find these. This is incompatible with the higher worlds. Through this something new occurs, something completely new is being created. The higher beings will now excise ‘beings’ through the physical body, which will then lead an independent life between our worlds. In the occult science these are called phantoms. They are called phantoms, because they are closest to physical perception. Furthermore, they are beings with physical regularity. They are swarming through our space. They are obstructing human development and evolution. They make what lives in the world worse than it would be if they would not exist. The phantoms are beings that mankind creates by way of lies, hypocrisy and so on, which hold back evolution.

Learning to know about the impact of the spiritual beings is much more helpful than preaching morals. Mankind in the future will know what it creates by lies, hypocrisy and slander. The most effective morals are created by learning to know the facts, not through moral principles. By existence based on the science of the spirit, the strongest moral drives and impulses are created. Phantoms are also a kind of nature beings who exist—created by the activity of man. In the evening, the human being deserts the physical body and leaves in it the signet imprints of lies, hypocrisy and so on. When he returns in the morning, then these phantoms first stream out of the physical body.

The etheric body too can be manipulated so that it creates excised beings. Once again, certain processes in the human world are causing such excisions to come into existence through the etheric body. Like all unjust things, such as unjust laws that punish in the wrong way, bad arrangements in a social community work back onto the etheric body, so that from them beings are created. In today’s superstitious time such entities are only ridiculed. These beings are spectres, ghosts. They are real and thus can be categorized as true spectres and ghosts. Mankind should make an effort to make its arrangements as well as possible, so that they are not creating such beings.

Now let us focus on the ego and the astral body during the night. Keep in mind that also the human astral body and the ego are in a special situation. They have aligned themselves to the blood and nervous system. During the night, higher powers from a higher world stream down onto the astral body and the ego. If a human being takes along certain things from his daily life, so again an excision process will occur. Again, the things that cause the excision process are things of the soul life. Let’s imagine two people have opinions that differ. One tries to convince the other and feels a longing to convince him. This longing is nowadays widely spread amongst humans. People should present their opinion to one another and wait to see if some forces stir within the other through which he would accept the opinion. There are so many opinionated fanatics, who are not at all content if they are unable to force their opinion on someone else. If something like this happens, then it is detrimental to both astral bodies. They pick up persuasions and wrong advice. Whatever is imprinted into the astral body from these persuasions and ill advice, will at night cause beings to be produced. Such beings are called demons.

These demonic beings exert particularly unfavourable influence on our human development. They whizz through the spiritual room and prevent people from developing their personal ideas. Imagine how much will be sinned in this regard in many coffee shops, at the beer table! Continuously, forces are collected for the creation of demons. These creep into the human soul. Ask yourself how many appear at this or that court hearing, when people act as witnesses. They are convinced, and therefore are not really committing perjury, because they are convinced. Once an ”experiment” was conducted and it went according to plan. Thirty people were asked to describe it. Two described the process correctly, all other twenty-eight people added things that had not happened. In this way, demonic beings are created that exert all sorts of influences. There is no other remedy for the human being than the recognition of this fact, to know what to do to free himself from the influences of these detrimental spiritual entities. They are present everywhere where there is opportunity to exert their destructive influences. The occult observer can see this in the courtroom. The beings always work into the direction from which they have emerged. Such beings that have come about through bad laws will again work so that they entice people to make more bad laws.

The human being should look into the spiritual world, so that he will become practical and not continually create obstacles. When we look across that which we have just examined, we have to say that during the waking hours of daily life people create a lot of causes for the emergence of all sorts of spiritual beings—elemental beings. We have to ask what significance they have in regard to the future development of mankind. We take a look back into ancient times, when our ancestors were living in the Atlantean world. If we would go back far enough into the old Atlantean development, then we would gradually arrive at humans in a totally different shape. Imagine back, approximately in the middle of the Atlantean time. We must imagine the human beings as follows: the part of the etheric body which today is within our head, was at that time widely extended out across the physical head, as it can be perceived even today by a clairvoyant in the horse. The same is still particularly noticeable in an elephant, who currently has a large protrusion in front of and above its physical head, just like this was the case for human beings in the old Atlantis. Evolutionary progress consisted of these parts moving closer together, so that today a human’s etheric head and the physical head are almost covering each other.

In earlier times, the human being had a twilight clairvoyance. When he would, during the day, dive into the physical body, he did not see distinct contours, but he would perceive the objects surrounded by an aura. At night, he would not recognise any boundaries at all, but only the spiritual element of things. Since the post-Atlantean time we differentiate thus far five cultural ages. In the ancient India, the first of the post-Atlantean ages, the connection of the etheric head of a human being with his physical head was very light. Increasingly, the fusion of the etheric with the physical head became stronger. During our time, the fifth post-Atlantean age, it became the strongest, as mankind descended into the physical, material world, and where they penetrated most deeply into the material substance. Throughout these many incarnations during the various epochs, people learned a lot until today in their present incarnation. Everything that happens in the world, does so in a descending and an ascending line. As truly as the etheric head always connected itself more and more strongly with the physical head, it is also true that little by little a loosening occurs. We have already arrived at a point in time where the etheric head begins to loosen again. Here we must differentiate between development of races and the development of the soul. In the future, there will be souls who have not done enough whilst the etheric head was united with the physical one. Because of the fusion of the etheric head with the physical head, many people are reluctant nowadays to embrace spiritual truths. Human beings who accept spiritual truths now, will when they return later, have absorbed enough in this incarnation, to be able to make a connection to incarnate. But those, who fail to do now what needs to happen, will not be able to find suitable bodies in the future. This is because the development of the races will create normal bodies, that are fit for those souls who have not neglected anything. Other bodies will be so that the loose etheric body cannot absorb anything. These people will be a special kind of human being, who will drop out of the progressive development of mankind.

It takes quite something to find your bearings within a future body. Imagine a soul that will live in a physical body with a loose etheric body. This soul would no longer understand if one would tell it about demons and so on. Today is the point in time where one can talk about those things. When the etheric body has loosened up again, one can no longer do this. Currently, the etheric body has a calling to quite different perceptions. The etheric body will later live in the spiritual world. This is populated with demons, and so on. Then this world of spiritual beings will be around the human being, and if he is not prepared for this now through the teachings, then he will be at a loss when he faces these beings. However, those that carry with them the knowledge obtained in this incarnation about these beings, will understand how to behave towards them. In the future, these knowledgeable individuals are destined to transform these beings into servants of the ongoing evolution. So, we understand how people can fail to complete their task to further the development of humanity and that of other beings.

All these demons, ghosts and phantoms are harmful today, but in the future they will be transformed by us into servants to human development. For this to happen human beings must prepare themselves. The development of the soul and the development of the race do not run side by side.

In the future, humanity will separate into the good and the bad. By one part developing in the proper ascending way to transform the demons, ghosts and phantoms in the future, they will push down another part. These will be the bad ones. What the human spirit creates has a real meaning—this has always been so during the development of mankind.

Another example will demonstrate how the human being co-creates in today’s world. We will focus on the fourth cultural period—on the Greek temple. The idea about the temple arose initially from the human soul. The concept for the temple is based on what we call a column, and on what this column carries. Never again has humanity achieved what it did at the time when humans succeeded to put themselves into the ‘supported space’ of the Greek temple. Let us compare a Greek temple with a modern building. Once a column becomes decorative it is no longer the true column that it is when it is free standing and really load-bearing. The human being must feel that the column consists of the right material. If we paint a thin iron column, that carries the same load as a thicker stone column, then it lies to us.

A Greek temple is a Greek spatial idea. This would be understood by people who can imagine that forces are moving from top to bottom and from right to left. We can imagine three painted angels, suspended in the air, so that one knows they are carrying each other. We find this spatial feeling with the old painters. Nowadays we can't find it anymore, not even by Boecklin.¹ On his Pietà there is an angel, that we feel could fall down any moment.

This is something that even the greatest genius might be missing when spiritual culture is lacking: a sense of space. Each time a person creates a real spatial concept, then this creates an opportunity for a higher being to fill this room. We are then ‘captivating’ higher beings to descend into the room. Quite different beings are enticed to descend by a Greek column and the horizontal beams resting upon it—quite other beings by the Gothic cathedral and its pointed arcs. The Gothic cathedral differs spiritually from the Greek temple in the following way: In the Greek temple humans have worked the spatial sense into it in an occult way, so that the temple is a crystallised spatial thought. In this way, the temple, being the way it is, is the home of a higher being, a god, even if it has been deserted by people. But to the Gothic cathedral belong people. It must be complemented by the devotions of the human beings and the folded hands they raise up. The Greek temple is an abode of a god. The Gothic cathedral is a cultural site, and an abode of a god when human beings are present. The Greek temple is, even if it has been deserted, the abode of a spiritual entity. So we can see, that people, by being in harmony with the spiritual world, are working together with it. So we can see in the spirit, how, through human deeds, more and more can be done to entice higher beings to descend.

Once again the Whitsuntide thought steps in front of our soul. The Whitsuntide thought expresses symbolically what we are able to recognise through such observation: that people through their work create sites for spiritual beings to descend to, that people are working on the spiritualisation of the world.

We must understand the spiritual science thought in such a way that it permeates into all branches of life. In our materialistic time the outer life is only in a small way an expression of the inner life. In the past, every door lock, every key was an expression of something spiritual. Now everything is comparatively insignificant. The human being will once again learn to work in such a way that the outside will be a replica of the inside. Then a railway station too will emerge as a thought, like the Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral came about. Our time too has a building style that corresponds to our time. This is the warehouse. It is the replica of the ‘utility’ thought, the replica of the human egoism. The time of usefulness has brought forth as the only original style that of the warehouse.

Previously, people put their spiritual feelings into a building style. The warehouse is an expression for the feelings of the 19th century. But already now there is a spiritual movement underway, that prepares for a later spiritualisation. Those humans who understand the anthroposophical movement in this way will make the Whitsuntide thought a reality. In the future we will see the anthroposophical thoughts crystallised in what the Earth will be covered with.

• 1. Arnold Boecklin, Swiss Painter, 1827-1901. His painting Pietà was in the National Museum in Berlin until 1945, and has since been missing.

Throughout the millennia, different peoples have sought to satisfy their deepest needs in life through religion. In our time, it is easy to misjudge the significance of the religious aspirations of nations. It is easy for a modern person to harbor illusions about the nature of religion. Since one of the principles of Theosophy is to fathom the wisdom of religions, some light will also be shed today on the aims and tasks of the Theosophical movement in general.

At first, our topic was discussed by learned religious scholars from a cultural-historical point of view. In the past, such things were not considered at all. In the past, individuals were aware that they could find the truth in their religion. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that people decided to compare different religions. This has revealed a remarkable fact: a consensus in the various religious beliefs of different human races. But they did not get much further than the assumption that the childlike imagination of the nations forms ideas about God and man in the same way. It has become common practice to see in the different religions of different peoples childlike stages of human spiritual development, and no more. If one delves deeper into the question hinted at here, one comes to the conclusion that one underestimates even the simplest religious ideas if one does not take them deeply and thoroughly. If you go deeper, you acquire the right kind of humility, the humility that says: You understand something of the great, powerful images, but there is still much you cannot fathom. You learn to recognize more and more by climbing the ladder of human development yourself.

Go down to ancient Egyptian culture. There you find the male deity Osiris and the female deity Isis. If you learn to understand the deity Osiris from the perspective of the Egyptian people, it reveals itself as a meaningful religious concept. It is said that Osiris was dismembered by his brother Typhon, and the individual pieces were buried in different places. The idea is associated with this that everything that lives on earth emerged from Osiris. Everything that happens on earth is seen as a resurrection of Osiris. When a person experiences their spiritual core, they say to themselves: Osiris rises within me. The earth is the dismemberment of Osiris. The human being is the resurrection of Osiris.

Now let us go up to the legends and myths of the Nordic world. There we meet the giant Ymir, who was overcome by Wotan, will and woe. We learn that he was dismembered, that the rocks were made from his bones, the streams and seas from his blood, the vault of heaven from his brain, and so on. This Earth is an enlarged, idealized human being. She is a sleeping giant.

We find similar ideas in the religions of different peoples everywhere. We should not believe that the religions of “lesser” peoples are childlike compared to our own. Let us take an example of how a sublime religion can be found in another nation. When the ancient Indians of North America were increasingly pushed back by the peoples of Europe, the latter believed that they were far superior to the North American Indians. At a meeting with the Europeans, a Native American chief gave a speech that beautifully reflects the religious beliefs of the Native American tribes. The way the chief spoke is how many representatives of these peoples spoke about God.

They had been promised land, but this had not been done. The chief now said the following to the representatives of Europe: You learn about God and what He says from books, in which small black characters appear. The white man only knows about his God from the black signs in the books, but the brown man recognizes the great spirit as it speaks to him from the whispering of the wind, from the lapping of the waves, [from lightning and thunder]. You promised us to give us land, but did not do it. Your God has not taught you to speak the truth, etc.

This is how many peoples thought about the great spirit before there was what we call religion. Religion comes from “religere”, to reconnect. We want to understand why religion is important for reconnecting.

Before our present human race populated Europe, Asia and Africa, it was preceded by the Atlantean population on the Atlantic continent, between America and Europe. This continent was inhabited by the Atlantean race. There they lived, the Atlanteans, with a peculiar spiritual life. What remains of Atlantean culture can be found in the seemingly wild, but in fact only backward culture on the periphery of the former Atlantis.

There they felt in a primitive and elementary way what one might call the equivalent of religion. What was the religion of the most ancient ancestors of early man is preserved in the form that we can find in the religion of China, in the so-called Tao religion.

When the Chinese pronounce the Tao, they feel something similar to how that Indian spoke of the great spirit. It was a completely different way of feeling and thinking; it was a sense of belonging to the whole world. Man did not feel like a special being, as we do today. Today's man does not think much of breathing in and out. The breathing process is carried out as a purely mechanical process. In the ancestors of yore, a feeling was awakened in response to breathing. They felt gratitude to the great spirit. They felt that he united with them with every inhalation. They united with him with every exhalation. When they felt their pulse, they attributed this power to the great spirit. They felt at one with the universal spirit. The breath was spirit to them, the blood that pulsed in their veins was spirit to them. They felt part of the great world spirit. One must try to feel what is going on in a human soul that feels itself as one piece with the great world spirit flowing through it, the divinity within itself, and within the divinity, how our ancestors were completely blissful in this sensation, one must learn to empathize.

There is only one feeling that comes close to this - when the Vedantist feels the “Tat twam asi”: “That art thou,” he says to the world around him. But in the main, our nature has lost the feeling of our ancestors. Sympathy for the whole world was called Tao. Tao is what lives in the wind, what lives in lightning and thunder, what lives in animals and plants, what is in man, what pulses through him as his life. It was a unified feeling. Our thinking is itself a product of development. Those who felt the Tao did not yet have this intellect. It is precisely a characteristic of our present race. When our race developed from the Atlantean race, intellectual thinking developed from the clairvoyant gift of the Atlanteans. Now people learned to think in terms. The consequence of conceptualization was that man strictly separated himself from his environment. This had a significance when man conquered intellect. The Atlanteans did not feel that they were separate from others. Tao was the blood, the air, Tao was the other human being. The feeling of separation arose in them through the intellect working within. Everything they felt in the world, they had to experience within.

The God who pulsed through man was a unity that flowed outside and flowed inside. Now the separation had taken place. Now the “religere” - “reconnect” had to occur, the religion that connected the outside with the inside. The entire fifth root race strives in religion to reconnect with the divine All-Spirit.

On the basis of what has just been said, one must ask oneself: How can man of our present cycle imagine his God? He must first seek him within himself. But when he realizes that this is the same God as out there, then he has achieved something in his own way, as the ancient Atlantean felt in Tao. This is expressed in the ancient, sacred religion that the Rishis taught their disciples, the religion that preceded the Vedas. The Vedas are only an echo of that ancient, sacred religion of ancient India. This religion of ancient India can be brought to life within oneself even without esoteric knowledge. For it lives everywhere between the lines and words. It is a religion of life, which assumes that the divine is found within the human being. Whereas in the past people felt the connection with the God in their environment, in ancient India people sought the God in the separate individual soul. They sought to develop themselves to the point of direct realization that what lives in the individual soul lives in all souls. If one could experience one's own divinity in this way, if one had found what led beyond all separateness; beyond the deception of separateness, then one called it the divine Brahman. One could not theorize about that. One had to experience it within oneself. Then one gradually came to recognize this unified divinity from three points of view. This is found in all religions, these threefold aspects, under which the Brahman is sought.

The three aspects of the divine are understood roughly as follows in the intimate life of the different religions: The divine spirit lives in you. But the divine spirit also lives outside in the universe. And a spark of this divine spirit lives in you. The spirit that lives in you when you have an urge, a passion, an ideal, also lived when it built the house in which you now feel and sense everything. The deeper you penetrate into the structure of human wisdom, the clearer it becomes how this divine spirit has worked in you. Your passions, your sense of truth, are still subject to error. But the human body is not subject to error. Only the soul makes mistakes. It continually attacks the wonderful organism that the Deity has built as a housing for man. The structure of the human body is perfect. Every bone, for example, is wonderfully designed. It is composed of fine beams in such a skillful way that no engineer today could imitate it. The thigh bone has a reciprocating structure that allows it to support the body with the least amount of force.

The higher bodies of man are much more imperfect than the physical. This perfect physical casing was built by the great spirit; then he was drawn into this shell like a spark. Now take this whole world of this structure that lives around you, apart from what lives in you as a soul, and you have the third aspect of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Then take your own soul and the souls of your fellow brothers and fellow creatures. That is the Son, the second aspect of the Godhead, the second form in which the Godhead appears. At the beginning of the world process, we have everything that surrounds us as the perfect world. That is the Holy Spirit. What now lives in it as soul, that is the Son. That which the Son will become and that to which we will come through the Son, what we will be at the end of the days, that is the first aspect, the Father. Religions look at the primal essence from these three aspects, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You can go through all religions and you will always find this Trinity as the basic concept of all religions. The disciples were spoken to in this way countless times. When I speak, my words break free from my soul. They vibrate in the air. Then the vibrations go out to the other souls. Imagine that the organ of hearing is switched off – I speak – the words could be made visible – then you could see what I am saying. Imagine that you could turn the vibrating air into water and then into something solid. Imagine that you could very quickly condense the [vibrating] waves. Then the words would fall down as pieces of solid matter. They would lie at the bottom of the ground. This is how religion imagines everything around us, only by thinking the macrocosm formed similarly to how the words do here.

The macrocosm was once a very fine substance. Now the deity spoke a word, a primal name. The substance condensed, and so everything came into being. This is how rock crystal was formed too. The words of God were spoken into this substance, and it condensed. Everything was the thought of God, everything was spirit. That from which the spirit emerges is the original word. The Word of God that resounded into space was called the “Word”, the second aspect of the Deity. The thought of God that had condensed was the third aspect of the divine essence. The Word that resounded was the second aspect of the divine essence. God was in the Word and in the Word was God. (John 1:1) But before the Word can be spoken, something must precede it. That was the Father-God, the beginning. A deep connection has been recognized in all religions between what was in the beginning, the Father-God, and the life of the present. The Son is the life of the present. In the soul lives the Son as the Word. Veda - Edda means: the word. That which is called the actual revelation in the different religions always goes back to the word. The divine documents express this word. That is why they are also called the Word. In the religious records is that which the Spirit of God has spoken into the world. An echo of this lives in the human soul.

Another part of the core wisdom of all religions is the awareness that man is in a process of development, that he can reach ever higher and higher levels of development. The soul can increasingly resemble God. In my body, I see that the forces and materials of nature have worked together to create the perfect physical body for me. Plants and animals are experiments. A development has taken place. In the human being, the keystone of this development is opposed to us. In us, we carry the spirit germ like a bud. This is how we participate in the spiritual world. Thus, the human being lives in a physical environment and, on the other hand, grows into a spiritual world. Within himself, he has powers and abilities through which he is connected to the spiritual world. Stones, plants, animals are beings in different degrees of perfection. The soul also exists in various degrees of perfection, existing in a sequence. This begins with us. We are the most imperfect in the spiritual world. We have to live ourselves into a community with supersensible beings, with spiritual beings that form the connection between man and the Supreme Divinity, Devas, Dhyan Chohans, Angels, Archangels, etcetera. Everywhere, in all religions, there is the core of wisdom of a spiritual world, of a sum of entities of a supersensible nature. Just as man belongs to the rest of the [physical] world through his physical body, so he belongs to the spiritual world through his core of being.

Another core wisdom of all religions is that all development occurs in cycles, which can be compared to breathing in and out, day and night. The life of a human being, the life of the soul, also runs in such cycles. Man alternates between this side of existence, where he gathers experiences, and another where he lives in community with spiritual beings, in Devachan. In rhythmic succession, physical life on earth appears again and again, and again the life of the spirit. The idea that one earthly life is one among many is a common basic law of all developed religions.

It is a mistake to say that Christianity does not teach reincarnation. In its esoteric form, it teaches reincarnation. It just doesn't teach it on the outside. Christ spoke to his intimate disciples about reincarnation. When he was alone with his disciples, he explained many things to them on the mountain. He only spoke most intimately to his most intimate disciples, James, John, Peter, at the Transfiguration. The expression “building huts” is there. (Mk 9,5) These are the most intimate disciples who have risen to the level where huts are built. You experience what you experience when you can build huts. Space and time are overcome. Moses and Elijah appear. The deepest secret is shown to the disciples. Elijah is the Way. “El” means Way. Moses is the Truth, and Christ is the Life. He stands in the middle. The Way, the Life, the Truth. This ancient wisdom of the Christian religion stands here in bodily form; it appears to the disciples in the devachanic, raptured state. Christ said to them: Elijah has returned. They just did not recognize him (Mk 9:19). He spoke to them of reincarnation, but continued: “But do not tell anyone until I return” (Mk 9:9). The Second Coming refers to the point in human development when they will be ready to find the inner Christ.

Angelus Silesius points to the essence of this inner Christ and its significance:

A thousand times if Christ were born in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be a thousand times lost.

The inner experience of Christ enables us to grasp the Christ in the world. When people have come so far, then one can speak again of reincarnation. Until then, it should be kept secret. Among the Egyptian slaves, there was a living awareness: This is one life among many. In the other life, I will be like the one who now commands me. Thus he recognized the law of reincarnation and karma, the connection between cause and effect in the moral world. He felt this to be the law of his life. Then we understand the deep significance that the law of karma and reincarnation had in the souls.

But this humanity would have only looked up and lost the appreciation of the one life between birth and death. Once the soul had to go through a life where it knew nothing of reincarnation. About 1500 [or 2600] years is the period that elapses between two embodiments. In the 2000 years after Christ, the soul has gone through one such embodiment. Therefore, the disciples should not teach reincarnation until people could grasp the Christ within themselves.

The doctrine of reincarnation is contained in Christianity, not as a mere teaching, but as a legacy for the future. The teaching was not lost in Christianity by accident or disgrace, but was deliberately not taught for 2000 years. Man has grown out of the whole of nature. Goethe felt the Taoist feeling in the words he addressed to nature in the Hymn to Nature. This contains an examination of how he empathized with nature.

Man had to become a special being, but then he had to be reconnected to the divine. The search for the way back to the divine is what the old mystics of the Middle Ages called deification. This is how man expresses that he is eminently created for a development. In order for him to grow towards deification, the divine must be present in him in a seed-like way.

To make this one's content is to be a religious person. And to know what then lives in the soul and flows through it is theosophy. This is, in another form, what religions give to man. It makes religions understandable to him. Divine wisdom is the antitype of the soul's content, which itself is permeated and pulsated by the truth. The earlier religious conceptions were more or less the content of faith. This content of feeling must be raised into full, bright day-consciousness. The deepening of all religions into wisdom, so that it permeates us completely with its living content, so that the soul thereby reaches the goal of deification; that is what Theosophy will lead us to.

I have often spoken to you of how the human soul has altered in the course of mankind's development, how short-sighted it is to believe that the constitution of the modern soul can be understood if one will not look back to the different changes it has passed through. We look back—I do not need to recapitulate it—to the most varied epochs of earthly evolution; we have in particular often characterised the post-Atlantean epochs in order to show how the constitution of man's soul continually altered. In speaking of such things one must advance from the abstract to the concrete. One must try to give as clear an answer as possible to the question: What was the nature of the human soul in the ages of antiquity? We look back to a far-off age in which—and this may be stated in more than a figurative sense—divine teachers themselves instructed men about the sacred mysteries of existence. We know that from this ancient epoch onwards men have come to learn of these mysteries of existence in most manifold ways. From epoch to epoch the conceptions of the human soul have actually become more and more different. The concepts and ideas which we have today, which live in us and which we put every moment into words, these lived too in earlier conditions of our soul but in an utterly different way. Many of our most ordinary ideas lived quite differently. Today I will speak of what are apparently the most ordinary concepts, two concepts living in man's soul. People denote them at every moment from their word-store, but they lived in the human soul in earlier times in an entirely different way. I will speak of the two concepts: Space and Time.

Space for modern man is the most abstract thing conceivable. What do men mostly picture as space? Three dimensions standing at right angles to each other—or if one reads philosophical text books: the state of extension of physical objects—or there are still other definitions of space. But all that—think how prosaic, cold, abstract, that all is! Three dimensions standing at right angles to one another, or even all that geometry has to say about space,—how frightfully abstract, how prosaic and poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken that the whole of space—with time as well—has become for Kant subjective shadow, merely a form of conceiving sense-phenomena. This abstraction, space, of which modern man knows little more than that it has length, breadth and height, this abstraction, space, was a very different conception in the far past, of which, however, something still exists today for especially sensitive people—though indeed it is only a trace. One need not go back so extremely far; in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries one may definitely say that space, as it was then experienced, was very different for the human soul from the prosaic abstraction that it is for man today. Even in the early Greek ages when the soul experienced space, it felt it to be something with which it was livingly united. It felt itself placed into a living Something, in feeling itself placed into space.

Today man has at most a vestige of the sense of standing with his personality, his human self within space. But the man of antiquity expressed a significant relation of himself to the universe, if he distinguished above and below, right and left, in front and behind. The living feeling that one expressed when in ancient times one spoke of above and below, of right and left, of before and behind, has terribly little to do with our abstract three dimensions, which have no other occupation at all than standing at right angles to each other. What a very monotonous occupation it would be through eternity, if one did nothing else at all but stand at right angles to one another like the three dimensions of geometry.

Above and below: it was something living when in ancient times man still experienced how he was first a little child and raised himself from below upwards, when he felt how the course of life consists in an unfolding in the direction of above and below. The course of life consisted in the experience of the direction of above and below. One only travels a tiny distance from the earth (unless one lives in the Ahrimanic age of aeroplanes, or in the Atlantean age but there it was not very high above the earth—you know of this from my description of Atlantis), only a very little distance in normal life does one travel upwards from the earth in growing, and thus experience the above and below, the opposition of above and below. But this opposition was felt in antiquity as the contrast of the world of consciousness and the objective world,—of the conscious and the unconscious world. How subject is related to object—that was a deep experience when one felt above and below. Above, and ever farther and farther upwards come the divine worlds, downwards the worlds which are opposed to the Gods, and the human being is placed within the Above and Below.

As late as to such men as Goethe (you only need study his “Faust”) you still find remains of the consciousness of above and below. In addition to the above and below men felt the right, and left. Today we must use abstractions if we speak of right and left. To the man of antiquity a living in right and left was an actual experience, one might say a genuine world of observation. The Above and Below is the line from infinity to infinity or from the conscious to the unconscious. Right and left: in experiencing right and left one experienced the connection in the world between mind and figure, between wisdom and form. You only need draw a symmetry-axis, what is left and right of it gives together the form and you cannot combine the right and the left without doing it purposefully, without relating the one to the other.

If above and below is pointing to man's mysterious relation to the spiritual and material worlds, then the experience of right and left is his relation to the worlds spreading out in form. And by relating the form in the right and left to one another, by letting wisdom prevail in the forms arranged symmetrically right and left, he experiences himself in the second element of space. This experience of sense in the shape, of wisdom in the form in all possible variations, this feeling of oneself within this harmony of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was experienced by the man of old as what today is the abstract second dimension. The above and below, the right and left belonged to the flat plane, to the surface which can have no existence for the senses, which requires thickness, needs before and behind if it is to exist in the element of the sense-perceptible.

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And in this third, in the before and behind, ancient mankind felt the entrance of the material into the spiritual. (See diagram) Above and below, left and right he experienced as something still spiritual. It can have no material existence if something is merely above and below, and right and left—it is pure picture, must be pure picture in space; it becomes material only through thickness. In ancient times man felt vividly that in growing he made a few steps upwards from the earths surface in the direction of the above and below. He felt that in walking, he could move freely that he was in the element of his will: before and behind. In between stood the completely free self-movement to right and left while standing still.

Ancient man experienced in his being this threefold contrast as placed into the All; the remaining still with regard to right and left, the striding into the world with regard to before and behind, the gradual movement from below upwards in the direction of the above-below. This was the experience of the man of old. In experiencing the above and below he felt weaving in the universe all that today we call the intelligence, the reasoning of the universe. All that rules in the universe as intelligence was interwoven in space with his idea of the above and below, end since he could share in this intelligence of the world through his growth from below upwards, man felt himself to be intelligent. The participation in the above and below was at the same time a participation in cosmic intelligence. And participation in the right and left, in the interweaving of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was for him the feeling that weaves through the world. And his restful remaining still, surveying the world, was to him a uniting of his own feeling with the universal feeling. His striding through space in the direction of forwards or back was the unfolding of his will, the placing of himself, with his own will, into the universe, the universal will, He felt his own life to be interwoven with the above and below, the right and left, the before and behind. The conscious and the unconscious: above and below; wisdom and form: right and left; spirit and matter: in front and behind. Such was the experience of the man of antiquity.

At the same time, however, he experienced the indefinite—if I put it crudely—when one stands on one's head then the under is above and the above under. So too is it for the antipodes, and if one counts oneself in with the earth, the below is above and the above underneath. One can imagine too through some circumstance or other that what is normally right is in front, what is normally left is behind. These directions are just as living and weaving in space as in a certain respect they are indistinguishable, weaving into one another. Ancient man felt as he thus experienced himself in the three-divisioned space that the Divinity ruled in the threefoldness. The divine ruling in space directed man then to the divine in duration.

He experienced—and what I am saying now was actually experienced—he experienced in space the divine manifestation, ruling in threefold manner. It was the image in him of the threefold God: Father, Son and Spirit or by what other terms the three-membered God was known. Threefoldness is truly not thought out in the mind, is not an invention. The threefoldness with all its qualities was experienced in its reflection when ancient man experienced livingly the three dimensions of space.

And just as in a certain respect want of clearness can prevail about the above and below, just as right and left can also be before and behind, so in certain circumstances an uncertainty can also enter into the reciprocal relationships of God, Son, Spirit. In the sphere of the transitory, the sphere of space, man experienced the three dimensions concretely, not abstractly or geometrically as we do. And as he experienced concretely how the divine expressed itself in space, in the transitory, he therefore related the transitory to the element of duration; the three-dimensioned space became for him the reflected image of the three-dimensioned spirituality.

The idea of ancient man was approximately: If I live here below on earth I live in the threefoldness of space, but this is to me the reflected proof of the threefold nature of the divine origin of the world.

Today space has become an abstraction and only a few people perceive the depth-dimension, the thickness-dimension, that is, the above and below, the in front and behind, or the plane-dimension of right and left. Even among philosophers little of this experience is to be found. But yet some few who reflect on things and are not entirely asleep come to realise that the depth-dimension really arises in the unconscious observation lying not so very far below the consciousness. Men still feel the depth, but that is the last shadowy relic of space-experience. In the evolved religions an understanding for the Oneness of God has taken precedence of the real understanding of the threefoldness. The understanding for the unity of God has an origin similar to that for the threefold nature of God through space.

My dear friends, spiritual science seeks its information out of the divine facts themselves. Simple-minded people that come and say that no external proof for this or that is given. Well, we have gone into a great deal. I could still relate many things, but it shall not occupy our time today. I will only point out that it is largely the unscientific nature of modern science, so-called, if the verification cannot be found. Just this one thing I will say, and it is as it were an external proof of the fact that the man of antiquity felt in the same way I have described today. Why have the ancient Rabbis called God also Space? Because in earlier time, even in Judaism, they felt what I have shown you today concerning mankind. If science could really think in different domains it would find countless riddles which at the same time, however, are true proof, external proof of what spiritual science has at any rate to find out of the spiritual facts. One of the names for God among the Rabbis is Space; Space and God denote the same.

The unity of the divine has an origin similar to that of the threefoldness of the divine. It is connected with the living experience of Time. Time too was not the abstraction to the man of old that it is to us today. But the concrete experience of time was lost still earlier than the concrete experience of space. If one reads Plato or Aristotle today with a real understanding, and not in the way many schoolmasters read—well, I have often quoted the note written by Hebbel in his diary where the reincarnated Plato sits before the schoolmaster as a pupil, and the teacher reads a dialogue of Plato's with his class and the reincarnated Plato is given very poor marks. Hebbel noted this in his diary. One who reads Plato and Aristotle today, not as is often done by a schoolmaster, but with really deep understanding, finds that this feeling for space was still fully in existence in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries. It was however already shadowy in Plato and Aristotle, and the living experience of time was lost still earlier than those pre-Christian centuries. It was strongly alive in the second post-Atlantean epoch the ancient Persian, where a cold shiver would have been produced among, for instance, the pupils of Zarathustra, if one had spoken to them of time as a line running from the past to the future. It runs quite uniformly, but does nothing else than run its course from the past to the future.

Again in the Gnosis there existed a more shadowy feeling—but scarcely still to be recognised—for the living nature of time. They did not speak of a line running from past to future but they spoke of Aeons, the creators who were there earlier and from whom the later proceeded, where one Aeon always passed on the impulse of creation to others. Time was so imagined pictorially that in the hierarchical succession the preceding Being always gave the impulse to the one following; the following was ever, as it were, brought forth by the preceding, the preceding Being enclosed the next following. One looked up to the preceding Being, as more divine than the one succeeding. “Later” one experienced as more non-divine, “earlier” one experienced as more divine. This looking towards the change in evolution from the divine to the non-divine was contained in the living experience of time. Everything would fall apart if one were not to weave the divine and the non-divine to a unity. That is identical with our modern abstractions of past and future.

But in this picture of time, looking right back to the “Ancient of Days”, and encompassing the ever more and more encompassing, one experienced the image of God as Unity. Just as the three-divisioned, threefold Space was experienced as the image of the threefoldness of God, so was Time experienced as the image of the oneness of God. The basis of monotheism lies in the ancient time-experience, the basis for perceiving the Trinity lies in the ancient space-experience. Thus has the constitution of man's soul changed, thus has what was once alive became abstract and dry. However paradoxical this may sound: modern man most certainly has an abstract picture when he speaks of space, and he pictures or so I believe—a living relationship when he speaks of a friend. But that concreteness, that elementary experience, which today speaks from friend to friend, that is still abstract in comparison with the intensive experience of the universe which ancient man had when he experienced space and time, which to him were the images of the Unity and Trinity of the Divine.

Thus have we become dry and abstract in respect of space and time, and something else must take their place, something that we must again experience, that must be more and more inwardly realised. We must learn to feel that duality, that contrast in the world of which I have spoken during recent weeks. My dear friends, think for once that someone were to see only the rippled surface of water. This crinkly, rippled water-surface is in fact an abstract line. What is the concrete? There below, the water; there above, the air. And out of the duality air and water, in the co-operation of their forces, there arises the maya, the rippled surface. But so is our world the rippled surface, so too are we as men if we behold ourselves only as we look within maya; if we behold ourselves in reality then here too we must see: below, the water; above, the air.

Below the water—we see it if we observe transitory evolution, as I have brought it before you recently, where man develops in such a way that what he can conceive as a child he would grasp only as an old man. What he conceives in the age of puberty, he knows somewhat earlier, but still only towards old age. I depicted the course of human life, where it is only in old age that one grasps in oneself what one has been in childhood and youth. Life runs thus not apparently, but in reality on the surface, I have said that perhaps one does not need such a perspective today for life on the surfaces but for dying one needs it.—That the conception of the below; and belonging to it, the conception of the real above the region of duration. I spoke of this region in a recent lecture,¹ where man does not evolve, but has that which belongs to duration his whole life through from birth to death. But we cannot consider today how the below and the above interweave, if we do not realise the below, there where it threatens to become fixed, where it threatens to harden; and if we do not realise the above there where it threatens to dissolve, to spiritualise itself—if we do not develop the feeling for the contrast: the Divine—the Luciferic the Ahrimanic. Man of old had something alive in his soul when he spoke of his space-experience, his time-experience; the man of the Earth-future must develop inner concepts, inner impulses representing: Divine—Ahrimanic Luciferic.

• 1. 15th September 1918

When someone has concerned himself for a time with the conception of the world presented by Spiritual Science, and then allows the various ideas and thoughts and items of knowledge that he gains from it to work upon him, manifold questions arise, and he becomes more and more of a spiritual scientist by linking such questions—which are really questions of feeling, of the heart, of the character, in short, of life in general—with spiritual-scientific ideas. The nature of these ideas is such that they do not only satisfy our theoretical, scientific curiosity but shed light upon the riddles of life, upon the mysteries of existence, and they bear fruit in the real sense only when we no longer merely reflect about and feel their import, value and meaning, but learn under their influence to look differently at the world around us. These ideas should warm us inwardly, should become impulses, forces of heart and soul within us. And this is increasingly so when the answers received to certain questions give rise to new questions, when those answers in turn become questions followed by new answers, and so on. In this way progress is made both in spiritual knowledge and in the spiritual life.

A fairly long time will still have to pass before it will be possible to speak of the more intimate aspects of spiritual life in public lectures, but within our own Groups the time when this can be done should be coming nearer and nearer. It is therefore inevitable that new members may be taken aback or even shocked when they hear certain things; but, after all, we should make no progress in our work if we could not pass on to discuss more intimate questions of life on the basis of spiritual-scientific investigation and knowledge. Therefore—although misunderstandings may arise in those of you who have been concerned with the spiritual life for only a comparatively short time—we will consider certain of these more intimate facts of spiritual knowledge again to-day.

Without doubt an earnest question will arise in us when we think about the idea of reincarnation, of many earth-lives, not merely as an abstract theory, but when we ponder deeply on the meaning and implications of this fact of the spiritual life. The significant answer given by reincarnation will be followed by new questions and we may ask, for example: If the human being lives many times on earth, if he returns again and again in new incarnations, what is the deeper meaning of this?—The usual answer is that by passing many times through life we ascend higher and higher, experiencing the results and fruits of earlier earth-lives in later ones, and thus making progress. But that is still a rather general, abstract answer. It is only through more exact knowledge of the whole purpose of earthly life that we are able to fathom the significance of repeated incarnations.

If a man were to keep returning to an earth that did not change but remained essentially the same, there would not really be much to be learnt through successive incarnations. These incarnations are important because, as we pass through each of them, we can learn new things, have new experiences on the earth. Over short periods of time this is not so clearly perceptible, but if, as Spiritual Science enables us to do, we survey long periods, it becomes obvious that the epochs of our earth differ essentially from each other in character, and that we are continually passing through new experiences. But something else, too, must be realised—that these changes in the life of the earth itself must be taken into account. If in a particular epoch of earthly existence we neglect the opportunity of experiencing and learning what that epoch has to offer, then, although we return in a subsequent incarnation, we have missed something, we have not assimilated what we ought to have assimilated in the previous epoch. The result is that in the next epoch we are unable to make proper use of our forces and faculties.

Speaking still in a quite general sense, it can be said that in our epoch something is possible on earth, indeed over almost the whole globe, that was not possible in the earlier incarnations, for example, of men now living. Strange as it may seem, there is a certain, indeed a great significance in this. It is possible in the present incarnation for certain numbers of people to come to Spiritual Science; that is, to assimilate the findings of spiritual investigation which are available in the domain of Spiritual Science today. The fact that a few human beings come together and receive the knowledge discovered by spiritual investigation may of course be regarded as of no importance, but people who hold this view do not understand the significance of reincarnation, nor that certain things can be learnt only during one particular incarnation. If they are not learnt, something has been missed and will be lacking in the following incarnations.

This above all must be realised: What we learn to-day in Spiritual Science becomes part of our soul, and we bring it with us when we descend again into the next incarnation.

Let us now try to grasp what this means for the soul. Reference will have to be made not only to a great deal that will already be known to you from other lectures and from your own reading, but to many facts of the spiritual life that are more or less new or still quite unfamiliar to you. It is necessary first to go back, as often before, to earlier epochs in the evolution of humanity and of the earth. We are living now in the fifth epoch following the great Atlantean catastrophe. This epoch was preceded by the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, when ideas and experiences of paramount importance of life on earth originated among the Greek and Latin peoples. This fourth epoch was preceded by the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian period, this by the original Persian and this in turn by the ancient Indian. In a still more distant past we come to the great Atlantean catastrophe by which an ancient continent extending over the area of the present Atlantic Ocean was destroyed. This continent of ancient Atlantis was gradually swept away and the solid earth on which we are now living received its present configuration. In still earlier epochs preceding the Atlantean catastrophe, we come to the civilisations and forms of culture developed on Atlantis by the Atlantean races. And these conditions were preceded by still earlier ones.

A survey of what is told by history—it does not, after all, go very far back—may easily give rise to the belief (although this is quite unfounded even for shorter periods) that conditions of existence on our earth were always the same as they are to-day. That is by no means so, for there have been fundamental changes—most marked of all in man's life of soul. The souls of those sitting here to-day were incarnated in bodies belonging to all these epochs of earth-evolution and they absorbed what it was possible to absorb in each of them. In each successive incarnation the soul has developed different faculties. Although during the Greco-Latin epoch the difference was perhaps not quite as extreme, in the epoch of ancient Persia and even more so in that of ancient India, our souls were entirely different from what they are to-day. They were equipped with faculties of another kind altogether in those olden times and lived under entirely different conditions. And now, in order that what follows may be thoroughly understood, we will visualise as clearly as possible the nature of our souls after the Atlantean catastrophe, when they were incarnated, let us say, in the bodies that could have existed on earth only at the time of the ancient Indian civilisation-epoch. It must not be imagined that this civilisation was to be found only in India itself—it was merely that in those days the Indian peoples were of prime importance. The forms of civilisation differed all over the earth, but they bore the stamp of the instructions given for the ancient Indians by the Leaders of humanity.

When thinking of the nature of our souls in that epoch it must be realised at once that knowledge of the kind possessed by men of the modern age was then quite impossible. There was as yet no consciousness of the self, no ego-consciousness as clear and distinct as that of today. The fact that he was an ego hardly entered a man's consciousness. True, the ego, the “I”, was already within man as a power, a force, but knowledge of the ego is not the same thing as the power or activity. Human beings lacked the inwardness belonging to their nature to-day, but instead of it they possessed faculties of quite another kind—faculties we have often referred to as those of ancient, shadowy clairvoyance.

When we study the human soul during waking life in those times we find that it did not really feel itself as an ego; an individual man felt himself to be a member of his race or tribe, of his folk. In the sense that the hand is a limb or member of the body, the single “I” or ego stood for the whole community of the racial stock and the folk. Man did not feel himself to be an individual “I” as he does to-day; he experienced the ego as the folk-ego, the tribal ego. During the day he did not really know that he was a man in the real sense. But when evening came and he went to sleep, his consciousness was not completely darkened, as it is to-day; the soul was able, during sleep, to be aware of spiritual facts—for example, of spiritual facts and happenings in its environment of which the dream to-day is a mere shadow, in most cases no longer representing their full reality. Men had such perceptions at that time and they knew: There is indeed a spiritual world. The spiritual world was a reality to them, not as the result of logical reasoning, not through anything needing proof, but because every night, even if in dim, dreamlike consciousness, they were actually within the spiritual world. But that was not the essential. As well as sleeping and waking life, there were also intermediate states during which man was neither completely asleep nor completely awake. In those states, ego-consciousness was diminished even more than by day, but on the other hand the perception of spiritual happenings, the dreamlike clairvoyance, was essentially stronger than at other times during the night. Thus there were intermediate states in which men had, it is true, no ego-consciousness, but were clairvoyant. In such states a man was as if transported, entirely unaware of his separate identity. He did not know: “I am a man”. But he knew with certainty: “I am a member of a spiritual world, and I know that it is a reality for I behold it.” Such were the experiences of human souls in the days of ancient India. And in the Atlantean epoch this consciousness, this life in the spiritual world, was even clearer; indeed very, very much clearer ... We therefore look back to an age when our souls were endowed with a dim, dreamlike clairvoyance which has faded away by degrees in the course of the evolution of mankind.

If our souls had remained at the stage of this ancient clairvoyance, we could not have acquired the individual ego-consciousness that is ours today; it would not have been possible for us to realise: We are men. We were obliged so to speak, to exchange our consciousness of the spiritual world for ego-consciousness, “I”-consciousness. In the future we shall have both at the same time; we shall all attain that state in which clairvoyance functions in the fullest sense while ego-consciousness is maintained intact—as can only occur to-day in one who has trodden the path of Initiation. In the future it will again be possible for everyone to gaze into the spiritual world and yet to feel himself a man, an ego.

Picture to yourselves once more what has taken place. The soul has passed from incarnation to incarnation; once it was clairvoyant, then later on the consciousness of becoming an ego grew clearer and clearer and it was increasingly possible for the soul to form its own judgments. As long as a man still has clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world and does not feel himself to be an ego, he cannot form judgments or reason with the intellect. The latter faculty developed steadily but with every succeeding incarnation the old clairvoyance faded. The states in which man was able to gaze into the spiritual world became rarer; he penetrated more and more deeply into the physical plane, developed logical thinking and felt himself to be an ego.

We can therefore say that in very ancient times man was a spiritual being, for he lived in direct intercourse with other spiritual beings as their companion; he felt his kinship with beings to whom he can no longer look up to-day with normal senses. As well as the world immediately surrounding us there are, as we know, still other worlds, peopled by other spiritual beings. With his normal consciousness to-day man cannot see into these worlds, but in earlier times he lived in them, both during the night-consciousness of sleep and in the intermediate state of which we spoke. He lived within these worlds, in communion with these other beings. Normally, this is no longer possible for him to-day. He was, as it were, cast out of his home—the spiritual world—and with every new incarnation became more firmly established in this earthly world.

In the sanctuaries for the cultivation of the spiritual life, in domains of learning and in the sciences where such things were still known, account was taken of the fact that man had incarnated in these different epochs of earth-evolution. Men looked back to a very ancient epoch before the Atlantean catastrophe, when human beings lived in direct communion with the Gods or spiritual Beings, and when their inner life of feeling and sentient experience was naturally quite different. You can well imagine that this was so in an epoch when the soul was fully aware of being able to look up to the higher Beings, knowing itself to be a member of that higher world. In considering these facts we will remind ourselves that we can learn to speak and think today if we grow up among human beings, for such faculties can be acquired only through contact with men. If a child were to be put on some lonely island to-day and grew up without having any contact with human beings, he would not develop the faculties of thinking and speaking.

This shows that the evolution of any being is to some extent dependent upon the species of beings among whom it grows up and lives. That this has an effect upon evolution can be observed in the case of animals. It is well known that if dogs are removed from conditions where they are in contact with human beings to places where they have no such contact, they forget how to bark: as a rule the descendants of such dogs cannot bark at all. Something does, then, depend upon the kind of beings among which a being grows up. You can therefore imagine that for the same souls to live among modern men on the physical plane is a different matter from having lived at an earlier time among spiritual Beings in a spiritual world into which normal vision to-day does not penetrate. The impulses man developed when living among men and those he developed when living among Gods were quite different.

Higher knowledge has always recognised these things, has always looked back to that ancient time when men were in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. And the effect of this contact was that the soul felt itself a member of the divine-spiritual world. But this also engendered impulses and forces in the soul that were still of a divine-spiritual nature—divine-spiritual in quite another sense from that which applies to the forces of the soul to-day. When the soul felt itself a member of the higher world, there spoke out of this soul a will that also sprang from the divine-spiritual world—a will of which it might rightly be said that it was inspired, because the soul was living among Gods.

Higher knowledge speaks of this age when man was still united with the divine-spiritual Beings as the Golden Age, or Krita Yuga. It is an age of great antiquity, the most important period of which actually preceded the Atlantean catastrophe. Then came an age when men no longer felt their connection with the divine-spiritual world as strongly as during Krita Yuga, when :they no longer felt that their impulses were determined by their life with the Gods, when their vision of the spirit and the soul was already clouded. Nevertheless, there still remained in them a memory of their life with the spiritual Beings and the Gods.

This memory was particularly distinct in ancient India. It was very easy in those days to speak about spiritual things; one could have directed men's attention to the outer, physically perceptible world and yet regard it as maya or illusion, because men had not been having these physical perceptions for so very long. So it was in ancient India. Souls then living no longer beheld the Gods themselves, but they still beheld spiritual facts and happenings and spiritual Beings of lower ranks. Only a comparatively small number of men were still able to behold the sublime spiritual Beings, and even for these men the former living communion with the Gods was already much less intense. The will-impulses from the divine-spiritual world had already disappeared. Nevertheless, a glimpse into spiritual facts and happenings was still possible, at all events in certain states of consciousness: in sleep and in those intermediate states to which reference has been made.

The most important facts of this spiritual world, however, which in earlier times had been experienced as immediate reality, were now there in the form of a kind of knowledge of truth, as something that the soul still knew with certainty but which was now operative only in the form of knowledge, as a truth. Men still lived in the spiritual world, but in this later age the realisation of its existence was not as strong as it had formerly been. This period is called the Silver Age, or Treta Yuga.

Then came the epoch of those incarnations when man's vision was more and more shut off from the spiritual world, when his whole nature was directed to the outer sense-world and firmly consolidated in that world; inner ego-consciousness, consciousness of manhood, became more and more definite and distinct. This is the Bronze Age, or Dvapara Yuga. Man's knowledge of the spiritual world was no longer as sublime or direct as in earlier times, but something at least had remained in humanity. It was as if in men of the present day who have reached a certain age there were to remain something of the jubilance of youth ... this is past and over but it has been experienced and known and a man can speak of it as something with which he is familiar. Thus the souls of that age were still in some degree familiar with experiences leading to the spiritual worlds. That is the essential characteristic of Dvapara Yuga.

But then came another age, an age when even this degree of familiarity with the spiritual world ceased, when the doors of the spiritual world closed. Men's vision was more and more confined to the outer material world and to the intellect which elaborates the sense-impressions, so that the only remaining possibility was to reflect about the spiritual world—which is the most unsatisfactory way of acquiring knowledge of it. What men now actually knew from their own experience was the material-physical world. If they desired to know something about the spiritual world, this was possible only through reflection. It is the age when man was most lacking in spirituality and therefore established himself firmly in the material world. This was necessary in order that he might be able by degrees to develop consciousness of self to its highest point, for only through the sturdy resistance of the outer world could man learn to distinguish himself from the world and experience himself as an individual. This age is called Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age.

I emphasise that these designations—Krita Yuga, for example—can also be applied to longer epochs, for before the Golden Age man experienced and participated in still higher worlds; hence all those earlier ages could be embraced by this name. But if, so to speak, demands are kept moderate and one is satisfied with the range of spiritual experience described, the periods can be divided in the way indicated. Definite time periods can be given for all such epochs. True, evolution progresses slowly and by degrees, but there are certain boundary-lines of which it can be said that prior to them such-and-such conditions of life and of consciousness predominated, and subsequently, others.

Accordingly, in the sense first spoken of, Kali Yuga began approximately in the year 3101 B.C. Thus we realise that our souls have appeared repeatedly on the earth in new incarnations, in the course of which man's vision has been more and more shut off from the spiritual world and therefore increasingly restricted to the outer world of the senses. We realise, too, that with every incarnation our souls enter into new conditions in which there are always new things to be learnt. What we can achieve in Kali Yuga is to establish and consolidate our ego-consciousness. This was not previously possible, for we had first to be endowed with the ego.

If in some incarnation souls have failed to take in what that particular epoch has to give, it is very difficult for the loss to be made good in later epochs. Such souls must wait a long time until the loss can in some respect be counterbalanced. But no reliance should be placed upon such a possibility.

We will therefore picture to ourselves that the result of the doors being closed against the spiritual world was of fundamental and essential importance. This was also the epoch of John the Baptist, of Christ Himself on earth. In that epoch, when 3,100 years of the Dark Age had already elapsed, a fact of salient importance was that all human beings ,then living had already been incarnated several times—once or twice at the very least—in the Dark Age. Ego-consciousness had been firmly established; memory of the spiritual world had faded away, and if men did not desire to lose their connection with the spiritual world entirely, it was essential for them to learn to experience within the ego the reality of the spiritual world. The ego must have developed to the stage where it could be certain—in its inmost core at least—that there is a spiritual world, and that there are higher spiritual Beings. The ego must have made itself capable of feeling, of believing in, the spiritual world.

If in the days of Christ Jesus someone had voiced the truth in regard to the conditions then prevailing, he might have said: In earlier times men could experience the kingdom of heaven while they were outside their ego in those spiritual distances reached when out of the body. Man had then to experience the kingdoms of heaven, the kingdoms of the spiritual world, far away from the ego. This is no longer possible, for man's nature has changed so greatly that these kingdoms must be experienced within the ego itself; the kingdoms of heaven have come so near to man that they work into his very ego. And it was this that was proclaimed by John the Baptist: The kingdoms of heaven are at hand!—that is to say, they have drawn near to the ego. Previously they were outside man, but now they are near and man must grasp them in the very core of his being, in the ego. And because in this Dark Age, in Kali Yuga, man could no longer go forth from the physical into the spiritual world, it was necessary for the Divine Being, Christ, to come down into the physical world ... Christ's descent into a man of flesh, into Jesus of Nazareth, was necessary in order that through beholding the life and deeds of Christ on the physical plane it might become possible for men to be linked, in the physical body, with the kingdoms of heaven, with the spiritual world. And so Christ's sojourn on earth took place during a period in the middle of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when men who were not living in a state of dull insensibility but understood the nature of the times could realise: The descent of the God to men is necessary in order that a lost connection with the spiritual world may be established once again.

If at that time no human beings had been able to find a living link with Christ in their hearts and souls, the connection with the spiritual worlds would have been gradually lost; the kingdoms of heaven would not have been received into the egos of men. It might well have happened that if all human beings living at that crucial point of time had persisted in remaining in darkness, an event of such momentous significance would have passed them by unnoticed.

The souls of men would have withered, gone to waste, decayed. True, even without Christ they would have continued to incarnate for some time still, but they would not have been able to implant in the ego the power that would have enabled them to find the link with the kingdoms of heaven. The event of the Appearance of Christ on the earth might everywhere have passed unnoticed—as it did, for example, in Rome. It was alleged in Rome that a sect of sinful people were living in some out-of-the-way, sordid alley, that among them was a wicked spirit calling himself Jesus of Nazareth and inciting them by his preaching to all kinds of villainous deeds. At a certain period that was all that was known in Rome of Christ! And you may possibly also be aware that Tacitus, the great Roman historian, wrote in a similar vein about a hundred years after the events in Palestine.

Thus it was by no means universally realised that something of supreme importance had taken place: that the Divine Light had shone into the darkness of earth and that it was now possible for men to be brought safely through the Kali Yuga. The possibility of further evolution for humanity was ensured because there were certain souls who understood what was at stake at that point of time and knew what it signified that Christ had been upon earth.

If you were to transfer yourselves in thought to that time, you would realise that it was quite possible to live without knowing anything at all of the advent of Christ Jesus on the physical plane—it was quite possible to live on earth without having any consciousness of this most momentous event.

Would it not also be possible to-day for something of infinite importance to take place without men being aware of it? Might not our contemporaries fail to have the slightest inkling of the most important happening in the world at the present time? It might well be so. For something of supreme importance is taking place, although it is perceptible only to the eyes of spirit. There is a great deal of talk about periods of transition; we ourselves are actually living in a very important one. And its importance lies in the fact that the Dark Age has run its course and a new age is beginning, when slowly and by degrees the souls of men will change and new faculties will be developed.

The fact that the vast majority of men are entirely unaware of this need not be a cause of surprise, for it was the same when the Christ Event took place at the beginning of our era. Kali Yuga came to an end in the year 1899 and we have now to live on into a new age. What is beginning is slowly preparing men for new faculties of soul.

The first indications of these new faculties will be noticeable in isolated souls comparatively soon now, and they will become more clearly apparent in the middle of the thirties of this century, approximately in the period between 1930 and 1940. The years 1933, 1935 and 1937 will be particularly important. Very special faculties will then reveal themselves in human beings as natural gifts. Great changes will take place during this period and biblical prophecies will be fulfilled. Everything will change for souls who are living on earth and also for those who are no longer in physical bodies. Whatever their realm of existence, souls are on the way to possessing entirely new faculties. Everything is changing—but the happening of supreme importance in our time is a deeply incisive transformation of the faculties of the human soul.

Kali Yuga is over and the souls of men are now beginning to develop new faculties. These faculties—because this is the purpose of the epoch—will of themselves draw forth from souls certain powers of clairvoyance which during Kali Yuga had necessarily to be submerged in the realm of the unconscious. A number of souls will experience the strange condition of having ego-consciousness but at the same time the feeling of living in a world essentially different from the world known to their ordinary consciousness. The experience will be shadowy, like a divination, as though an operation had been performed on one born blind. ... Through what we call esoteric training these clairvoyant faculties will be attained in a far better form. But because human beings progress, they will appear in mankind in their very earliest beginnings, in their most elementary stages, through the natural process of evolution.

But it might very easily happen—indeed, far more easily now than at any earlier time—that men would prove incapable of grasping this event of such supreme importance for humanity, incapable of realising that this denotes an actual glimpse into a spiritual world, although still shadowy and dim. There might, for example, be so much wickedness, so much materialism on the earth that the majority of men would show not the slightest understanding, and regard those who have this clairvoyance as lunatics, shutting them up in asylums together with those whose minds are obviously deranged. This point of time might pass men by without leaving a trace, although to-day we too are letting the call of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, and of Christ Himself, again resound: A new epoch is at hand when the souls of men must take a step upward into the kingdoms of heaven.

The great event might very easily pass without being understood by men. ... If between the years 1930 and 1940 the materialists were to say triumphantly: True, there have been a number of fools but no sign whatever of the expected great event ... this would not in the least disprove what has been said. But if the materialists were to win the day and mankind were to overlook these happenings altogether, it would be a dire misfortune. Even if men should prove incapable of perceiving them, great things will come to pass.

One is that it will be possible for men to acquire the new faculty of perception in the etheric world—a certain number to begin with, and they will be followed by more and more others, for mankind will have 2,500 years during which to develop these faculties in greater and greater perfection. This opportunity must not be missed. If it were, this would be a tragic misfortune and mankind would then be obliged to wait until a later epoch in order to retrieve the lost opportunity and subsequently to develop the new faculty. This faculty will consist in men being able to see in their environment something of the etheric world which hitherto they have not normally been able to see. Man now sees only the human physical body, but then he will be able to see the etheric body at least as a shadowy picture and also to perceive the connection between deeper happenings in the etheric world. He will have pictures and premonitions of happenings in the spiritual world and find that in three or four days’ time such happenings take place on the physical plane. We will see certain things in etheric pictures and know that tomorrow or in a few days’ time this or that will happen.

These faculties of the human soul will be transformed. And what is associated with this? The Being we call the Christ was once on earth in the flesh at the beginning of our era. He will never come again in a physical body, for that was a unique event and will not be repeated. But He will come again in an etheric form in the period indicated. Men will learn to perceive Christ inasmuch as through this etheric sight they will grow towards Him. He does not now descend as far as the physical body but only as far as the etheric body; men must therefore grow to the stage where He can be perceived. For Christ spoke truly when He said: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the days of earth.” He is present in our spiritual world ... and those especially blessed can always see Him in this spiritual, etheric world.

A man who was convinced with particular intensity through such perception, was Paul—in the vision at Damascus. But this etheric sight will develop in individual human beings as a natural faculty. In days to come it will be more and more possible for men to experience what Paul experienced at Damascus.

We are now able to grasp quite a different aspect of Spiritual Science. We realise that it is a preparation for the actual event of the new Appearance of Christ. Christ will appear again inasmuch as with their etheric sight men will raise themselves to Him. When this is understood, Spiritual Science is disclosed as the means of preparing men to recognise the return of Christ, in order that it shall not be their misfortune to overlook this event but that they shall be mature enough to grasp the great happening of the Second Coming of Christ. Men will become capable of seeing etheric bodies and among them, too, the etheric body of Christ; that is to say, they will grow into a world where Christ will be revealed to their newly awakened faculties.

It will then no longer be necessary to amass all kinds of documentary evidence to prove the existence of Christ; there will be eye-witnesses of the presence of the Living Christ, men who will know Him in His etheric body. And from this experience they will realise that this is the same Being who at the beginning of our era fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, that He is indeed the Christ. Just as Paul at Damascus was convinced at the time: This is Christ! ... so there will be men whose experiences in the etheric world will convince them that in very truth Christ lives.

The supreme mystery of the age in which we are living is the Second Coming of Christ—that is its true nature. But the materialistic mind will in a certain sense appropriate this event. What has now been said—that all the data of genuine spiritual knowledge point to this age—will often be proclaimed in the years immediately ahead. But the materialistic mind corrupts everything to-day, and what will happen is that this kind of thinking will be quite incapable of conceiving that the souls of men must advance to the stage of etheric sight and therewith to vision of Christ in the etheric body.

Materialistic thinking will conceive of this event as a descent of Christ in the flesh, as an incarnation in the flesh. A number of persons in their boundless arrogance will turn this to their own advantage and announce themselves to men as the reincarnated Christ. The near future may therefore bring false Christs, but anthroposophists should be so fully prepared for the spiritual life that they will not confuse the return of Christ in a spiritual body, perceptible only to higher vision, with a return in a physical body of flesh. This will be one of the most terrible temptations besetting mankind and to lead men past this temptation will be the :task of those who learn through Spiritual Science to rise in the true sense to an understanding of the Spirit, who try not to drag spirit down into matter but to ascend into the spiritual world themselves. Thus we may speak of the return of Christ and of the fact that we rise to Christ in the spiritual world through acquiring the faculty of etheric vision.

Christ is ever present, but He is in the spiritual world. We can reach Him when we rise into that world. All anthroposophical teaching should be transformed within us into an indomitable will not to allow this event to pass unnoticed but in the time that remains to us gradually to educate human beings who will be capable of developing these new faculties and therewith to unite anew with Christ. Otherwise, before such an opportunity could again arise, humanity would have to wait for long, long ages ... indeed, until a new incarnation of the earth. If this event of the return of Christ were to be overlooked, the vision of Christ in the etheric body would be restricted to those who are willing to fit themselves for such an experience through esoteric training. But the really momentous fact of these faculties being acquired by humanity in general, by all men, of this great event being understood by means of faculties developing naturally in all men ... that would be impossible for long, long ages.

Obviously, therefore, there is something in our age that justifies the existence and the work of Spiritual Science in the world. Its aim is not merely to satisfy theoretical needs or scientific curiosity. To prepare men for this great event, to prepare them to take their rightful place in the epoch in which they live and with clarity of understanding and knowledge to perceive what is actually present but may pass men by without being brought to fruition—such is the aim of Spiritual Science.

It will be of the utmost importance to recognise and understand this event of Christ's Appearance, for it will be followed by other events. Just as other happenings preceded the Christ Event in Palestine, so will those who prophetically foretold His coming follow Him after the time referred to, after He Himself has become visible to mankind again in the etheric body. The preparers of His coming will be recognisable in a new form to men who have experienced the new Christ Event. Those who lived on earth as Moses, Abraham and the Prophets will be recognisable once again. And it will be known that just as Abraham preceded Christ as a preparer, he also takes over the mission, after Christ's coming, of being a helper in His work. Thus a man who does not sleep through the event of supreme importance in the immediate future gladly finds his way into fellowship with all those who, as the Patriarchs, preceded the Christ Event; he allies himself with them. The whole choir of those to whose level we shall thus be able to rise is again revealed. The one who led mankind downwards to the physical plane appears again after Christ and leads men upwards again, unites them again with the spiritual worlds. [See the following lecture.]

Looking far back into the past we come .to that point of time in the evolution of humanity of which we say: from then onwards humanity descends farther and farther away from the spiritual world into the physical world. Although the following picture also has its material aspect, it can nevertheless be used here. In earlier times man was a companion of spiritual Beings and because his spirit lived in the spiritual world he was a son of the Gods. But the soul, descending ever more deeply into bodily incarnation, participated to a constantly increasing extent in the outer world. The son of the Gods within man took delight in the daughters of the earth, that is to say in those souls who were drawn to the physical world. This in turn means: the human spirit, in earlier times charged through and through with divine spirituality, sank down into physical materiality, became the spouse of the brain-bound intellect and by it was entangled in the web of the physical world of sense. And now the human spirit must re-ascend along the path by which the descent was once made and become again a son of the Gods. The human spirit which had become the son of man would perish in the physical world ifthis son of man were not to climb upwards again to the Divine Beings, to the light of the spiritual world, finding delight in times to come in the daughters of the Gods. It was necessary for the evolution of mankind that the sons of the Gods should unite with the daughters of men, with the souls who are fettered to the earth, in order that as the son of man the human spirit should learn to master the physical plane. But it is necessary that the human being of the future, the son of man, shall take delight in the daughters of the Gods, in the divine-spiritual light of wisdom with which he must unite in order then to grow upwards again into the world of the Gods.

The will of man must be fired by the divine wisdom, and the most powerful impulse for this will be if to those who have truly prepared themselves the sublime ether-form of Christ Jesus becomes perceptible. To a man in whom natural clairvoyance has developed this will be like a Second Coming of Christ Jesus, just as the etheric Christ appeared as a spiritual Being to Paul. Christ will appear again to men when they realise that they must use to this end the faculties with which evolution itself will equip the human soul.

Let us therefore use Spiritual Science not merely to satisfy our curiosity, but in such a way that it will make us worthier to fulfil the great tasks and missions devolving upon the human race.

Answer given by Dr. Steiner to questions asked in connection with the foregoing lecture

When light has been thrown, as it has been today, upon mysteries of a more intimate kind, let us not treat them as thoughtlessly as certain subjects are wont to be treated to-day, but realise that Anthroposophy must be for us something altogether different from a theory. The teaching has, of course, to be given; for how would it be possible to rise to thoughts such as have been voiced to-day if they could not be received in the form of teaching? The essence of this teaching, however, is that it does not remain as such but is re-moulded in the soul into qualities of heart and character, into an entirely different attitude of mind, making different men of us. The teaching should guide us how to make the right use of our incarnations so that in the course of them we can develop into something quite different.

I have tried not to say a word too much or too little and have therefore given only fleeting indications of matters of great moment. But What has been said is of significance not only for the souls who will be incarnated on the physical plane in the period from 1930 to 1940 but also for those who will then be in the spiritual world between death and a new birth; souls work down from the spiritual world into the world of the living, even though the latter may know nothing of it. Through the new Christ Event, this communion between souls who are incarnated here on the physical plane and souls already in the spiritual world will become an increasingly conscious communion. Active co-operation between human beings in incarnation and spiritual beings will then be possible; this should already have been indicated when it was said that the Prophets appear again among men on the earth.

You have therefore to conceive that when these great times arrive in the future there will be a more conscious mutual co-operation between men in the physical world and in the spiritual world. This is not possible to-day because of the absence of a common language. Here in the physical world the only words men use in their languages designate physical things and physical conditions. The world in which human beings live between death and a new birth is quite different from the world immediately surrounding us, and they speak a different language. The Dead can take in only what is spoken in the sense of Spiritual Science—nothing else. Therefore in Anthroposophy we are cultivating something that will be more and more intelligible to the Dead and we are speaking also for those who are living between death and a new birth.

Humanity is passing into a new era when the strength of the influences from the spiritual world will steadily increase. The great events of the immediate future will be perceptible in all worlds. Those, too, who are living between death and a new birth will have new experiences as the result of the new Christ Event in the etheric world. But if they made no preparation in themselves while on earth, they would no more understand the event than would men incarnated on the earth, unless these had prepared themselves to respond in the right way. It is essential for all souls now incarnated—no matter whether they will then still be in physical incarnation or not—that .through the assimilation of anthroposophical truths they should prepare themselves for these important future events. If they fail to receive into their earthly consciousness what Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science has to give, they will have to wait for a new incarnation in order to have the possibility here on earth of assimilating the corresponding teachings. For there are things that can be experienced and learnt only on earth.

Hence it is said that in the spiritual world there is, for example, no possibility of knowing death—and it was necessary for a God to descend into the physical world in order that He might die. Knowledge of what the Mystery of Golgotha is can be acquired in no other world in the way that is possible in the physical world. We have been led down into the physical world in order to acquire something that can be acquired only there. And Christ came down to humanity because it was only in the physical world that He could reveal to men—could enable them to experience in the Mystery of Golgotha—something that, having let its fruits ripen in the spiritual world, carries those fruits onward. But the seeds must be laid down and spread abroad in the physical world.

Golden Age—Krita Yuga—about 20,000 years
Silver Age—Treta Yuga—about 15,000 years
Bronze Age—Dvapara Yuga—about 10,000 years
Dark Age—Kali Yuga—about 5,000 years
Our Age embraces a future 2,500 years

It has often been emphasized that the present can best be understood in the light of the past and its happenings, and we shall most easily discover and understand the characteristics of our spiritual ideals for the future by looking back into times of remote antiquity. Today, therefore, we will consider developments that took place after the destruction of ancient Atlantis and, in connection with those developments, man's experience during the life after death.

The conditions experienced by the soul between death and a new birth have not always been the same. They, too, have changed in the course of evolution. During the great cultural epochs—the ancient Indian, the epoch of the Holy Rishis; the ancient Persian, epoch of the Zarathustrian culture; the Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin and our present epoch—man has connected himself ever more closely with the physical plane, which he grew to love more and more intensely. In every such epoch the human soul descended deeper into the material world. The greater the understanding acquired by man for this world, the stranger the spiritual world became for him after death. This was the case most strongly in the Greco-Latin epoch. The Greeks loved the physical world because in their glorious art, in that splendid adornment of physical existence, their whole soul could live joyfully. The physical world was dear to the Roman because in his discovery of the ego, the “I,” the feeling of his own personality could develop to the full. The concepts of Roman citizenship and Roman rights are hallmarks of this cultural epoch. The Roman felt at home in this physical, material world. The concept of rights has existed only since that epoch, so it is quite correct to say that jurisprudence began in the Roman Empire; it is the sign of reverence for the single personality. Death was the great unknown and evoked fear. The utterance of Achilles: “Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of Shades,” aptly indicates the conception prevailing in that epoch of the soul's experience during the life after death in the spiritual world. The more fully these souls had given expression in the realm of earth to all their faculties, the more did the capacity to find their bearings in the spiritual world after death depart from them. The soul felt isolated in the spheres it had now entered. Even in spiritland (Devachan) the soul felt that everything around it was dark, empty and cold. The soul was no longer capable of experiencing the spirituality of yonder world. Even the great leaders of mankind, the initiates, could not change this condition, yet they are the teachers of men not only here on earth but also in yonder worlds. When they told the dead anything about the world this side of the threshold, these souls felt still greater pain at having been obliged to leave the physical world that had become so dear to them. The teachers could bring with them nothing that would help or be of value to the dead, all of whom longed for reincarnation. A human being felt as though he were shut away from his brothers, abandoned even in the realm of the spirit. Had these conditions remained, love and brotherliness would also have gradually disappeared from the earth. For this sojourn in the realm of spirit would have meant that these souls would bring egoism with them into the physical world and into a life wholly centered in the individual self.

In the ancient. Indian epoch man still regarded the earthly world as maya, but things changed in the course of evolution. Zarathustra already proclaimed that the spiritual can also be found by man in the physical world. He revealed the path by which the people were ultimately to realize that the sun with its light is only the external body of a sublime spiritual being whom he called Ahura Mazdao, the Great Aura, in contrast to the little human aura. His aim was to proclaim that this being, as yet far off, would one day come down to the earth in order to unite with its very substance and to work further in the evolution of humanity. For the people of Zarathustra this heralded the same being who in later history lived on the earth as Christ. To his pupils Zarathustra proclaimed, “If you learn to understand that the spiritual is present in everything physical and material, that the physical is permeated by the great Sun Aura, by Ahura Mazdao, then Ahriman will no longer lead you astray.”

At other times Zarathustra said, “So great, so mighty is He who has revealed Himself to me in the sun that I sacrifice everything to him. Gladly I offer to Him the life of my body, the etheric existence of my senses, the expression of my deeds, the astral body.”

This was the pledge once made by the great Zarathustra. He announced to his pupils that the great Sun Spirit would reveal Himself directly in the earth itself, in the realities of earthly existence. Thus did Zarathustra inaugurate the teaching that the material is only the physiognomy, the expression of the spiritual.

Then came the time when the being who had been heralded by Zarathustra revealed himself to Moses in the burning thornbush and on Sinai. Moses taught that this Sun Being is also the Ego Being, the highest principle that can be membered into man. But it is not only into man that a particle of the Sun Spirit has descended; it has also descended into everything in external nature, into the elements, everywhere. The same divinity who, in the name of the “I am the I am,” the principle once revealed to Zarathustra as Ahura Mazdao, as the innermost core, the primordial ground of all existence, was proclaimed by Moses to a whole people as the supreme being whose name was inexpressible and might be uttered only in the innermost sanctuary by the officiating priest. The Godhead who dwells in man, who does not reveal Himself only in the elements, in the flaming fire, is He who is here proclaimed.

Thus we can regard Zarathustra as the herald of Jehovah, of the same being who at the beginning of our time-reckoning dwelt for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the same God who had been proclaimed by Moses and Zarathustra.

Christ says, “How shall ye believe me if ye have not believed )Moses and the prophets?” Herewith Christ confirms that the Old Testament had proclaimed in advance, only under different names, the same God whom He, Christ also proclaims. All events in the world need a certain time to take effect. On Sinai, in the burning thornbush, this Sun Being, descending from the heights of the spiritual world, had reached the point where He could announce Himself to man through the elements. He now came nearer and nearer to the earth, into the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism in the Jordan, and when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth and the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, this was not only the expression of a great cosmic event but also of the greatest of all earthly events: the Christ passed into the earth's aura as the Spirit of the earth. A new impetus had been given and could be perceived by clairvoyance, for at that moment the earth's aura changed, revealing particular colors. New colors were revealed and new powers were incorporated in the earth's aura. At the moment when the blood that is the physical expression of the ego flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer on Golgotha, at that moment the ego of Christ united with the earth. But the moment had also come when conditions in the spiritual world could begin to change for souls after death. This was the meaning of Christ's descent into Hell.

A clairvoyant, living before the event of Golgotha, would not have seen in the earth's aura what could be seen there later on, when Christ Jesus had passed through the death on Golgotha. Let us now think of the event of Damascus. Saul who, as an initiate of the Jewish Mysteries, knew full well that the “Great Aura,” Ahura Mazdao, would one day unite with the earth, rebelled against the belief that this being could have died on the shameful cross. Although he had participated in the events in Palestine, he did not believe that this great spirit had dwelt on the earth in Jesus of Nazareth. It was when he became clairvoyant near the gates of Damascus that in the earth's aura he beheld the Christ spirit, the living Christ, who could not previously have been seen there. He then said to himself, “Yes, it was predicted that the earth's aura would change, and that has now come to pass.” Then Saul became Paul. Paul spoke of himself as one who had been born prematurely, one who had become clairvoyant through grace; his was a premature birth because maturity had not yet been fully reached; he had not descended so deeply into matter and was less firmly connected with the physical body. Those who follow the course of Christianity know that the personality in it of supreme importance is Paul. He achieved more than anyone else for its propagation.

It was an occult fact, an occult event, by which Paul was converted, and it can justly be said that through that clairvoyant experience humanity was led to Christ. At that time a change took place in the earth's aura, and since then it has been changed. The words of St. John's Gospel were thus fulfilled: “He who eats my bread treads upon me with his feet.” Since then Christ has been the Spirit of the earth, the planetary Spirit. The earth is the body of Christ; His habitation is within the earth. This profound utterance in St. John's Gospel is not to be understood in an adverse sense or as a pointer to Judas who betrayed Christ. Rather, the reference is to the Christ-Jehovah Divinity and His relation to the earth.

When the occult investigator compares the effect of the art of the Greeks and post-Christian art upon the world man enters after death, he still finds that when a clairvoyant contemplates with physical eyes a Greek temple with its Doric pillars—for example, the ruins at Paestum-he may well be entranced by the harmonious forms that follow the spiritual lines of direction and thereby make this temple an actual dwelling place of the god. Just as a soul feels drawn to the body that is fitting for it, so does the god descend into these forms that harmonize so perfectly with his nature and being. But when a seer turns his eyes to the spiritual counterpart of his temple, he finds nothing in the spiritual world. The temple seems to have been obliterated from that world and a space left empty there: nothing of the temple is to be seen. If, on the other hand, a seer is contemplating works of art of the post-Christian era or, for example, contemplating the Gospel of St. John or the passages in the Old and New Testaments that have to do with Christ-Jehovah or Raphael's Madonnas—if the seer contemplates these creations first with physical eyes and then with clairvoyant sight, they are by no means invisible in the spiritual world but radiate there in even greater splendor. This is especially true of the Gospel of St. John. It is in the spiritual world that the greatness of that creation is first realized. It is in the spiritual world that whatever is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha first becomes radiant and clear in the fullest sense.

Simultaneously with the historical event on the physical plane, a spiritual happening, which was also a symbolic happening, took place when the blood flowed from the Redeemer's wounds. When Christ was no longer living in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, at the moment when He died on Golgotha, He appeared in the spiritual world to the souls living between death and rebirth, and the darkness abated. The spiritual world was suddenly filled with light. Just as the objects in a dark room suddenly become visible when a ray of light shines into the room and you see the objects that were always there although you could not previously detect them, thus did light pour into the world of the dead. The souls there were again able to perceive what was around them, to feel united in the realm of spirit with their brothers and could now bring into the physical world the qualities of love and brotherliness. Thus a new light came into this world of the dead, for the Mystery of Golgotha has significance not only for the world in which it took place physically but for all the worlds with which man is connected in the course of his evolution. If the spiritual world had remained as the dead experienced it during the Greco-Latin epoch, if the human soul had remained in the icy coldness and loneliness then prevailing, brotherliness and love would have gradually vanished from the world. Man would have brought with him from Devachan the longing for seclusion. For the light that then streamed into the earthly world and also into the world of the dead was meant to establish the kingdom of brotherliness and love on the earth. That is the mission of the Christ impulse.

We will now consider from still another side the Mystery of Golgotha and the secret of the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer.

We know that man on the earth has received an inheritance from Old Moon. The three lower bodies, physical body, etheric body and astral body had been prepared for him and it was on the earth that the ego was first added—the ego as the expression of human freedom and independence. In ancient times it was important to establish the homogeneity of mankind. At the beginning, conditions were such that the relations of one human being to another were saved only by being given a physical foundation. The blood is the expression of the ego. Blood kinship and the ties of blood were the ruling principles. The physical blood was the medium operating from man to man. This was how things were in times of antiquity. But through Christ Jesus love became a non-material bond. The activity of the human group ego declined. In earlier times the human being belonged to a communal tribal ego and he felt safe and secure within it, within the bosom of Father Abraham. This kinship was much more important to him than his personal identity. His higher self continued to exist in the ties of blood kinship. In the Old Testament we hear of Noah and other tribal fathers that they lived for hundreds of years. We are there led back to times when the human being not only had a memory of what he himself had experienced but also to a time when this memory extended far back into the generations. He did not say “I” of himself but he lived in his “I” right back to remote ancestors. His life did not begin with his birth; it was not then that he began to say “I” of himself but he said “I” of everything his ancestors had experienced.

It was against love based on blood that the luciferic beings at all times directed their sharpest attacks. Their aim was to make each single human being dependent upon himself alone, to instill consciousness of self into man even between death and a new birth. But divine beings, bearers of love, strove to bring individuals together through bonds other than those based on ties of blood, which take no account of freedom. The Christ principle unites with the full expression of the “I” the power flowing from the spirit of love and lets it hold sway from individual to individual. Hence there is a saying, Christ is the true Lucifer (Christus verus Luciferus) or Light-bringer, and finally the opponent of the fallen Lucifer. The love based on blood was transformed by Christ into spiritual love, into the brotherly love streaming from soul to soul. Christ's utterance, “He who forsakes not father and mother cannot be my disciple,” is to be understood in the sense that love based on blood must be transformed into the brotherly love that embraces all human beings with equal strength. Spiritual science takes nothing away from any of these biblical utterances but when it is rightly understood can only enrich them with a deeper understanding of Christian grace. The power of spiritual love was brought to the souls of men for the first time by Christ when He appeared on the earth; and with the blood that flowed on Golgotha from the wounds of the Redeemer the superfluous blood of humanity was as it were sacrificed. Through this act the teaching was confirmed that individual must confront individual as human brothers. In the world today there is still little understanding of Christ. Mankind has first to learn to realize the greatness of this most. mighty cosmic event. A few individuals have always had a divining of the whole significance of the Christ Being and His appearance on the earth. How have they thought of that event? Think of the human beings and peoples who preserved for some considerable time the connection with the spiritual world. The ancient Indian set little store by his connection with the physical world. He was intent upon the acquisition of super-sensible truths and lofty spiritual life in the spiritual world but had no desire to love physical existence. Let me tell you about an Eastern saga, which indicates in a splendid way how the Christ principle was tentatively grasped there.

In the course of time, so runs this saga, there appeared the power that guides our earth. An oriental legend, which reports it, was narrated in the temples of Northern Tibet to the pupil of the wisdom of the Buddha, and has been preserved ever since. This Eastern legend narrates that Kashyapa, the worthiest pupil of the Buddha, lived at a time when, even in the East, little understanding of wisdom was to be found. When he felt his end approaching he withdrew into a cave where he lived for long ages; his corpse was to be preserved there to await the appearance of the Maitreya Buddha in order then to ascend to heaven.

The gist of this legend follows. If there had been no special event, that is to say, if Christ had not appeared on the earth, neither the East nor the West would have been able to find the path into the spiritual world. The body of Kashyapa is pre-served until the Maitreya Buddha releases the corpse from the earth. This means that in the future man will again have powers whereby what is earthly can be spiritualized. The sublime being who conducts Kashyapa's body into the spiritual world will have descended more deeply than any being has ever done. Christ Himself releases the body of Kashyapa. In the period following this event the body is no longer there. What does this mean? It means that the body was immediately transported into the spiritual world. The body of Kashyapa can be liberated in the element of fire. Where is this fire? When seen by Paul before Damascus it was spiritualized. Thus the appearance of Christ on the earth is the great turning point when man can ascend again from the physical into the spiritual world.

Now think of the Buddha's teaching. Through observing old age, illness, death, and so forth, the great truth concerning suffering dawned in him. He now taught of the cessation of suffering, of release from suffering through the elimination of the desire for birth, for physical incarnation.

Now think of humanity six hundred years later. What do you find? Humanity reveres a corpse. Men gaze at Christ on the cross, Christ who dies and through His death brought life. Life has vanquished death.

One: To be born is suffering? No, for Christ entered into our earth and henceforward for me, a Christian, to be born is no longer suffering.

Two: Illness is suffering? But the great medicine will exist, that is, the power of the soul that has been kindled by the Christ impulse. In uniting himself with the Christ impulse, man spiritualizes his life.

Three: Old age is suffering? But whereas man's body becomes frail and infirm, in his real self he grows ever stronger and more powerful.

Four: Death is suffering? But through Christ the corpse has become the symbol of the fact that death, physical death, has been vanquished by life, by the spirit; death has been finally overcome by life.

Five: To be separated from the being one loves is suffering? But the man who has understood Christ is never separated from the one he loves, for Christ has brought light to the world stretching between death and a new birth; so a man remains united with the object of his love.

Six: Not to receive that for which one craves is suffering? He who lives with Christ will no longer crave for what does not come to him, or is not given to him.

Seven: To be united with what one does not love is suffering? But the man who has recognized Christ kindles in himself that universal love that envelops every being, every object according to its value.

Eight: To be separated from what one loves is no longer suffering, for in Christ there is no more separation.

Thus for the illness of suffering, which Buddha proclaimed and recognized, the remedy has been given through Christ.

This turning of humanity to Christ and to the dead body on the cross is the greatest transformation that has ever come to pass in evolution.

Today in connection with the previous lecture some aphoristic remarks will follow concerning the different races. First however attention will be drawn to certain things, the reasons for which only appear in a few books.

The so-called laws of nutrition in the various civilisations appear at first to be very arbitrary. This is not so however, they are born out of knowledge and wisdom, but we must strictly bear in mind that our present-day humanity is not at all in a position to be able to follow such matters as we now wish to deal with. They will nevertheless provide a basis for certain laws of social life. Of course no one should believe that one immediately becomes an adept simply by going over to vegetarianism and so on.

Among oriental peoples there is a certain way of practising the art of healing in which the doctors attach the greatest importance to the nourishing of their own physical body.⁷⁸ In places where the old spiritual life still exists, there are those who have become healers by following a diet consisting exclusively of milk. They are quite clear that because they exclude everything else they gain certain healing forces within themselves, especially in the treatment of so-called mental illnesses. They have their special methods. They know for certain that when they only take milk they then develop quite definite forces.⁷⁹

Let us be clear about the intuition upon which this depends. This profound intuition can be understood in the following way. We know of a definite happening in human evolution. In the middle of the Lemurian Age the original human element divided into an ascending humanity and an animal kingdom. With this is bound up the fact that the forces which the Earth still had when it was united with the Moon also divided and a part of the same separated with the Moon from the Earth.

Let us think of the time when the Earth was still united with the Moon. Man then stood at quite a different stage of development. He already had warm blood, but was not yet divided into two sexes. It was with the separation of the Moon that this division is to be observed, so that when today you look up at the Moon you can say: It is your separation from the Earth that has brought it about that the power of human reproduction has divided into two parts. There was also a time on the Earth in which humanity was directly connected, was merged together with what was animal, and was also nourished by the animal. This kind of nourishment cannot be easily understood by those lacking the power of clairvoyance. We can however form a conception of this when we observe the normal manner of nourishment of mammals, which feed their young with their own milk. With the division of the power of reproduction this kind of nutrition also appeared. Earlier human beings could absorb food substance just as today the lungs take in the air. At that time threads of suction connected man with the whole of Nature around him, somewhat in the manner in which today the embryo is nourished in the body of the mother. This was the old form of nourishment on the Earth. A relic of this is the suckling of mammals, and milk is like the nourishment mankind took in Pre-Lemurian times. It is the old food of the Gods, the first form of nourishment on the Earth. At that time the nature of the Earth was such that everywhere this nourishment could be sucked from it. Thus milk is a product of the first form of human food. When the physical constitution of man was nearer to the divine he sucked milk out of his surroundings. Occultists know how man is connected with Nature.

The taking of milk is a transformation of a primeval form of nourishment. Man's first food was always milk. In the saying: ‘The milk of human kindness,’ this expression is used intentionally. We must ask: How was it originally brought about that milk, as it then was, could be sucked out of the Earth? The Moon forces in the Earth made this possible; like an all-pervading bloodstream they permeated the entire Earth. But when the Moon departed these forces could only be concentrated in special organs of living beings.

The occultist calls milk: the Moon-food. Sons of the Moon are those who nourish themselves on milk. The Moon brought about milk. It has been verified that the Oriental healers, who only live on milk, again absorb the original forces which were on the Earth when milk still flowed in streams. They said: These are the forces which brought mankind into existence. These productive forces must also be health bringing, so we ourselves gain the power to further health, when we only take milk and exclude everything else.

Let us transfer ourselves into the pre-Lemurian Age. Then the condition prevailed when milk was sucked out from the surroundings. A condition arose when milk became the general nourishment for mankind, and then the condition when nourishment was provided by the mother's milk. Before the time when milk was imbibed from Nature, there was an Age in which the Earth was still united with the Sun. There then existed a Sun nourishment. Just as milk has remained over from the Moon, products have also remained over which gained their maturity from the Sun. Everything irradiated with sunlight, blossoms and fruits of the plants, belongs to the Sun. Formerly their growth inclined towards the centre of the Earth when it was united with the Sun. They planted themselves into the Sun with their blossoms. When the Earth separated from the Sun they retained their old character: they again turned their blossoms towards the Sun. Man is the plant in reverse. That part of the plant which grows above the Earth has the same relationship to the Sun as milk has to the Moon, is therefore Sun-food. Side by side with milk nourishment there arose a kind of plant nourishment, namely from the upper parts of the plant. This was the second form of human food.

Thus when the Lemurian Age was approaching its end two human types faced each other: the one kind, the Sons of the Moon, who bred animals and nourished themselves from what the animals produced, from their milk; and a second kind who fed on plants, on the produce of the Earth.

This fact is portrayed in the story of Cain and Abel.⁸⁰ Abel is a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil; Abel represented the Moon race and Cain the Sun race. This allegory is very profound. Occult teaching reveals this in a somewhat concealed way. That divine being who gave man the possibility of becoming a Moon-being, nourishing himself with the transformed Moon food, was called by the Jewish people ‘Jehovah’. He was the nourishing force of Nature; this flowed towards Abel and he took it from his flocks. It was a falling away from Jehovah when man went over to the Sun-food. This is why Jehovah would not accept Cain's offering, because it was the offering of a Sun-food.

When we go back into the most ancient times we find no nourishment at all except milk, the food which man receives from living animals. This is the first form of nourishment as it still is now in the first weeks of life, and the Eastern healer relates this form of nourishment to the saying: ‘If you do not become as little children, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ All these things have their significance.

Now we come from the Lemurian to the Atlantean Age, to the peoples who lived in the region of the present Atlantic Ocean. With the Atlanteans something new appears. They began for the first time to eat food that was not taken from what is living, but which came from what was dead. They consumed what had yielded up life. This is a very important transition in human evolution. Through the fact that human beings nourished themselves from the lifeless it became possible to make the transition to ego-hood. This feeding on what is dead is rightly connected with the desire for the ego. Man became independent through eating what is dead. He took the lifeless into himself in various forms, at first in the case of the developing hunting peoples who killed animals. Later, peoples arose who ate, not only what was ripened by the sun, but what ripened below the surface of the earth. This is just as lifeless as the dead animal. Everything living in the lowest part of animal nature, what is saturated with, blood, has turned away from the Moon-force. The Moon-force itself is still in milk, which is connected with the life-process, whereas man absorbs the forces of what is dying when he eats what is dead. Equally dead is that part of the plant that grows below the surface of the Earth, that is not shone upon and warmed through by the life principle of the Sun. Thus there is a correspondence between the root and the blood-saturated body of the animal.

Later another form of food was added which did not exist earlier. Man introduced into his food what was purely mineral, what he took out of the Earth, salt and so on. In his food therefore he passed through the three kingdoms. This is approximately the course which the Atlantean civilisation passed through in regard to nourishment. Firstly came the hunting peoples, then the farming peoples and thirdly the development of mining, which brought to light what is under the Earth.

All these things represent a turning away from the actual force of life or production. The dead animal is separated from life. That part of the plant which is in the soil is also separated from life. Everything of the nature of salt is the dead nature of the mineral kingdom, that remains over from the past.

Now we come to the fifth human race. The drinking of milk and the eating of fruit continued; other things were added as something new. In the Fifth Root-Race the most outstanding addition is what was gained from minerals, that is to say, by means of a chemical process. This is indicated in Genesis. What is it that was gained by means of a chemical process? There is an ascent in evolution, chemistry is applied to plants, to fruit. Out of this wine arose. This did not exist on Atlantis. Therefore the Bible tells us that Noah, the original ancestor of the post-diluvian race, became intoxicated by wine. By means of a mineral-chemical process something was produced from the plant kingdom. Wine then played a special role in the whole of the Fifth Root-Race. All initiates from the beginning of the Fifth Root-Race had taken over their traditions from the time of the Atlantean Race, when there was as yet no wine. The Indian, Persian and Egyptian initiates had no need of wine. What played a part in the sacred rituals was exclusively water.

With the Fifth Root-Race wine made its appearance, in which the mineral treatment of the plant had to play its part. The first three Sub-Races were repetitions of what came earlier. The Fourth Sub-Race was the first to develop the new, which was to appear in the Fifth Root-Race. A certain sacredness was claimed for wine. In this connection cults emerged in which wine played a part (the cult of Dionysos). A wine-god even appeared.

This had gradually been prepared for in the development of humanity. Wine had first made its appearance with the Persians. Here however wine was still something quite secular. Only gradually did it find its way into ritual, into the Dionysos-Cult. The Fourth Sub-Race is the one which first brought forth Christianity and also the one which seven hundred years earlier announced its mission through the Dionysian dramas. These first took wine into the sphere of the cult. This fact was portrayed in the most wonderful way by that evangelist who knew most about Christianity: St. John. He describes at the very beginning the transformation of water into wine, for Christianity came at first for the Fourth Sub-Race of the Fifth Root-Race. A teaching was needed which makes sacred what had to come about on the physical plane. Wine cuts human beings off from everything spiritual. Whoever takes wine cannot attain the spiritual. He can know nothing of Atma, Buddhi and Manas, of what is lasting, of what reincarnates. This had to be. The whole course of human evolution is a descent and a re-ascent. Man had to descend to the lowest point. And it was in order that he should come right down onto the physical plane that the Dionysian Cult made its appearance. The human body had to be prepared for materialism through the Dionysian cult; this was why a religion had to appear that changed water into wine. Formerly wine was strictly forbidden to the priests, they could experience Atma, Buddhi and Manas. Now a religion had to come about which led right down onto the physical plane, otherwise human beings would not have completely descended. This religion which led them downwards had to have an outer manifestation, a manifestation that was turned away from Atma, Buddhi and Manas, from reincarnation, and only drew attention to what was of a general nature. The next thing will be that wine is again turned into water.

If at an earlier time water had not changed into wine, man would not have received everything which is in this earthly vale. At the beginning of St. John's Gospel in the description of the changing of water into wine at the marriage in Cana, we are shown how Christ took into account what was there. But he also reckoned with the future, through the fact that for his part He inaugurated the Sacrament of the Last Supper. The Last Supper is the greatest symbol of the One who began this stream of civilisation with the Fourth Sub-Race. Being indeed the true ‘Son of Man’, who descended to the greatest depths in order to rise again with the greatest power, He had to hold to what was there and show mankind how the physical constitution of the race was connected with His mission. If humanity were to ascend again it was necessary for them to have a symbol leading once more from the dead to the living: Bread and Wine. In the occult sense, bread is what only comes about when the plant has been killed. Again, wine comes about when the plant has been killed, but then further treated with mineral substance. When one bakes the plant one does the same as when one kills the animal. When we draw wine from the plant kingdom in a certain sense we do the same as when we bleed the animal. Bread and wine are there as the symbol of the Fourth Race. What should develop in the future is a further ascent from plant to mineral nourishment. Bread and Wine must again be sacrificed, must be given up. Thus as Christ appeared in the Fourth Sub-Race he pointed to Bread and Wine: ‘This is my Body; this is my Blood.’ Here He wished to create a transition from animal nourishment to plant nourishment, the transition to something higher.

At that time there were two classes of human beings: Firstly those whose nourishment was flesh and blood; these are the pre-Christian people with whom Christ in no way concerned himself. Secondly those who only killed plants, who drew from plants their blood: people who drank wine and ate bread. With these He was still concerned; they are the forerunners of that humanity which will exist in the future.

The significance of the Last Supper is the transition from nourishment taken from the dead animal to nourishment taken from the dead plant. When our Fifth Sub-Race will have reached its end, in the Sixth Sub-Race, the Last Supper will be understood. Even before this it will be possible for the third form of nourishment to begin to make its appearance, the purely mineral. Man himself will then be able to create his nourishment. Now he takes what the Gods have created for him. Later he will advance and will himself prepare in the chemical laboratory the substances he will require.

So you see that all these things arise out of deep intuitions. When with the old Eastern peoples we find all kinds of instructions about what should be eaten, these are not actually laws, but stories: You should not expect the effect of substance to be other than they are.

That which Christ killed, which was actually sacrificed after he had partaken of the Last Supper, is the physical body. This dies. For the whole of humanity this will die. Towards the middle of the Sixth Root-Race, in the last third, there will no longer be a physical body. Then the entire human being will again be etheric. It will pass over into the finer substance. But this will not happen if man himself does not bring it about. For this he must first pass over to the nourishment which he prepares in the laboratory. So that man, in so far as he no longer takes his nourishment from Nature, but gains it from his own wisdom, from the God within him, so far does he also hasten. towards his own deification.

When man begins to nourish himself, the foundation will also be laid for something higher, that is, self-propagation. He will gradually create life for himself out of the mineral world.

This is the great progression of human evolution. What the natural scientist knows today is only a fraction of the great cycle.

With Saturn we come into the Mineral Age. In the Atlantean Epoch, through consuming what was dead, preparation was made for what was to bring about egoism. From the original Semites up to the Fifth Sub-Race, the human ego was very gradually developed. In the Sixth Sub-Race of the Fifth Root-Race the ‘I’ will again reach a higher stage of development. This means that we stand before a new so-called spiral of existence. The previous spiral began in the time when the original Semites laid the foundation for the present Root-Race.

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It is to the original Semite civilisation that we owe everything that has existed up till the present time. But now there begins a new impact with the Slavonic Peoples which will lead into the future. A kind of break with the past will be brought about by a people who will introduce a new impulse into the world. This is working as hidden spirituality out of the Russian peasantry. It will form the second part of the coming spiral. At the present time a certain culture is in process of destruction and a new one is being prepared. It is being prepared in the West and will come to fruition in the East. But the Old must activate the New. Wherever in our time we have new impulses these are germinal, awkward, unskillful. On the contrary the Old is clear-cut, but has a critical, destructive character. It was the Semitic Race which gave birth to the bearers of the Old Culture, who are the bearers of what spirals within the spiral.

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All these have something Semitic about them. Examples: Lassalle, Marx. The spiral turns inwards. A continuation from here is not possible. Now a leap must be made as though from one shore to another, to the spirituality of the future culture of the East. This is a completely new impulse.

What belongs to the future is as yet unformed and naturally infiltrated by the old. Haeckel is a man who swims in midstream and is pulled by both spirals. The first part of Haeckel's ‘Weltritsel’ (Riddles of the World)⁸¹ is positive, elementary Theosophy: the second part is negative and altogether destructive. This is a double spiral (Wirbel).

We can also observe these contradictions in the Socialism of the East and the West. The Socialism of the West is a Socialism of production; that of the East is a Socialism of consumption. One who orders the social life in the direction of production reckons with possessiveness, with egoism. He who reckons with consumption turns his attention to what others require from him; he bears in mind his fellow men, reckons with brotherhood. The socialism of production—Marx, Lassalle—only bears the worker in mind, in so far as he is the producer. In the East the consumer is placed in the foreground, as for instance with Kropotkin, Bakunin, Herzen. You can see things building up to a climax if you follow Kropotkin. He had an immediate understanding of the principle of helpful interaction in the case of animals. The socialism of the West is entirely built up on strife. Thus do the currents of World evolution play into one another.

• 78. Later Rudolf Steiner spoke on this subject from many different angles especially to the workmen engaged on the Goetheanum building. See Rudolf Steiner on Nutrition and Health and Illness.
• 79. These are the words according to Mathilde Scholl. Marie Steiner's notes, on the contrary, report that the old healers ‘call up in themselves psychic means of healing mainly for psychic illnesses’.
• 80. Rudolf Steiner interpreted this allegory in different ways especially in lectures in 1904 and 1905 in connection with the Temple Legend. Die Tempel legende und die Goldene Legende. The only ones translated are Concerning the Temple Lost and Found 15, 22, 29 May, 5 June 1905, (Typescript).
• 81. See lecture 5.10.1905 Three Essays on Haeckel and Karma.

How a person lives, whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied, depends on the degree of understanding they have of their own nature. When looking up at the starry sky, the medieval person felt comfort and hope, full of admiration for its size and beauty, because the medieval person felt part of the universe, part of the spirit that permeates the world. He recognized his origin and his goal, which would lead him back into the bosom of the Godhead.

Compared to the mighty structure of the world, the infinity of the universe, today's man feels so small, so tiny, that he thinks he must scatter like a speck of dust. Man is certainly tiny compared to the universe, and yet one thing is greater than all creation: the soul, the spiritual part in man. The highest divine reality, to which his journey leads him back, lives within himself. This knowledge, this belief was not taken from people in the Middle Ages.

This has now changed significantly in our time. Popular writings never tire of emphasizing the smallness of man. Just as the earth appears in space only like a grain of sand, so man on earth is only a grain of sand that passes away. Thus, the present time emphasizes man's smallness, the Middle Ages his greatness. It is difficult for today's man to find his way between these considerations of the smallness and the greatness of man. Schiller, who had more of a theosophical way of thinking than most people suspect, says:

You astronomers, do not talk about nebulae and
suns, the Sublime does not dwell in space.

Theosophy brings new light into this confusion; it opens up depths for us that provide new insights into the nature of man. The theosophical world view is not reactionary; it knows and recognizes that the material world view was necessary because it led to the knowledge of the external world. But the consequence of this was that the deeper knowledge about man was neglected. The material view has conquered the globe. Now it is time to gain a deeper understanding of the soul and spirit, and the teachings of Theosophy can provide us with this.

How can the nature of man be fathomed? Today's science seeks to understand man, like everything else, through dissection. It uses the external senses to gain insight into the nature of man. The value of the science thus acquired is by no means to be belittled, but there is another way of research.

In old mystical writings (this word has an unpleasant ring for many, of course), you will find descriptions of the inner being, of the human spirit. They say that man has inner organs with which he can pursue a completely different kind of research than the one carried out with the outer senses. The result of these investigations with the inner, finer senses is now not at all fundamentally different from the materialistic investigation; it only provides further, deeper insights than the external method of investigation.

This spiritual wisdom now has different names. The name “Theosophy” is only one among many. Paul was the first to use it. This wisdom is ancient, it is nothing new; it is only being brought to people today in a way it has never been before. Higher or deeper knowledge used to be the property of secret schools. The word should not be misunderstood. The teachings are secrets only in the sense that mathematics is a secret for a simple farmer, for example. It remains a secret to him until he has learned it. Anyone who is willing to learn it can. Over the millennia, many have learned the wisdom. In the past, greater demands were placed on the student. Today, schools mainly teach intellectually and train the minds of students. In the wisdom schools, the aim is to develop the whole person with all their powers of mind and soul. And before the student was introduced to the deeper teachings of wisdom, he had to pass certain tests.

Some who read about the secret Pythagorean school may find it quite simple. Only those who put themselves in the same state of mind as the people were in at the time will recognize its true meaning. They will recognize its value.

We can understand this by considering a work of art. Two people stand before a painting by Raphael. One sees only the colors on the canvas and passes by the work of art quite untouched. The other, an art connoisseur with understanding, is opened to the wonders of the soul and spiritual worlds, which left the other quite untouched. This different perception of the work of art depends on the different development of the inner powers. In the one, only the intellect had been developed; in the other, soul and spirit had undergone a development that created the right mood to understand and enjoy the work of art.

Anyone who wants to live a life in the spirit must be clearly aware of one thing: that thoughts and feelings are real things. It is not the person who grasps the books who reads them with the intellect alone, but the person who grasps them with the spirit. Just as a brick falling from a roof kills a person just as surely as if it were a fact of nature, so does a feeling of hatred wound the soul of the one at whom it is directed. The soul is wounded by hatred just as surely as the body is wounded by the brick. The teaching of the invisible can only be grasped by the one who always realizes that the invisible is much more real than the visible.

It is also worthless to read only in books; it is life that matters, life in the spirit. The whole person must immerse themselves in the teachings, not just their minds. This must be said in advance to enable the understanding of what is to be said. It is not enough to say yes to the theosophical teachings; the person must transform themselves if they want to come to knowledge.

It is clear that man is part of the external world. Born of women, he appears on earth; the external sciences, chemistry, anatomy and so on show that the same forces, the same substances, make up the human body as they do in the rest of the world. Man is, therefore, first of all, a physical being. That much external science teaches us. Beyond that, it can investigate nothing; only that which dies can be investigated by it; theosophy gives us information about that which is immortal. That is a simple thought. Just as the human being, the external man, is grasped by looking with the external senses, so the spiritual man can be grasped by the inner senses.

What is meant by this is not difficult to understand. Look at my hands. It is conceivable that a skilled artist could create an exact replica of such a hand so that it could not be distinguished from mine; on the outside, let us assume, there would be no difference; and yet there is a word that shows the enormous difference between the artificial and the natural hand. The artificial hand remains as it is, unchanged; it can stand alone. But if you cut off the natural hand, it withers or decays. The one word is life. Science does not teach us this.

My whole body is flooded with life. Man has not only the physical body, but also, secondly, an etheric body – I ask the scholars not to take offense at this expression. Every living being has an etheric body that makes the being live. It is not perceptible to the external senses. But there is a way to see it, just as we see the physical body. There is a method that allows us to see life, not just see colors and hear sounds.

A doctor, with whom I discussed this matter, said: “It is quite natural that the hand withers when it is cut off; the blood no longer flows through it.” Quite right, but what does it need the blood for? What does it need the invisible for? To be what it is!

With death, the physical body decays and the etheric body dissipates; it returns its components to the life-giving ether that permeates the world.

We now come to the third aspect of human nature. Imagine a person standing before you; you can see and touch them. You recognize their weight and observe their life. But only the material can be felt by the hand. But there is still something else living in him: pleasure and pain, passions and desires, instincts and inclinations, which no hand can touch, no sensual eye can see. But all this is a reality for man, even if it cannot be perceived by any physical eye or other sense. The part of man that includes the instincts, desires, passions, and so on, is called the third, the astral body.

Those who have developed spiritual eyes, who have become able to see, can also perceive this body. It is also called an aura. This astral body is something that humans have in common with all animals. But beyond that, something that no animal can achieve, humans possess something that makes them human in the first place. The word “I” expresses this. In this word lies a very powerful difference from all other names. “I”, a powerful, great word. Anyone can say table, chair, dog, lion, but only you can say “I” about yourself. No other person can say “I” to you; only you can say it about yourself. I am me, everyone else is “you.” You have to delve into this thought to understand it.

All religions are based on wisdom; even Judaism; the Jews knew and recognized the God, the ego within man, the hidden God, whose name was unutterable for the people. Only the high priest was allowed to pronounce it once a year before the people: Jeoah — only a breath sounded from his mouth, and then the divine spark flashed through the hearts of the community in undulating motion. And this I is the fourth link in the human being.

Everything a person does and pursues contributes to the development of this I. In primeval times, man could not yet say “I”. He was still half animal. Instincts, desires and drives are the driving forces in the development of the animal, but through the I these instincts are ennobled; the I works into the astral body. In this way, man changes and ennobles his animal instincts. Anger and rage are transformed into calm reflection; hatred and feelings of revenge are transformed into love, as the I works into the soul. The wild is civilized, instincts become ideals, urges become duties, selfishness becomes sacrifice. This transformation of the astral body produces the growth of the “Manas”. What man has thus created for himself is permanent. This is the point where immortality begins. Every cause we build into the Manas remains, and the effects appear in the next re-embodiments.

Small children usually resemble their parents at first, and naturalists ascribe all their characteristics to their parentage. To a certain extent, they may be right. Raphael also appeared as the child of his parents, and many of his characteristics and his appearance can be explained by the nature of his ancestors. But what about when something suddenly comes to life in him, his genius, which he has inherited from neither his father nor his mother? Then one says to oneself: This must either have no cause at all or a cause other than descent. Often one also sees a great diversity among the children of a family. Where does that come from? This diversity has its basis in the fact that the individual has laid the foundation for it in previous lives. I do not owe my nature only to the similarity to my parents. Perhaps thousands of years ago I myself laid the foundation for it. The differences in human nature can thus be explained by reincarnation, by repeated lives on earth, in which each life brings to the fore what the person has laid the foundation for in previous embodiments.

What was it that made the ancient Egyptian slaves do their hard work, their forced labor, with devotion, even with joy in some cases? It was the fact that he knew that in the next incarnation the tables would turn, that the quietly obedient servant would then perhaps rule and the cruel oppressor would be enslaved; for that is how the law of retribution, karma, works. The man of the West has no idea what a feeling of bliss arises from this [law], how it produces cheerful serenity. “God is not mocked; what a man sows, that shall he also reap.” (Gal. vi. 7.) Reincarnation and Karma are the great facts which enable and impel man to work at improving his astral body.

When he has done so to a certain extent, he has undergone a catharsis. In the secret schools he is then taught how to develop not only his astral body but also his etheric body. When he has succeeded in doing this, when the etheric body is completely transformed and better, more fully formed, he no longer dissolves. He becomes immortal. This is the resurrection to life, that is, awakening Christ in us.

When a person returns, he brings with him, in addition to the astral body and the etheric body, the sixth part of the human being, the Budhi.

What lies beyond that or even deeper hidden within him is, seventhly, the Atma. It is difficult to say anything about this in a few words.

Once these higher basic parts have been developed, it is possible to become master of the whole body.

Only now, after we have become acquainted with the basic parts or bodies of the human being, can we become clear about the origin.

Natural science cannot provide any information about the origin of the human being. It is only concerned with the forms of manifestation that can be perceived by the senses. The origin of the human being can only be perceived by occult, supersensible means, through the organs of the finer bodies.

What do these reveal to us? If we look back a million years, what do we see? Something completely different from what we see now. Where Germany is now, there was a tropical climate back then; giant animals, giraffes, elephants roamed the swamps. There are hardly any traces left of this time; but theosophical wisdom can trace them back further and further through the changes brought about by the Ice Age, back to ever simpler and simpler conditions. Man, who lived thousands of centuries ago, looked quite different than he does now. There are hardly any remains from that time. The forehead was receding far, the forebrain was actually missing. He had no intelligence, no mind.

Materialistic science says that man has evolved. In his infancy, in the Stone Age, he was more similar to an animal and only gradually did he develop into today's man. There is only one difference between animals and humans that is immediately apparent. When an animal is born, it is already complete, for example a chicken; when it hatches from the egg, it can eat immediately and so on; it grows, but it does not change any further. A child undergoes major changes before reaching adulthood.

The simile of the childhood of man also applies to the theosophical science, and we are now in our youth. Natural science traces man back to his childhood, when he was similar to an animal; it cannot go beyond that. The theosophical science goes beyond that; it asks about father and mother. Why does one child of the same parents become a good-for-nothing, while the other becomes an intelligent being? Why did the animal-like being give rise, on the one hand, to animals that do not change any further, and, on the other hand, to human beings with unlimited developmental capacity? Natural science has no answer to this. Without the parents, the child would not be there; the natural scientist cannot go further, because he cannot go further than his senses reach, and there is no objection to this.

Usually, one infers from the child to the parents. In the spiritual view, research into the origin of man takes a completely different form. When asking about the parents, we must proceed very carefully. When we look at the anthropoid ape, can we see primitive man in it? Two possibilities present themselves here: Man developed from the anthropoid ape, as was concluded at the time, then science rejected this hypothesis and said to itself that, given the still too great difference between the two, it would be more likely to assume that there must have existed a being from which both the anthropoid ape and the gibbon descended, as well as the evolving man. So there we have the father of the good-for-nothing and the good, noble son. But this being could not be found anywhere, and so the naturalists placed this primeval man in the sea.

The theosophical research actually points to an area that is now covered by the sea.

How is such research conducted? How can one learn this type of research? Today, young people are taught to look into the external world. A person is considered educated if they have learned a lot and absorbed a lot.

Another teaching method was adopted in the old schools, which had the attainment of knowledge of the hidden forces as their goal. When a pupil came and desired to learn, the teacher gave him a sentence that contained power for the soul, and then he sent him away. The pupil had to repeat this sentence silently within himself for hours every day, letting it live in his soul. We find such sentences, for example, in the little book 'Light on the Path', written by Mabel Collins. The student continued this exercise for months until he had experienced the eternal content of the sentence within himself. In this way, the instruction continued until the inner sun shone in the heart, not only illuminating one's own soul but also sending rays of light to the other souls, illuminating them as well. This light, this sun, now not only illuminates the life and soul of the person living now, but the practiced disciple also learns to throw its rays back to the earliest past, like a spotlight.

You can find more details about this kind of research in my “Lucifer” No. 14-18 in the essay “Akasha Chronicle”. So there are three kinds of chronicles: the Akasha Chronicle, the written book chronicle that we have had for about 6000 years, and the chronicle of nature. Where the Atlantic Ocean now flows, the continent of Atlantis lay a long, long time ago. Our ancestors living there had not yet developed minds. They were able to use other powers that are now dulled in humans. Just as we are now able to develop a driving force from coal, or rather, how coal is converted into a driving force, so the people who lived at that time understood the seed power, that is, the power that lies in the seed, which enables it to sprout through the shell, to use it and to convert it into a forward-driving power. The powers of will were strongly developed. Where did that come from? The I, which has now taken possession of the physical brain, could not work in it at that time, because there was no brain yet. It worked much more in the etheric body, just as powerfully and mightily in the etheric body as it does now in the physical brain. The etheric body was impregnated with the divine I.

So we have the human parental pair. He comes from the spiritual father and the physical mother.

Egyptian wisdom beautifully symbolizes this eternal truth. Osiris, the spirit, the father, Isis, matter, the mother. From these two, Horus, the young human being, was born. The physical body was endowed with the I. The non-fertilized beings developed downward into the animal kingdom, while the I-fertilized primal beings developed into ever more highly educated humans.

Before the Atlantean period, the etheric body was not yet fertilized either. Only the astral body was I-fertilized.

The land inhabited by these people, who were animated only by their instincts and passions, is usually referred to as Lemuria. Science regards the Lemurian as a human being who has degenerated into an animal; the development that the spirit teaches us regards him as a being working his way out of the animal state. There was a time when there were no warm-blooded creatures on earth. Only at the moment when man descended to earth as a spiritual being, at the great moment when the astral body was endowed with the ego, did man become warm-blooded. The divine spark of the spirit, the Father-Spirit, united with Mother-Matter, and man emerged from this. Humanity consists of spirit and matter. The descent of the manas, the Manasputras, is the descent of the human ego.

The origin of man from the Father-Spirit and the Mother-Matter is the starting point for the knowledge of God and the world.

The word “I” in its entire essence of recognition is the recognition of the divine being. Self-knowledge leads to the knowledge of God because the I originates from the divine. The recognition of the divine essence of the human being is the key to the recognition of the whole, including the physical human being. The poet says:

One succeeded,
He lifted the veil from the goddess Bild at Sais.
What did he see? Wonder upon wonder – himself.

When man finds himself, he finds God: through self-knowledge to God-knowledge!

Final remark

Until recently, there were no books about these things; these divine wisdom teachings were only passed down orally from ancient times, from generation to generation. Now the time has come when people in the midst of active life should learn these things, so they are now being published in elementary form.

When someone became initiated in the ancient mysteries, one of the first things he experienced there was that his thoughts and his whole human soul mood were directed towards the significance of the cycles of world civilization which are based on the number seven. And we see a clear reflection of what arises from this initiation principle in the Apocalypse. The number seven is present in the construction, composition and content of the Apocalypse in a great variety of ways.

Now of course what is connected with this number seven was not connected with it in the external way that one usually imagines today, but one initiated the person concerned into the working and weaving of numbers in general. Now I would like to draw your attention to something which I explained over there in a quite different course on speech formation.

There I had to explain how an experience of speech sounds is possible, and that mankind has lost its ability to experience them. Just place the way elements of the creative word are given through these experiences of speech sounds and the way that the most manifold and wonderful content and even a whole world content can be given through combinations of about 32 sound elements before your souls. Now try to imagine what things were like at such a time—and there were times when something like this was a reality for mankind—a time that lived with these 32 elements in a very active way and which felt how wonderful it was to be able to shape a world out of this experience of 32 speech sounds. One really felt that something spiritual was weaving in speech formation and in the pictorial shaping of words when one spoke; one experienced that gods were living in the speech sounds.

If you take our 32 speech sounds, it will be easy for you to see that about 24 of them are consonants and that about 7 of them are vowels. Of course these things are always approximate, but you can now let some light from the beginning of John's gospel “In the beginning was the word” fall on that Apocalyptic Imagination of an Alpha and Omega surrounded by seven angels or vowels, and by 24 elders or consonants. One felt that the secret of the universe weaved and lived in what one intoned in holy cultic language in the way that I already explained to you. And when one celebrated a religious rite one felt the presence of the world's content which lived powerfully in this symbolic picture.

Mankind must again get a feeling for where the gods were located from the viewpoint of mystery wisdom. They weren't sought in the remote transcendental places one thinks of today. One sought their bodies in things like speech sounds; and when people spoke about the cosmic, word, they were speaking about the things which really weave through the world and which men participate in with their speech.

The same applies to numbers. Our present idea about numbers is very abstract, by comparison with the kind of thinking which still holds sway in the Apocalypse. Now you see, if one goes back to the first Christian centuries one finds that a few people have a certain understanding for something like the Apocalypse, because they still felt what the secret of numbers is and because they still experienced the peculiar proportions which are connected with a division into a series of numbers.

People definitely did not look upon a series of numbers as a kind of joining of one more unit to the previous number, but one experienced what is present in three and in four, namely, the closed nature of three, the open nature of four, and the five which is related to the human being. One felt something divine in numbers, just as one found something divine in speech sounds and letters.

When someone in the ancient mysteries had reached the point where he was initiated into this secret of numbers, it was his duty to think, feel and sense in accordance with this secret of numbers. Just think what this means. In music we have an octave of seven tones—for the eighth is the same as the first, in the rainbow 7 colors, and the number 7 is also present in other things in nature. Just suppose that it would occur to Nature to have a different arrangement in the rainbow,—the whole universe would be thrown into confusion; or suppose one would divide up the musical scale in a different way,—the music would become unbearable, and so on.

However, since this secret of numbers is also in man's soul being—there where the lawfulness is right—, just as the course of nature is in it, the candidate for initiation was told that he shouldn't toss his thoughts back and forth arbitrarily anymore after his initiation, but that it was his duty to think inwardly in numbers, just as Nature thinks in numbers; he was told to experience how the mystery of numbers weaves and lives in all beings and processes.

Now the Apocalypse was written at a time when such an insertion of man into the cosmic secret of a 7 or 12 or 24 or 3 was absolutely valid. Since the beginning of our consciousness soul age, that is, since the first third of the 15th century, we are running into things which are similar to those which took place before the time in which the number 7 was strictly valid, so that displacements in the number 7 are gradually appearing. We are no longer in the fortunate position of experiencing an evolution which occurs exactly according to the number 7 We are already in that evolutionary stage of the earth where irregularities are beginning with respect to the secret of numbers, so that the secret of numbers has acquired a new significance for us. If we enlighten ourselves through the secret of numbers which exists in documents like the Apocalypse, we find that we gradually become able to grasp what is increasingly occurring outside the secret of numbers with our senses. And so in a certain sense, we're living our way out of the secret of numbers. But we have to find out what it is, so that we can use it in the forms which are suitable for the earthly human events which are to be guided by the priesthood in the religious sphere.

Although I'm assuming this, I can nevertheless speak about certain phenomena as if they were occurring in accordance with the secret of numbers, because world events will probably only emerge from the secret of numbers slowly, as they move into a mode which is not in accordance with numbers. In any case, in the ancient mysteries people thought in terms of larger, smaller and very, small cycles of seven.

Thus we have seen the continuation of old cultures and the beginning of new cultural periods in the 7 communities or churches, which were also real, concrete formations on earth. On the other hand, we have a smaller cycle, and the Apocalypse helps us to understand this in a certain way. Just consider what this smaller cycle consists of.

If we look back to the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place upon earth, we see that Oriphiel, the archangel who gets most of his impulses from Saturn, was ruling human spiritual development. Then we come into an age where Anael is the ruling archangel, then to the age of Zachariel, then we come to the age of Raphael, then of Samael, of Gabriel and into the present Michael age; we have the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh ages; so that we're in the seventh age of this smaller cycle within our fifth larger cycle.

If we wanted to write what they wrote in ancient times in a modern form, we would have to say that we are living in the 5/7 age, that is, we're in a larger, fifth cycle, and we're also in a seventh cycle which intersects this. A seventh cycle signifies an end condition. It was preceded by the sixth Gabriel cycle. A great deal is always decided in a sixth cycle; the end is prepared, and the previous age still works into this sixth cycle. The Michael cycle begins about 1879, the Gabriel cycle begins about 1471. Before that was the fifth Samael cycle, and this archangel gets his impulses from Mars.

The archangel of the fifth smaller cycle was reigning when the fifth post Atlantean epoch began. However, he had already been reigning for 3 to 4 centuries in this fifth archangel cycle when he ushered in the fifth post Atlantean cycle. Thus the small cycle overleaps the beginning of the large cycle. However, this means that the large cycles are brought about by spirits in the middle hierarchies; the third hierarchy, which includes the archangels, are the servants of the higher hierarchies. But the law of numbers works in such a way that the fifth archangel's main activity coincides with that of a being from a higher hierarchy who is also connected with the number five at the beginning of the fifth cycle.

It's been a relatively long time since anyone has spoken about these things, but they were discussed over a period which is longer than most people think. These secrets were discussed in places like the School of Chartres in the 12th century. They still had an apocalyptic language then, for the latter is always one which looks upon the universe from the perspective or point of view of numbers, and also from other viewpoints.

When Plato says that God geometrizes and mathematizes he doesn't mean our rather abstract geometry or mathematics, but that deep experience which people in ancient times had in connection with forms and numbers. And although it is ridiculed by materialism, one can see everywhere that the law of seven also applies to organic life. One will find that the law of seven is at work in the time it takes for larvae and butterflies to develop and crawl out, and in the development of certain diseases, and in many other things. These initiates were told that numbers are something which arise out of the nature of things, and this helped them to see the way things really are.

For one really becomes attentive to things if one has to tell oneself that the archangel who stands in the number five spot helps to begin the fifth post Atlantean age with Mars forces. Everyone knows that there is something warlike about Mars. If we look at the successive cultural periods, we see that they are separated by important events.

If we look back at the last big event which separates the Atlantean age from the present age which is now in its fifth cultural period, we have what is known as the ice age or flood between the two the sinking of Atlantis and the rising of new continents.

We are living in the fifth post Atlantean period, a sixth one will follow and a seventh one will follow. The catastrophe which then separates us from the next large period which will come the fifth from the sixth period will not just be an external event in nature like the ice age or flood was. This separation of the fifth from the sixth period will become manifest in a more moral way. As I have often mentioned, a war of all against all or a moral catastrophe will separate the fifth from the large sixth earth period.

Of course, this will also be connected with events in nature, but the latter will be less important. It is introduced by what comes from Mars through Samael, the spirit of conflict, when warlike elements for initiation were brought from the spiritual world. At the beginning of our fifth, smaller consciousness soul age we have a preview of the way our larger age will end after our fifth cultural epoch has been followed by the sixth and seventh ones.

If we listen to what people who still knew something about the secret events which stand behind the public ones said around the beginning of the 15th century when Samael was reigning under the influence of Mars we will get an inkling of the way our large epoch will end. One finds one's way into apocalyptic thinking if one connects numbers with events. If one learns to look at the world in an apocalyptic way, one will, as it were, be able to read the apocalyptic universe, and one will find that countless secrets are revealed to one.

Now consider the fact that the small Michael cycle is in our fifth post Atlantean cultural epoch and in the larger fifth earth period. Let's take a look at what this means.

We are living in the post Atlantean epoch or in the fifth large earth period. This fifth epoch has in a way strongly separated men from the world of the gods. Atlantean men still felt that they were permeated by God; they felt that they were like a covering for the godhead, and not like individual human beings. Atlantean men felt that the godhead existed, but not individual human beings.

The main thing that our epoch is for is to make men independent and to separate him from the godhead, and this has been happening slowly and gradually for four cultural periods. It was happening slowly in the ancient Indian cultural epoch, and one could still see the after effects of this in the Ephesian mysteries. During, the ancient Indian cultural age men felt that they were still almost entirely embedded in the godhead. They separated themselves from it considerably during the ancient Persian period. They were relatively independent in the third, so that they already felt death approaching from a distance. Death was felt to such an extent during the Græco-Roman cultural period that it gave rise to that well known saying, “It's better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.”

Now that we're gradually supposed to have death beside us as a companion in the fifth post Atlantean cultural age, as I said yesterday, we will need moral strength in order to bear this continual presence of death. In the immediate present and in the age where the consciousness soul and the accompaniment by death are beginning for us, it is important that this coincides with the time of Michael's reign—a reign that signifies an end in a certain sense and a kind of an attainment of perfection; or decadence and perfection at the same time.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, Michael, who lived in the sun and who was the most important servant of the Christ spirit in the sun, experienced this event from the other side.

Humanity on earth experienced the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that it saw the Christ approaching, whereas Michael and his hosts, who were still in the sun at that time experienced it in such a way that they had to say farewell to the Christ.

One must let the two poles of this event which surpassed everything else which was happening in the cosmos work upon one's soul,—the hosanna on earth when Christ arrived there, and his departure from Michael's hosts up above, for they belong together.

But Michael has undergone a great metamorphosis in our age, and the beginning of his reign signifies a following of Christ down to the earth, and in the future it will signify a walking before Christ's deeds upon earth. And then one will begin to understand again what “Michael walks before the Lord” means.

In the Old Testament the initiates of Asia said that Michael went before Jehova, just as a man's face precedes him as his foremost part; for there was a Michael reign before Oriphiel's. They spoke of Michael as the countenance of Jehova. We must learn to speak of Michael as the countenance of Christ, but we're in a different age now. Certain things must attain the greatest perfection; we must, as it were, learn to make things productive which couldn't be productive before.

Let's take the seven churches. If we assign one of them which we can do to the period which went parallel with the Christ event and the beginnings of Christianity, which was still underway when the Apocalypse was being written—if we take this first time period, it is represented by the church in Ephesus. And then we see that the people in this Ephesian community were the ones whose first love united them with Christianity around the time the Apocalypse was written and also afterwards. All of this should be understood out of the secret of numbers.

After this we find the age of Anael, who draws his forces from Venus. We find the great deeds of love which spread Christianity during this age, countless deeds of love, namely those deeds of love which live in the footsteps of the Irish monks as they spread Christianity in Europe. And we find that love is also the predominant thing in the rest of Christian life during this reign of Anael.

The reign of Zachariel follows; he draws his forces from Jupiter, mainly forces of wisdom, but forces which could be but little understood during this age. Instead of a real Jupiter reign, the reign of the archangels began to retire more into the background at this time. In a way humanity no longer reached up to the region of Jupiter, and they denied the Jupiter spirit. The significant eighth Council of Constantinople, which took away a great deal from the evolution of humanity and which eliminated the trichotomy, took place during this period.

Then comes the age in which events occur that are more or less ignored in outer history. After the age of Zachariel is over, humanity's soul is basically sick. Humanity is very sick, and pathogenic substances spread from east to west. Terrible pathogenic substances exist which are dangerous to Christianity, because the period of Jupiter wisdom has ended. These pathogenic substances came from materialism, for it was this which pressed into Christianity, and it thereby took hold of the whole Christian culture.

However, something strange stands behind all of what is only present on earth as a projection. The age of Raphael, the doctor among the archangels, stands behind the sick things which were left behind from the age of Zachariel. This was the age which began in the 10th and 11th centuries, where things were healed behind the scenes not in an outwardly manifest way but mostly within. Namely, much was healed in connection with the rescue of certain moral qualities which were on the verge of being ruined; a great deal was healed in this way. But in contrast to the pathological substances which were brought to Europe by Mohammedanism, something was summoned which was permeated by the Christian principle and which had to come from the Orient in a different form. One must become aware of the great will impulse which was behind the crusades. One of the causes of the crusades was the principle to heal mankind, to cure it of the materialism which was threatening it from both Mohammedanism and Roman Catholicism. And Raphael, the doctor among the archangels, is basically the inspirer of those who prepared mankind, to look for the part of the Orient towards which the crusades were directed. However, the crusades are in the fourth small cycle in the fourth post Atlantean age which was almost over. Here we are in the fourth smaller cycle in the fourth larger one which is the fourth Græco-Roman age. But this fourth, larger period was the one which was chosen to include the Mystery of Golgotha. The fourth, smaller cycle or Raphael cycle is closely connected with the basic structure, of the fourth, larger one. For we see how Raphael the archangel implements Christ's impulses as he inspires people to go on the crusades and to look fervently towards the Orient in order to find Christ's mystery there, and we see that a kind of spiritual atmosphere floats above the ground and above all the events. The people who could look behind the scenes at all at the time were really only separated by a thin spider's web from a directly adjacent world, just as we were only separated from it by a spider's web in the last third of the 19th century, when Michael became visibly active on earth.

Joachim of Floris, Alanus ab Insulis and other outstanding spirits in the Raphael age could see this activity of Raphael and this healing of humanity which was going on behind the scenes. This was the background for the age of pathogenic spiritual materials, which is confirmed by the fact that people began to really understand Luke's gospel of healing in this age. Thus if one looks at periods from a numerical point of view, one finds important things which can help one to interpret events.

This was followed by the Samael age, which gets its main impulses from Mars. Quarrelsome forces arise and mankind is inoculated with them. Five becomes opposed to four. This is the strange thing in transitions from four to five, that the five always becomes opposed to the four. If we go back to the ancient mysteries, where pupils or adepts were initiated into the secrets of numbers for a long time, we find that after a while pupils left their classes with a deep conviction which they formulated as follows: Now I know that five is the number which represents evil.

According to the secret of numbers, wherever five is at work in the universe, one has to do with the evil sphere; it opposes four and this gives rise to great decisions which enable one to go up to six in either a good or an evil way. Tomorrow we will dis cuss the extent to which this leads to concrete things, such as to the wisdom of the heart and of the human soul. I wanted to show you how one becomes able to describe events if one lets one's thoughts be guided by the thread of numbers.