The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We shall discuss a few intimate questions of reincarnation that can be examined only in a circle of well prepared anthroposophists. By this we mean not only that they should be well prepared in theoretical knowledge but also that they have developed their sensitive faculty by working with others in a branch. For we all remember that our perceptions and sensibilities for truth have changed by virtue of this collaboration. What today we do not merely believe but perceive as truths that are beyond the realm of faith used to be incredible to us in earlier days and today still appears as fantastic nonsense or reverie to outsiders. Thus it is an indication of advancement if people have become accustomed to really living in these perceptions for only then can they begin to consider special questions. Much of what will be mentioned here seems to be remote, and yet even though we will first have to go back to far-distant periods of human evolution, all these things have an enlightening effect on our understanding of life and its phenomena. We must start by putting before our souls how the process of reincarnation takes place in general.

When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences. Their first experience is the feeling that they are growing larger or that they are growing out of their skin. This has the effect of the human being attaining another perception of things than was the case earlier in physical life. Everything in the physical world has its definite place—either here or there—outside the observer, but that is not so in this new world. There, it is as if the human being were inside the objects, extended with or within them, whereas earlier he or she was only a separate object in its own place. The second experience after death consists of a human being's attaining a “memory tableau” of the life just completed, so that all events in it recur in comprehensive memory. This process lasts a definite amount of time. For reasons that cannot be stated here today, the duration of this memory is shorter or longer, depending on the individual. In general, the duration of this state can be determined from the length of time each human being was able to stay awake during the past life, continuously and without once succumbing to the forces of sleep. Supposing that the outer limit for a person's staying awake continuously had been forty-eight hours, then the memory tableau after death will also be forty-eight hours. And thus, this stage is like an overview of the past life.

Then the etheric body leaves the astral body, in which the ego is living. All three had been connected from the time they left the physical corpse, but now the etheric body separates itself from the other two and becomes an etheric corpse. However, today's human beings do not lose their etheric body completely but take an extract or excerpt along with them for all the times to follow. So in this sense the etheric corpse is cast off, but the fruit of the last life is carried along by the astral body and by the ego. If we want to be quite precise, we will have to say that something is taken along from the physical body as well: a kind of spiritual abstract of this body—the tincture medieval mystics spoke about. However, this abstract of the physical being is the same in all lives; it merely represents the fact that the ego had been embodied. On the other hand, the essence of the etheric body is different in all lives, depending on what one has experienced in a life and on the degree of one's progress in it.

There follows the condition of what is called kamaloca, the time of weaning the soul from the effects of physical, sensuous existence, which lasts about a third of the time of a person's physical life. After the etheric body has been cast off, the astral body still contains all the passions, desires, and so on that it had at the end of life; they must be lost and purified, and that is kamaloca. Then the astral body is cast off and here, too, the fruit, the astral essence, is taken along; but the rest—the astral corpse—dissolves into the astral world. The human being now enters devachan where he or she prepares in the spiritual world for a new life in the future. Here human beings live with spiritual events and beings until they are again called into the physical world, be it because the karma of a person demands it or because an individual is needed on the physical earth.

This is a general description of the process. However, life in the spiritual realm progresses steadily in that the future joins itself to the past, and coming events are shaped with the help of past events. If one considers the details of this process, there is much among the wondrous things that become apparent, which is not contained in a simple presentation of the process of reincarnation. It is, after all, clear that great differences exist when one looks at the course of human development and that the extracts or abstracts of their bodies can have different values depending on the kinds of fruit they were able to extract from life. And when we remember that there are great leaders of humanity, initiates who lead other human beings into the spiritual worlds, then we have to ask ourselves this question: What causes the accomplishments of the initiates to be preserved for the future? External history is, of course, incapable of providing an answer to this question. What we have to do is scrutinize the reincarnation of the initiates and then apply the results of our investigation. We will begin with the oldest initiates.

Before humanity inhabited the continents as we know them today, the physiognomy of the earth was quite different. The area that is today covered by the Atlantic Ocean used to be the continent of Atlantis, which was destroyed by great catastrophes, as is reported by many peoples in their “saga of the great flood.” The Atlanteans—and that is we ourselves—had their great leaders and initiates, and even in those days there existed places of instruction or schools where the initiates taught. The existence of these schools can be verified today by clairvoyant investigation. A good name for these schools where the leaders taught and lived is the word “oracle.” the most important leader lived in one of the largest and most important oracles—the Sun Oracle. His main task consisted of revealing the secrets of the SUN—not the physical, external sun, but the real SUN. The latter consists of spiritual beings who make use of the physical sun much in the same way as human beings make use of the earth. To perceive and reveal the inner secrets of this Sun-existence was the task of the Great Sun Oracle. For it, sun light was not something physical, but rather every ray of sunshine represented the deed of the spiritual beings who reside on the sun. These great beings were exclusively on the sun during the time of ancient Atlantis. Later, when the great Being who was to be called the Christ united with the earth, this was no longer the case. Therefore, one can also call the Sun Oracle the Christ Oracle. The unification of the Christ-Being with the earth took place when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ at Golgotha. That is when His essence united with the atmosphere of the earth, as can be perceived even today in clairvoyant retrospection. That is how the Christ-Being came down from the Sun to earth. When the light of spiritual illumination fell on Saul-Paul near Damascus, Paul beheld the Christ that was united with the earth and knew immediately that it was He who had shed His blood at Golgotha.

The sun oracle of ancient Atlantis had already prophesied the coming of Christ, of the Sun-God. To be sure, he was named the Christ only much later, but we can still say that the Sun Oracle is the Christ Oracle. These oracles had many successors in later periods, such as the Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Vulcan oracles, each with its great mysteries and teachings. Toward the end of the Atlantean era a group of advanced human beings was formed in the vicinity of what is today Ireland. The Great Leader chose a few from their midst who should carry on cultural life when the impending catastrophe would finally take place. However, enormous migrations had taken place a long time before to the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which were beginning to rise out of the sea. Many successors of the old oracles came into being on these continents, but not without gradually losing the significance of the old oracles. The Great Leader, however, chose the best people in order to lead them into a special land. They were plain and simple people who were different from most other Atlanteans in that they had almost completely lost their clairvoyance. You will remember that the majority of the Atlanteans were clairvoyant. When they fell asleep at night, they did not lose consciousness, but rather the sense world disappeared and there arose in its place the spiritual world in which they were the companions of divine-spiritual beings. The advanced people in Atlantis had begun to develop their intellect, yet they were simple people who possessed inner warmth and were deeply devoted to their leader. He took this select group East to the center of Asia, where he founded the center of the post-Atlantean culture. After the group had arrived in central Asia, it was kept in isolation from the human beings who were unsuited to the task. The descendants of this group were educated with special care, and only they developed the qualities necessary to make them great teachers.

All this happened in a mysterious way. It was the task of the Manu, the Great Leader, to make the necessary preparations for preserving for the new race everything that was good in the Atlantean culture and thus to lay the foundation for the progression of a new culture. The sages living in the smaller oracles were unable to devote themselves to this task because only the Manu had preserved from the great initiates of the oracles that which we call the etheric body. As we have seen, this etheric body normally dissolves as the second corpse, but in certain cases it was preserved. The greatest of these sages in the oracles had worked so much into their etheric bodies that the latter had become too valuable simply to be dissipated into the general etheric world. Therefore, the seven best etheric bodies belonging to the seven greatest initiates were preserved until the Manu had developed the seven most outstanding people from his group in such a way that they were suited to absorb the preserved etheric bodies. Only the etheric body of the Great Initiate of the Christ Oracle was, in a certain sense, treated differently from the others. And so the seven sages, or Rishis, who had received the seven etheric bodies of the greatest initiates, went to India, where they became the founders and great teachers of Indian culture.

This very ancient, holy culture of the pre-Vedic era originated from the seven Rishis who bore the preserved etheric bodies of the initiates of the various oracles, such as Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and so on. In a way, a copy of those initiates, a repetition of their capabilities, came to be at work in these Rishis, even though they were plain and simple people when seen from the outside. Their significance was not evident from their external appearance, nor was their intellect commensurate with the loftiness of their prophecies. Possessing their own astral bodies and egos but being endowed with the etheric bodies of those great sages, these Rishis were not scholars and did not rank so highly in terms of their power of judgment as did many of their contemporaries, or even as many people in our times. But in inspired ages they were, in a way, seized upon by these oracle beings whose etheric bodies became active in them. In that sense they were only instruments through whom that ancient wisdom was proclaimed—those Vedas that are far too difficult, if not incomprehensible, for human beings in our age. And this is how the old wisdom of the ancient oracles was revealed, with the exception of the Sun, or Christ, Oracle which could not be completely revealed in such a way. Only a faint reflection of the Sun-wisdom could be transmitted because it was so lofty that even the Holy Rishis could not grasp it.

We can see here that reincarnation does not always proceed as smoothly and in such general ways as is often supposed. Rather, if an etheric body is especially valuable, it is—to express it metaphorically—preserved like a mold that can be imprinted on human beings of later ages. Such an occurrence is not all that rare, and many a plain person can have an extremely valuable etheric body that is preserved for later use. Not all etheric bodies dissolve after death, but some of those that are especially useful are transferred to other human beings. But the “I” of the individual receiving the etheric or astral body is not at all identical with the ego of the donor. Disregarding this fact can easily lead to great misconceptions on the part of someone who investigates a human being's past with faulty clairvoyant methods. It is for this reason that the occult theories about the earlier lives of human beings are often completely wrong, just as it would be wrong to say that the seven Rishis had the same egos as the initiates whose etheric bodies they had received.

Only when we know such things can we gain clarity about much that is important in human evolution, such as the preservation of human achievements for nature's economy. It is through the transmission of these seven etheric bodies that the highest values of the Atlantean culture were saved and preserved for posterity.

Let us discuss another example, which could not be mentioned earlier, and look at the ancient Persian time, the period of Zarathustra's culture.¹ We consider it an important period because it was the first post-Atlantean time in which greater emphasis was placed on the conquest of the physical world. During the Indian epoch, the longing for the spiritual realm dominated the thinking of human beings. Most of them considered the spiritual world as being real and felt like strangers in the physical realm, which to them was transitory, illusory, maya.² This consciousness changed in the prehistoric Persian culture through the teachings of Zarathustra, that is to say the teachings of the original and first Zarathustra, because there were many Zarathustras after him. His task as a leader was to draw the attention of human beings to the physical plane, to make inventions, manufacture instruments and tools, and thus to conquer the physical world. This was necessary because human beings had to become acquainted with the physical world as something that was important to them. However, the tempter within a human being tells him or her that the physical is the only reality and that there exists nothing beyond the earthly realm. This belief, Zarathustra teaches, is false because behind the physical there is the spiritual world, just as the physical sun is for us the external sign of the great Sun-Being, of the Spiritual-Divine, of the Great Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd. These names designate a Being that is now physically invisible and lives far away from the earth on the sun. But, as goes Zarathustra's teaching, some day this Being will reveal Itself; later It will make Its appearance on earth, just as It is now present on the sun.

Zarathustra initiated his most intimate students into these mysteries, but the most profound teachings he imparted to two of them. The first one was primarily instructed in everything that concerns human judgment, such as natural science, astronomy and astrology, agriculture, and other disciplines. All this knowledge was transmitted to this one disciple by a secret process of communication between the two. This prepared the disciple in such a way that in the following reincarnation he was able to carry the astral body of his teacher; and he was reincarnated as Hermes,³ the great teacher and sage of the Egyptian Mysteries. Born with Zarathustra's astral body, Hermes became the bearer of the great wisdom.

The second intimate disciple was instructed in the subject matters that express themselves especially in the etheric body and are deeper in substance. This disciple received in the following incarnation the etheric body of Zarathustra. The stories about this in religious documents are comprehensible only through these explanations. At his reincarnation, the student had to be animated in a very special way, that is the etheric body had to be strong before the astral body could be awakened. That could be achieved through the circumstances surrounding the birth of this reincarnated disciple, who was none other than Moses. The fact that he was placed into a box made of bulrushes that was allowed to float on the water and so on had the purpose of awakening completely the etheric body of the child. That enabled Moses to survey in his memory times long past, to pictorially record the genesis of the earth, and to read in the Akasha Chronicle.⁴ And, thus, one sees that these things are at work behind the scenes, as it were, and that through this process everything valuable is preserved and re-utilized.

There are other examples from later times, for example Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus),⁵ a curious personality of the fifteenth century. Here we can see the interesting case of how the research of this man, as it were, laid the groundwork for the entire body of the teaching of Copernicus,⁶ who lived in the sixteenth century. To be sure, this body of teaching is not yet quite as ripe in Cusa's books as in those written by Copernicus, but they contain all the essential ideas, a fact that confounds most traditional scholars. The fact is that the astral body of Cusa was transferred to Copernicus even though the ego of the latter was different from that of Cusa. This is how Copernicus received the foundation and all the preparations for his own doctrine.

Similar cases occur often. What is especially valuable is always preserved; nothing vanishes. But this fact also enhances the possibility of error in any attempt to establish correspondences, especially when people attempt to investigate the earlier lives of a human being with the help of a medium in séance. The transfer of an etheric or astral body to a human being in more modern times usually happens now in such a way that an astral body is transferred to a member of the same language group, whereas an etheric body can be transferred to a member of another language group.

When a pioneering personality dies, his or her etheric body is always preserved, and occult schools have always known the artifical methods by which this was accomplished. Considering now another characteristic case, we can say that it was important for certain purposes in the more modern age that the etheric body of Galileo⁷ should be preserved. He was the great reformer of mechanical physics whose accomplishments were so tremendous that one can say many of the purely practical accomplishments of the modern age would not have come about without his discoveries, for all technical progress rests on Galileo's science. The tunnels of St. Gotthart or Simplon have become possible only because Leibniz,⁸ Newton,⁹ and Galileo developed the sciences of integral and differential calculus, mechanics, and so on. With regard to Galileo, it would have been a waste in nature's economy had his etheric body, the carrier of his memory and talent, been lost. And that is why his etheric body was transferred to another human being: Michail Lomonosov,¹⁰ who came from a poor Russian village and was later to become the founder of Russian grammar and classical literature. Lomonosov, however, is not the reincarnated Galileo, as might be supposed as a result of superficial investigation.

And thus we see that there are many such cases and that the process of reincarnation is not so simple as most people of our time think. If, therefore, people investigate earlier incarnations with the help of occult methods, they have to exercise much greater caution. In many instances, it is nothing but childishness if people state or imagine they are the reincarnated such and such, perhaps Nero, Napoleon, Beethoven, or Goethe. Such silly things must, of course, be rejected. But the matter becomes more dangerous when advanced occultists make mistakes in this regard and imagine that they are the reincarnation of this or that man, when in fact they carry only his etheric body. Not only is this an error that is regrettable in itself, but the human being coming to these conclusions would live under the influence of this mistaken idea, and that would have nearly catastrophic consequences. The result of such an illusion would be that the whole development of the soul proceeds in the wrong direction.

We have seen not only that the egos are capable of reincarnation, but that the lower members of the human constitution in a certain sense undergo a similar process. The result of this is that the whole configuration of the process of reincarnation is much more complicated than is usually supposed. And thus we see that the ego of Zarathustra was reincarnated as Zarathas—Nazarathos, who in turn became the teacher of Pythagoras.¹¹ On the other hand, Zarathustra's astral body reappeared in Hermes and his etheric body in Moses. Therefore, nothing is lost in the world; everything is preserved and transmitted to posterity, provided it is valuable enough.

• 1. The “original” Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) Rudolf Steiner refers to in these lectures is not the historical religious teacher and prophet of ancient Persia whose dates are ca. 628–551 B.C., but the prophet who, according to early Christian tradition and according to Plutarch was born about 6400 B.C. He gave the impulse for the founding of the second post-Atlantean epoch.
• 2. The term maya in the Hindu Veda means magic power, but in Mahayana Buddhism it denotes illusion or non-reality; and this is how Steiner uses the term.
• 3. Historical scholarship usually considers Hermes as a mythical figure in ancient Egypt, but Steiner thinks he was a living prophet who appeared about 4200 B.C. when the sun moved into Taurus. According to historical speculation the so-called Hermetic books—metaphysical pronouncements about the community of all beings and things—were authored by the Egyptian god Thoth (the Thrice Great), whose name was often translated into Greek as Hermes Trismegistus.
• 4. The “Akasha Chronicle” is an occult “script” containing the complete story of the universe. Occultists of all ages have tried to “read” it by freeing themselves from the limitations of time and space. Rudolf Steiner had refined his spiritual faculties to such a degree that he was able to read the “Akasha Chronicle.” To understand his work, it is necessary to assume that he did possess this capacity. For a thorough description of the nature of the Akasha Chronicle, see Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory, pp. 38–41.
• 5. Nicholas of Cusa (1401?–1464) was a German humanist, scientist, and philosopher of the highest rank who became Bishop of Brixon in 1450. His astounding achievements in science included a theory that the Earth revolves on its axis around the sun and that the stars are different worlds.
• 6. Polish-born Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) was the founder of modern astronomy. His main work on the orbits and revolutions of heavenly bodies, completed in 1530, but not published until 1543 when he was on his deathbed, expressed his views on the structure of the physical universe.
• 7. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was the great Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who laid the foundations of modern experimental science. The time of his death in the text (toward the end of the seventeenth century) is an error in transcription.
• 8. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) was the famous German philosopher, mathematician, and statesman who invented calculus independent from Newton and is widely regarded as the founder of symbolic logic. His philosophical achievements include the Theodicy and the famous Monadology.
• 9. Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was the great English mathematician and physicist whose works marked a turning point in modern experimental science. Few people know that in the later years of his life Newton spent much of his time in the study of theology and alchemy.
• 10. Michail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1712–65) was perhaps the most outstanding scientist, scholar, and writer of eighteenth-century Russia.
• 11. Pythagoras (c. 582–c. 507 B.C.) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and mathematician of whose personal life traditional science knows little. He migrated from his native Samos to Gotona and established a mystery center. The followers of Pythagoras believed, among other things, in the transmigration of souls.

Today we'll consider one of the greatest works in world literature, Dante's¹¹ Divine Comedy.¹² We have to understand that to gain even a little insight into this work we must go back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Goethe has Faust say:

The spirit of our times, as you will say,
is basically just the gentlemen's own mind
acting as mirror for the times.¹³

When someone wants to discuss a work written in earlier times he usually does so from his own point of view, finding in it the things that come from his own subjective feelings.

In the case of Dante's Divine Comedy we can see how hard it is to go back to the Middle Ages in one's mind. All kinds of interpretations are available, among them Cameri's translation into German.¹⁴ The introduction shows that Cameri was attempting something very difficult. He said the Divine Comedy was always spoiled for one because it was given theological interpretations. He himself had given it a purely human interpretation. Cameri was the ethic philosopher of Darwinism.¹⁵ Basing himself on Darwinism, he developed noble ethics which, however, were materialistic, with no awareness of spiritual powers in the world. The whole of his translation reflects a materialistic attitude. That is ‘the gentlemen's own mind acting as mirror for the times’.

But let us now really enter into the spirit of that past time. For once let us forget everything we have taken in from childhood and enter into those times. People both thought and felt very differently about things then. We have learned that the planets and the sun are one system and that this system is one of many. At school we learn that the sun is at the centre of this one system, with the planets orbiting around it. Abstract rational laws govern everything which is in orbit there, everything that lives and moves in the infinity of cosmic space around us. Anyone who thinks like that sees nothing but cosmic bodies orbiting in a vast empty space, cosmic bodies that have life forms on them.

The people who lived in Dante's time saw the world very differently. No one would then have thought of such abstract ideas. The earth was to them the centre of the whole world system. It was not only a solid planet, however, for within it were spirits that related to human beings. These were the powers that made man animal-like. They were at the centre of the earth. The different stages of ‘hell’, as it was called, were there. Dante described things that were wholly real to people in those days. He did not invent them. Anyone who thinks even for one moment that Dante believed it all to be mere superstition does not understand him. The idea people had at that time was that yonder, on the other side of the earth, the pull of gravity went in the opposite direction. In medieval times people thought of the forces that were in opposition to man, forces that removed him from everything there was by way of earthly gravity in mind and spirit. That was kama-loka, the purging fire.

Looking out from there into the starry heavens people had very different ideas then. The moon was not a mineral but the body of a spiritual entity and the abode of many spirits—a cosmic body. The spirits who lived there had gone through similar evolutional states as human beings, but had fallen deeper than man. Their vices were, however, of a more spiritual kind than the animal vices of humanity.

Mercury was also seen as a body encompassing a spirit. Just as we derive man from his innermost soul qualities, so did medieval people see the sun, the moon, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter and saturn as spiritual entities. People saw spirit everywhere then. The world was populated by spirits for them.

The Christ lived in the region of the fixed stars since he had left this world. Beyond the fixed stars was the empyrean, the tenth heaven, where the source of all being was. People thought the spirits which were not here on earth and in this body dwelt in some region or other beyond the earth. A warrior who had gone through death would have to be sought on Mars. Someone who had lived a contemplative life would be on Saturn. Those who had risen even higher had to be sought in the region of the fixed stars, where the Christ was after he died. Beyond this would be even higher spirits.

Dante wrote his Divine Comedy out of this way of thinking. Today people have simply no idea that people in his day still saw something of the spirit in everything material. For them, nothing was wholly physical and nothing purely spiritual. Interweaving matter and spirit was something entirely natural for them. If we enter into such a way of thinking we are alive to the feelings out of which the Divine Comedy was written. It is pointless to fight over whether Beatrice was just a symbol or Dante's lover. The two are not contradictory. Beatrice was a real person, and she also stood for all that is spirit. For someone not lead astray by learning she was the true personification of Theologia.

Let us consider the atmosphere in mind and spirit in which the work evolved. It gives sublime expression to 13th and 14th century strict Christian Catholicism, before the Church came to be divided. People like Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa,¹⁶ whose thinking was that of scholasticism. Dante was a student of scholasticism. He saw the world the way his teacher Thomas Aquinas did.¹⁷

What was the mission of Christianity? It was to create a new basic religious approach. Before that, a girdle of religious views spread around the whole world. Christianity brought a different basic approach to religion.

We have to go back a long way to enter into the basic tenor of Dante's work. About ten thousand years before the Christian era¹⁸ the vast continent known as Atlantis was gradually sinking. Theodor Arldt¹⁹ has given scientific proof of the existence of Atlantis in the journal Kosmos.²⁰ The Flood, as we call it, refers to that continent gradually becoming flooded. The ancestors of the people who now live in Europe and Asia lived on Atlantis. The mythologies of all these nations show profound similarities. German mythology speaks of Atlantis, calling it Niflheim, home of mists. A view of the world has come down through tradition that gives us the figure of Wotan, the ruler. Wotan is the same as Bodha or Buddha. And Veda and the Edda have the same linguistic origin, for example.

These views, which are, as it were, a sediment from the past, have something in common. Reincarnation was originally taken as a matter of course in all of them. Buddhism then spread among Mongol tribes, however, and not among Aryans. The Semitic element entered into the views of Aryan peoples, and reincarnation is unknown in this. The most sublime expression of this type of religion, which thinks in terms of one incarnation only, is Christianity. It is a characteristic feature of Christianity that it considers one incarnation only. This was not the case with esoteric Christian teachings, but the popular teaching did not include the idea of reincarnation. Ancient Judaism and Arabism knew nothing of reincarnation.

Knowing this, we have the basic tenor of Dante's magnificent work. It represents a vision beginning on Good Friday. That was the day to mark life's victory over death. People did not think of this in abstract terms. They would feel that the sun was given new powers of spring on Good Friday and at Easter. It rises, entering into the sign of the Ram or Lamb,²¹ letting the plant world come into active growth. The sun was considered to represent a particular spirit. People thought that the powers of spirit and soul related to the spirit of the sun body. And Good Friday night was felt to be the best time for the soul to enter the realm that lies beyond death.

Dante's work is a vision of the kind initiates know, something real in the world of the spirit. Dante was truly able to perceive the spiritual. He perceived the world of the spirit with spiritual senses. He gained his images as a strictly Catholic initiate. As he had his visions he brought into them the catholic world that had come alive in his organism, but he would see it in the spirit. People always see things of the spirit through the spectacles of personal experience. As the child's presence in the mother's womb relates to the physical level, so does one's presence in the world of the spirit relate to the things we know in the spirit here on earth. Our life on this earth is like a maternal womb in which we grow mature so that we may later arise in the spirit. The senses we have developed for things of the spirit depend on our life here on earth. Here we mature for the other world, preparing spiritual eyes and ears for the other world. Dante had thus developed his spiritual organs in the way made possible in a strictly Catholic world.

When we enter into the other form of existence we are able to perceive the things that are now inside us. They then become outwardly visible. We say that passions, instincts and drives are ours. When we have entered into the worlds of spirit, the contents of our soul organism become something that exists outside us, just like the objects we perceive around us in physical existence. The things that live in our souls become visible in symbolic form.

Dante wrote of three symbols representing three main qualities in his astral body, the body of drives or lower soul—a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf.²² His three main passions thus appeared to him in the form of three animals. This was no mere symbol, however. When man enters the astral level, his lower passions truly appear to him in the form of animals. The she-wolf represented one passion. This is the she-wolf who once suckled Romulus and Remus. It is the passion people adopted at the founding of the Roman nation, the passion which lives in everything connected with property—the desire to possess and on the other hand the right to have personal possessions. This passion was implanted in human beings at the time when the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. Before this, humanity gained the power of courage, indicated by the lion, which can become lust for power. Even earlier came the increased cunning that developed from priestly rule—the leopard, the ability shown by Odysseus.²³ When Virgil²⁴ came to meet Dante he said: cannot make those animals go away, least of all the she-wolf? He said so because Dante had grown up in what remained of those old Roman passions in Italy. Virgil, who had given a picture of the initiation process in his Aeneid,²⁵ had to be Dante's guide. It was from the works of Virgil that people learned most about the other world in those days. They saw that world as having three levels—hell, purgatory and heaven.

There are only two consistent views of the world—that of Augustine²⁶ and that of reincarnation and karma. Augustine said: ‘Part of humanity on this earth is destined to be good and part to be evil’. According to the other view we develop through many incarnations. These are the only two possible views. Dante took Augustine's view, according to which human beings prepare here on earth for a destiny that will be eternal. Because of this, life on earth is immediately followed by hell, purgatory or heaven. The one life was all that counted. The person was all that was considered.

If we go beyond the person we are beyond birth and death. The principle that enters at birth and departs again at death goes beyond the personal. It is the individual. Anything the individual has done wrong must be compensated for in a next life. If we take away reincarnation and karma, everything has to be compensated in a single life. If one looks for retribution for everything concerning one person, a counter image of the personal is created and that is hell. Hell is nothing but being utterly caught up in the personal. The counter image of the personal in this world is hell in the other world. The personal must not be caught up in this world to such an extent that it beautifies existence. Christianity brought the view that everything depends on the one life between birth and death. The earth world had therefore to be made into a vale of sorrows, and people had to be told to let go of earthly things. Art on the other hand was a pagan element that made people be caught up in the personal aspect. The artists of old sought to make this earthly realm beautiful. Someone who sees only the personal element will say: ‘This personal aspect must do away with all that is beautiful. The earth must be made less beautiful, the person must be torn away from all that belongs to this world.’ It was therefore perfectly logical for Homer and all the poets of antiquity to appear to Dante in hell.²⁷

Dante gave a true picture of avaricious and prodigal people on the astral level.²⁸ There people see their own passions in mirror images. On the astral level an avaricious person will see what he has done with his avarice in the image of a prodigal. The prodigal will see his attributes in the counter image of an avaricious person.

In the city of Dis, Epicurus represents the approach to life that aims to expand and develop this world.²⁹ The city of Dis stands for physical reality. There people are in coffins. The materialists are living dead. They have been saying that man is but a corpse. As dead souls they now have to lie in coffins.

From hell Dante is taken into purgatory. Princes who neglected their soul's salvation over affairs of state also need to be purified in the fire.³⁰ The strictly Catholic view is that the personality must be developed. Princes who have not done so must therefore languish in the fire.

The next region between purgatory and heaven Dante enters is the Garden of Eden.³¹ Here we are introduced to the truly Christian view, which is that the origin of the Church rests in the realm of the spirit. Anyone wishing to understand the medieval view of the ideal Church must organize himself in a higher way so that he may see its original image in the other world.³² Dante used the views of the heavenly hierarchies held by Dionysius the Areopagite³³ for this. Dionysius wrote of a ranking order of angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominations, thrones, cherubim, seraphim. The ranks in the temporal hierarchy of the Church were meant to reflect those heavenly hierarchies. Dante wrote of the hierarchies in symbolic form in the Garden of Eden.

Then Beatrice took on the role of guide.³⁴ We distinguish between a female element in the soul, which is inner soul nature, and a male element, which is the spiritual principle in the universe that impregnates the soul. The female soul draws us upwards. Medieval alchemists called the female aspect of the human being the ‘Lilium’.³⁵ This is also why Goethe spoke of the ‘beautiful Lily’ in his Tale.³⁶ In the Dantean way of thinking Beatrice represents the edifice of scholastic theology.

Spirits of the moon who had broken their spiritual vows were first of all brought before Beatrice.³⁷ They had broken their vow to serve only the spiritual and had fallen back into sensuality. In ancient Greek theosophy Mercury³⁸ was still the spirit who had a role to play when the ancient Atlanteans advanced to a concept of the I. The earliest Atlanteans were not yet conscious of the I. The personal comes under the sign of the god Mercury, Hermes. Man came to the personal level when he fell into I-nature, egotism. This also made us into people who want to have possessions and is the reason why Mercury was also the god of merchants.

On Jupiter Dante found the princes who exercised justice.³⁹ Something very important occurred on the sun.⁴⁰ Dante was shown the true nature of eternity on the sun; how to see the day known as the Day of Judgement. The Day of Judgement changes everything. Two people made their appearance—Thomas Aquinas and King Solomon. Thomas Aquinas represented life in terms of Christianity, of the New Testament, and King Solomon was the teacher of the Old Testament.

Christians saw the priesthood as a physical expression of what the Christ meant to them in spiritual development. After life on earth the Christ had gone away and was now triumphant in the fixed star heaven. Someone who has prepared his spiritual embryo here on earth so that he has spiritual vision is able to see the Christ in the fixed-star heaven. The disciple who had been most profoundly initiated, John, appeared as the teacher of this view.⁴¹ Only the Christ and Mary were able to take their bodies up into the fixed star heaven. A master also has his body fully in hand. Just as people are learning to master their passions with moral ideas in our present civilization, so does someone who has reached a higher level truly learn to control the physical body. Jesus and Mary had hallowed their physical body to such a degree that they were able to take it with them to the highest regions.

Then St Bernard⁴² became the guide for the higher regions where God is beheld and one enters wholly into the divine self. There Dante went beyond the teachings of the Church. He saw the three cycles, the threefold original essence of the world, father, son and spirit. They are called Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in Indian religion. Here the trinitarian nature of the universe became apparent, with Dante rising to pure vision in the spirit, to contemplation.

In the end we are shown how we live, move and are in God but must not presume to understand God.⁴³ In the end, Dante only wrote of growing certainty in the human ability to recognize God. For him, this work was the drama of the world seen from the other side.

• 11. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321).
• 12. Rudolf Steiner was here considering the fundamental aspect of La Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. He spoke of this in a very different style in the lecture given to the workers at the Goetheanum on 14 March 1923, published in GA 349, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde. Über das Wesen des Christentums (in process of publication). The influence of Brunetto Latini was discussed in a lecture given in Dornach on 30 Jan. 1915, published in GA 161, Wege der geistigen Erkenntnis und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (not yet translated) and a number of lectures given in 1924, especially in Dornach on 10 Sept. 1924, published in translation as Karmic Relationships vol. 4 (in GA 238). 10 lectures, Dornach 5-23 Sept. 1924. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1957. For the translation of this lecture I have followed the terminology used in Dante Aleghieri, The Divine Comedy, text with translation by Geoffrey L. Bickersteth. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1981. Translator.
• 13. Faust I, 577-578.
• 14. Cameri, B. Sechs Gesänge ausDantes Göttlicher Komödie, in German, with an introduction on Dante's use of alliteration. Vienna 1896.
• 15. Sir Bartholomaeus Cameri (1821–1909). See essay ‘Bartholomaeus Cameri, der Ethiker des Darwinismus’ (not translated) in GA 30, also in Steiner R. The Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18). Tr. F. C. A. Köllin. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 16. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). See Steiner R. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (GA 7). Tr. K. E. Zimmer. Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980. Also Steiner R. The Origins of Natural Science (GA 326). Tr. M. St Goar, N. Macbeth. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1985.
• 17. Aquinas, Thomas (1225–1274). In his teachings high scholasticism reached its pinnacle. Rudolf Steiner spoke about him at Whitsun 1920 in Dornach (see The Redemption of Thinking. A study in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (GA 74). Tr. A. P. Shepherd, M. R Nicoll. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1956.) Concerning his relationship to Aristotle, see lecture given in Munich on 20 March 1908 (in GA 108, not available in English).
• 18. The first German edition said ‘thirty thousand years’. It is doubtful, however, if the figure was written down correctly. See Steiner R. Occult History (GA 126) lecture of 31 Dec. 1910. Tr. D. S. Osmond, C. Davy. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1957.2nd edn Rudolf Steiner Press 1982.
• 19. Arldt, Theodor, b. 1878, palaeontologist and palaeogeographer.
• 20. Das Atlantisproblem. Kosmos 1905; 2: Nr. 10.
• 21. Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno 1,38f The general view held at the time was that the sun was in the Ram when god made the heavenly bodies move in orbits. Thus be the day when Dante set out on his journey would have been the first day of spring. (Comment on 1,38 in W. v. Wartburg's German translation). The German translation has ‘panther’ instead of ‘leopard’ (translator).
• 22. In Roman mythology, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, sons of Mars, who later founded Rome were suckled and reared by a wolf.
• 23. Odysseus or Ulysses, in Greek mythology king of Ithaca. Homer spoke of him in his Odyssey as being cunning and wise.
• 24. Divine Comedy, Inferno 1,94 f. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC). Roman poet highly esteemed in the Middle Ages.
• 25. Virgi's Aeneid, a great epic about the role ofRome in ancient history, speaks of the wanderings of Aeneas after the sack ofTroy before he finally settled in Italy.
• 26. Augustine (354–430), greatest of the Latin church fathers. He taught that because of Adam's fall into sin humanity was incapable of goodness (original sin), with individual people chosen for eternal salvation by an act of grace (predestination). See Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8) chapter on Augustine and the Church. Tr. H. Collison, rev. C. Davy, A. Bittleston. Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1992.
• 27. Divine Comedy, Inferno 4, 25 f
• 28. Inferno 7.
• 29. Inferno 10.
• 30. Purgatorio 7, 64 f.
• 31. Purgatorio 27, 124 f; 28 f.
• 32. Purgatorio 29 f.
• 33. Dionysius the Areopagite, member of the Areopagus, the highest judicial and legislative council in ancient Athens, converted to Christianity by Paul (Acts 17:34). The works published in his name in the 6th century were much venerated by scholastics and mystics and translated from Greek to Latin by Johannes Scotus Erigena in the 9th century. They include the treatises On Divine Names, On Mystical Theology, On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, and 10 epistles. See also Steiner R. The Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World (GA 110) lecture given in Düsseldorf on 12 April 1909. Tr. R. Querido. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1983.
• 34. Purgatorio 30.
• 35. Purgatorio 30, 21.
• 36. Goethe's Tale (of the green serpent and the beautiful Lily) first appeared in the literary magazine Horen in 1795, concluding the story ‘Conversations of German emigrants’. See Allen PM, Allen J deRis, The Time is at Hand! Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press 1995., and Steiner R. Goethe's Standard of the Soul. As illustrated in the Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (GA 22). Tr. D. S. Osmond. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1925.
• 37. Paradiso 3.
• 38. Paradiso 5,91 - VII.
• 39. Paradiso 18, 70 f.
• 40. Paradiso 10-14.
• 41. Paradiso 26, 1-69; 31, 58 f
• 42. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). See Steiner R. A Sound Outlook for Today and a Genuine Hope for the Future. Lecture given in Berlin on 16 July 1918. Typescript translation C 50, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London: ‘Perhaps the most significant figure in the 12th century.’
• 43. Paradiso 33, 124 to the end.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

Many people who today know only the Christmas tree with its candles believe it to be an institution that has a long tradition. This is not the case, however. The Christmas tree is in fact a fairly recent European institution. Even the earliest Christmas tree was only just over a hundred years ago. But young as the tree may be, the Christmas festival is old indeed.

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of corn that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

As an introduction, I should like to tell you two short stories. The first (I shall omit certain details) is as follows:—

Once upon a time there lived two boys who from earliest childhood had been close friends. One of them was outstandingly gifted, learned with extraordinary facility and as he grew older gave every promise of attaining high academic honours. The other boy was much less talented. His friend who was deeply attached to him, taught and helped him in every way, but he was incapable of learning very much. This, however, did not greatly affect his circumstances as a small inheritance provided for his living. The more gifted boy grew to adolescence but when he was on the point of getting a University Degree, he died. As in the country where these young men lived, it was customary to marry and start a family very early in life, it devolved upon the other, less gifted youth to provide for the family of the friend who had died. This he did, but before long his own means were exhausted. He said to himself: “As my friend's talents have proved so transient, my mundane possessions too, will probably soon have disappeared; I must set about making a livelihood.” This he did by becoming a travelling merchant. Once when he was sitting in front of a house in a strange neighbourhood, a gigantic man came and sat down beside him. He gave the impression of not having eaten anything for days and seemed to be famished with hunger. The other took compassion on him and ordered a meal to be brought. It was very quickly consumed, to the astonishment of the merchant, but as the one meal was not enough to appease the other's hunger, he ordered a second. The big man ate this just as ravenously and then said that to satisfy his hunger he must have a whole ham and a number of cakes. He devoured all these and, after his enormous meal, seemed satisfied. This incident led to friendship between the big man and the little man, and they set out together on their travels. Very soon, however, the little man found the big man something of a burden and told him that he could well dispense with his company. The big man, however, assured the little man of his friendship, saying that man now felt a wish to question the big man about his life, and the latter replied: “I have no house on the earth, no boat on the sea; by day I live in the village, by night in the town” To begin with, the little man had no notion of what this meant. Then it happened that they must cross a wide river. Their boat capsised and sank, and both fell into the water. The big man extricated himself very quickly, carried the little man to a safe spot, brought up the boat and put the little man into it then he dived again into the water and brought up all the goods, even the tiniest articles, which the little man was intending to trade. This naturally aroused in the little man the greatest respect for the other, and as friends they had many talks together, sometimes on profound subjects. Thus on one occasion the little man said to the big man: “Oh! if only one could rise consciously to heaven; if only it were possible to know what is going on up there!” Thereupon the big man answered him: “Maybe you would like to soar into the air” ... and when the little man had assented he very soon became aware of fatigue and fell asleep. When he woke up the stars were above him, like pollen in the cup of a lotus-flower in heaven; he was even able to pluck one of these flowers, hiding it in his sleeve. Then he saw a great ship approaching, drawn and steered by dragons In it was a great vessel of water, and the big man who was with the little man in the clouds, showed him how the water could be poured out and allowed to trickle down to the earth. Then the little man realised that he was able to act as do the Spirits of the Air, when they let the rain pour down upon the earth. He begged the big man to pour the water in the vessel on his native soil and to let him go down again to the earth by a rope. The big man said to him: “Now you have rescued me; I am a son of the Thunder-God, and my duty has been to bestow rain and other blessings upon the earth. Because for a time I did not perform my duty properly, I was obliged to lead on earth the life of which you know.” Then he let the little man go down again to the earth. The latter was now in his home once more, having with him the star he had gathered in the meadow of heaven This he placed upon the table and it filled the whole room with miraculous light, strong enough even to read by. During the day it looked like a simple meteor-stone, but at night it was radiant and luminous. This continued until one night the little man's wife, rather a vain woman, was combing her hair by its light. This displeased the star-stone and it shrank to a tiny size. One day the wife had a strange impulse to swallow the stone! Thereupon there came to the little man a vision of the big man whom he knew so intimately, and the latter said to him: ”Owing to what has happened now, I can reach a particular stage of development Now I shall be able to come to the earth for a time as a son of the Thunder-God. Your wife will bear me as your son.” And he was actually born as the son of the little man. A peculiarity of this child was that in the dark he shone like a star, so that people called him the “Star Child.” He lived on, and although as he grew older his radiance waned, it still revealed itself in the form of his great talents Very soon he became a man of high importance in life....

This is the one story. You will wonder why I am telling you these tales, but before answering I will tell you a second, very similar one.

Once upon a time there lived a man who, in our country, might rank as a “Councillor” or “Governor.” He and his family lived in a spacious, very beautiful house. But after a time, strange things began to happen there. By day, and especially by night, nobody in it could get any rest; they were always being knocked, pinched and dragged about in all directions; objects were hurled at them and the house swarmed with ghosts. Because of this the family left the house and went to another, leaving a servant behind as caretaker; but after a few days he died. They sent a second and then a third, both of whom also died They then decided to leave the house without any servant at all. A young sceptic now turned up, a youth who was preparing for an examination, and he wanted to take the house for his studies. The Councillor warned him that he would probably never come out alive, and that at any rate terrible things happened to everyone in the house. But the young man replied: “I have written a treatise on the very subject of the “Unreality of Spirits,” proving that they do not exist. I could write a great many more and nobody who has written about such matters is in the least afraid of what may happen in such a house!” So the Councillor was prevailed upon to let him have the house. The young man took with him masses of books to study and sat down to begin his work. It was not long, however, before one of his ears was pinched, then the other; then he was attacked somewhere else and molested in all sorts of ways. When he went to bed the trouble began in real earnest! He could get no rest the whole night long and, sceptic though he was, he began to be dreadfully frightened. Nevertheless, he refused to give way to terror and held out valiantly. On account of his power of endurance, the spectral figures who were wont to bend over his books and play pranks by closing his eyes when he wanted to read, and so on, revealed themselves to him. This heartened the brave young man considerably, but it was a really ghastly state of affairs. Things went on like this until his good-heartedness enabled him to set up a kind of friendship with two spirit-beings who were always annoying and molesting him. After a time he discovered that the spirit-beings could not read but would like to be able to do so. And so it came about that he established a kind of school for the spirits, teaching them how to copy out all sorts of things from his books. Not only were the spirits extremely grateful for this, but they had actually learnt something. Spirit-intercourse was now quite a pastime to the young man and the spirits who lived in the house had, moreover, profited greatly through him. The time came for his examination; as well as having had a great deal of amusement, he had imbibed so much knowledge that he was hopeful of passing, but the intrigues of an enemy caused the rumour that he had cheated in his written papers. As in that country the rules about such matters were extremely strict and because to begin with the rumor was believed, he was sent to prison and retained there for some time with nothing to eat. Finally, however, one of his spirit-friends brought food to him. She then began to bring the other spirits with her and they provided for all his needs. Thus there grew up between the young man and one of his spirit-friends a friendship much greater even than it had been before. And after his innocence had been established and he had been set free, although he had formerly “proved the unreality of spirits,” his spirit-friend was now such a reality to him that he resolved to marry her! She answered, however, that situated as she was, she could not marry, for she belonged to the spiritual worlds, but that if he would go to a certain priest-magician and ask his advice, there would be a way out of the dilemma. So he went to the priest-magician who gave him a charm, saying that if, when a funeral was passing, his spirit-friend would go to the coffin and swallow this charm, she could then become a human being and marry him. Not long afterwards a funeral was actually taking place. The spirit-friend approached the procession, swallowed the charm and then and there disappeared into the coffin. People were astounded in the highest degree when the figure they had seen disappeared into the coffin (for when she had swallowed the charm she became visible). They therefore put the coffin on the ground, opened it, and found that it contained no body at all! The burial could not, therefore, take place. But after a few days the spirit-friend came to the young man, told him that she had now become a human being—the one who had been in the coffin—and that they could now enter into wedlock. And so the two whose acquaintance had begun in the haunted house, now lived on in the companionship of marriage.

If you give some thought to these two stories, you will have to admit that however close a search you may make in the literature accessible to Europeans, right back to the time when there was universal belief in ghosts, no such stories will be found. You will find indications of how the spirit-world plays into the world of men—but stories of this kind, giving the feeling that there could be no more natural and spontaneous way of depicting the interplay between the spirit-world and the human world, simply do not exist in European literature. They are quite unique. A curious feature strikes us when we study their composition. In the first story we are told, for instance, that a star is born as the son of a human being and goes on living as a man upon the earth. To the kind of consciousness underlying the first story, it is a natural matter of course that beings exist in the stars, beings who are the primordial kith and kin of men, and that those who walk the earth as men may, in reality, be embodied Star-beings. This underlies the first story as a natural and accepted fact. In the second, a human being who enters into actual wedlock with another, first came to know her in the spiritual world; she then descends into the physical world and her life continues there. The trend of the two stories is identical. This sense of “togetherness” with the spiritual world—not in the form in which it is expressed in European sagas and legends, but on the totally different ground of which we shall presently speak—will nowhere be found, in the same peculiar form, in the literature of Europe—except it were to be imitated by some modern writer.

And now remind yourselves of something I said in one of the last public lectures.¹ In the way that is possible in such a lecture, I spoke about the beginnings of Earth-evolution and of the genesis of man in connection with Earth-evolution. I said that the process of the evolution of humanity began at a comparatively late stage. We ourselves speak of the evolution of man and of mankind in the following way. When a human being is to enter physical existence on the earth, the innermost kernel or core of his being works within a certain field of activity, moulding the finer organs, the brain, and the more delicate bodily tissues. Thus there is in man a kernel of spirit-and-soul which passes over from earlier incarnations, envelops itself in what comes from the forefathers and is carried through the generations by the process of physical heredity. In a human being who appears on the Earth, a union takes place between what comes from earlier incarnations and what is carried through the generations, enveloping the kernel of spirit-and-soul which passes from incarnation to incarnation. I said that this form of the evolutionary process began only during the Atlantean epoch, when conditions rendering such a development possible arose for the first time on the Earth. I indicated that this particular process of evolution had been preceded by another, in which the human being did not pass into earthly existence by way of union between man and woman and then the descent of the soul which passes through the several incarnations. In very early periods of Earth-evolution, the human being originated in an altogether different way. The reason for this is that not until the Post-Atlantean period did the Earth actually resemble its present configuration. In the latest Atlantean period the Earth did not really differ, in essentials, from what it is at present; but the early Atlantean epoch was fundamentally different from the later, and anyone who ignores the fact that at that time entirely other conditions prevailed, has a totally false conception of the configuration of the Earth. After having passed through the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, the Earth was not only a living organism, but also a spiritual being, a great organism permeated by spirit-and-soul. We do not get back to an inanimate ball of gas as intimated by the Kant-Laplace theory, but to the Earth as a huge, living being. In that ancient time the evolutionary process of humanity was such that fecundation did not take place between man and woman, but between the “above” and the “below”—in this sense, that the Earth with its forces of life, provided the element of substance, the more material element—whereas the spiritual principle came from above like rain which fertilises the soil of meadows, and united with the more material principle. It was by this method of fecundation that the first human beings came into existence. This was indicated in the public lecture and can be established on logical grounds, in accordance with the principles of natural existence. Then the Earth separated out from itself a solid mass, like a kind of bony system, and it was impossible thereafter for it to provide, as before, the substance for fertilisation. The process had now to take place within the human organism. Instead of the fertilisation “from above,” fertilisation now came about by way of the two sexes, and the process which had formerly been set in train by interaction between the “above” and the “below,” now passed over into the operations of heredity and into those of reincarnation which are bound up with heredity. Thus what had taken place on the surface of the Earth in earlier times, had now passed into the being of man. Human beings came into existence and were able to inherit or carry over from one incarnation to the next, those qualities which had formerly been received directly from the spiritual world but were now transmitted by heredity. As was said in the public lecture, the very first human beings were bi-sexual, then there was differentiation into the male and the female, and then a gradual development into the conditions prevailing at present; what in earlier times had operated more from above—the female element—passed into the woman, and what had operated more in the earthly element, passed over in the stream of heredity into the male.

From intimations given through the course of years concerning the evolution of humanity, you will have realised that these conditions prevailed right on into the Atlantean epoch; it was not until the second half of the Atlantean epoch that the evolutionary process assumed, more or less, its present form. The Atlantean peoples on the Earth were really living in the aftermath of still earlier conditions, when the substantiality of the Earth was fertilised by the spirituality of the Heavens. The Atlantean peoples saw the birth of a human being as a direct embodiment of the Spiritual, a descent of the Spiritual into the Material. As we today see the rain falling from heaven and moistening the Earth, so did the people of Atlantis see human beings coming down from heavenly heights, uniting with substance provided by the Earth and then wandering over its surface. Conditions changed only by slow degrees; in certain regions the preparatory stages of conditions as they are at present, had long since been in existence, whereas in other regions where the old conditions had persisted, the Atlantean peoples knew that the human being exists, to begin with, in the spiritual world and then seeks bodily substance in order to become part of Earth-humanity. Thus when a man in Atlantean times saw his fellow-men moving about the Earth, he said to himself: “The form I see there derives from the Earth, but what is within it derives from the same world to which the stars belong: the human being has descended from the worlds of the Stars!” ... It sounds like a fairy-tale echoing from olden time ... Man comes down from heavenly heights, surrounds and clothes himself with earthly substance. The Atlantean peoples knew of the interaction between the Heavens and the Earth. They knew: To begin with, man is a Spirit; then he descends, clothes himself in matter and moves about the Earth. Man was seen as a heavenly being, a being from the spiritual world. For it was known that as he moved about, he differed from the Spirits only in that he was clothed in matter. The transition from the spiritual world to the physical world was a much gentler, more delicate process. Not that the Atlantean would in any sense have denied the existence of the spiritual world ... on the contrary, he saw clearly that there was no very essential difference between physical men and the spirit beings who belong to that other world. He knew: One can communicate with a human being through signs, by employing the early rudiments of human speech ... and with the Spirits, too, for the way in which man communicates with the Spirits does not differ from the way he communicates with other men.

Naturally, only very little of this direct knowledge of man's connection with the spiritual world survived the Atlantean catastrophe. The mission of the Post-Atlantean epoch was to develop in man an understanding of Earth-existence proper, of all that can be acquired by the development of the body as a physical instrument. And so the perfectly natural communion with the spiritual world very soon ceased in the course of the Post-Atlantean epoch. But what disappeared from the normal consciousness was preserved in those periods or moments of atavistic clairvoyance when the soul withdrew more into itself. What in earlier times had been actual experience when the soul turned its gaze into the spiritual world around, was born again later on ... in the form of Imagination, Phantasy. Let us assume that in some particular people belonging to the Post-Atlantean age, the characteristics and faculties of the Atlantean epoch still survived, more strongly than in all the others. It would not, of course, be possible for such a people, in the Post-Atlantean epoch, to have experiences in the form they had taken in Atlantis. But there would certainly be something in their phantasy distinguishing it from that of new races—races which cannot really be said to be survivals of Atlantean peoples. In the leading races of the Post-Atlantean epoch there will, obviously, be less evidence of this natural communion with the spiritual world.

In a people characterised by having carried over into the Post-Atlantean epoch a constitution of soul reminiscent of the Atlantean period, the after-effects of this communion will be quite different from those working in the typical Post-Atlantean races. In the case of a people who would be regarded from the point of view of occultism as belonging, not to the progressive races, but to the “laggard” races of ancient Atlantis, it is to be expected that their phantasy, when it speaks of the connection between the world of men and the world of spirits, will express itself in a form differing altogether from the phantasy of other peoples. We can understand that the imagination of such a people might well take the form of narrating how a Star-being suddenly resolves to incarnate as the son of a human being who had rendered service to the Star. Think of the first story, where a Star-being—a son of the Thunder-God—was born as the son of the friend with whom he had for a time wandered about the Earth. The second story suggests the gentler transition . . . a human being falls in love with a spirit-being from above; such a being does not descend to human existence in the ordinary way but chooses a dead body. It is as though an Atlantean soul, accustomed to seeing human beings descend and take on earthly substance, had gone astray by choosing a body which was suitable, not for the Post-Atlantean epoch, but for that of Atlantis, when human beings were not born as they now are, but merely assumed a mantle of earthly substance. In the light of this interpretation we can perceive in such stories the aftermath of earlier conditions. As the products of a race surviving from ancient Atlantis, their trend and content do not surprise us. It is interesting that a number of similar stories has been collected by Martin Huber and published by Rütten and Loening in Frankfurt-am-Main under the title of Chinese Ghost and Love Stories.

All this indicates that what may be surmised from a study of occult science, is actual fact—although, of course, these things are now no more than tradition.

Light can be shed upon a great deal that comes our way in life, if only we have patience to study the more intimate connections of world-evolution. Men of the present day will often stand amazed at such things and will only begin to understand them when they realise that anyone who is cognisant of the more intimate connections of human evolution, accepts them as self-evident. Understanding of Spiritual Science is not furthered by pedantic demands for “logical proof”; proof, after all, is useful only to those who are willing to believe what is asserted; it is useful only to those who can believe that it is proof. Nobody need believe in it at all—and then they are spared from believing anything! Spiritual Science will be received into the souls of men because of increasing evidence that those laws of which knowledge can be acquired only along the occult path, can be applied even in the most hidden recesses of spiritual and material culture. The treasures of wisdom will come into their own when more and more people have patience enough to observe the harmony between all the facts of existence to which a spiritual conception of the world is applied, and to realise that only in this way can there be a true explanation of things which must otherwise remain incomprehensible.

Thinking of all these matters, we shall be able to say: Post-Atlantean civilisation has its particular mission. Human beings who rightly understand their times will unfold the knowledge, will-activity and qualities of heart to be acquired through the instrumentality of the body. In these domains there will be greater and greater progress—progress which, fundamentally, is connected with the phase of evolution stretching from the time of the Holy Rishis of India to the descent of the Christ-Impulse into humanity. But side by side with this there has existed much that is like “imprisoned” spiritual treasure. The people of Europe were astonished in the highest degree at the vistas of spiritual life opened up by the discoveries concerning the wisdom of India, of ancient Persia, concerning the Krishna- or Brahman-culture, or the ancient Zoroastrian culture. In the older civilisations there was, naturally, a deeper spirituality than in the products of later forms of knowledge. People in the West were dumbfounded by what German scholarship in the first half of the nineteenth century disclosed concerning these ancient civilisations, were astonished at the light shed upon the wisdom of India by Friedrich Schlegel, and, later on, upon the wisdom of Persia. These disclosures were so dumb-founding that the deep influence exercised by Oriental Philosophy upon the minds of thinkers like Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann is readily understandable. There we have the first expressions of the wonder and astonishment of the West at what is contained in these ancient civilisations as a kind of “imprisoned” spirituality.

We are now confronting another epoch, in which imprisoned spirituality in a different form will be capable of throwing the West into amazement, namely, the spirituality that does not belong to the mission of Post-Atlantean humanity, but has remained as an heirloom from earlier times, concealed until our own time in the Chinese wisdom of which the West hitherto has known practically nothing. Very little will be sufficient to enable what will happen over there, to overwhelm the spiritual culture of the West—to such an extent indeed, that it might well forget its own mission, its own specific significance and task. As men live on into the future they will have to realise that from the Atlantean epoch there has survived upon our Earth, an imprisoned spiritual wisdom and knowledge greater than anything revealed by the disclosures concerning the old Brahman and Zoroastrian civilisations; this wisdom will be unleashed when the spiritual life of China emerges from its concealment. Two things will have to be realised by those who turn their eyes towards the future. From over yonder there will flow a mighty stream of spiritual life, containing, even in external details, most wonderful teachings ... although such teachings would in any case be available to those willing to penetrate into the spiritual life along the path revealed by Spiritual Science. If, however (to quote words used in a different connection by our friend M.B... . at our General Meeting) the great majority of human beings pull nightcaps over their eyes in regard to what Spiritual Science has to offer, then one day, in a form unsuited to Western mentality, spiritual treasures will pour from Chinese culture, and this portion of humanity, in their amazement, will realise that the products of such culture cannot be grasped by the pedantic thought common in the West, but only by deeper insight into the ancient Taoist culture which arose on the soil of the ancient Chinese civilisation. Spiritual Science often goes against the grain because, by its very nature, study of it will induce belief. Those who deliberately pull nightcaps over their eyes will be amazed, but on the other hand also rather relieved when, in Spiritual Science, they come across many things that have passed over into Chinese culture from Atlantean times. They will comfort themselves by saying: “There is no need to believe in that, for what history has preserved is studied simply because it is of interest!” This is the attitude of the philologists and archaeologists ... there is no need to believe in it; one can get hold of it by study and be exempt from having to “believe.” But when the wisdom casts off its fetters over yonder, it will have another effect as well: its obvious and intrinsic greatness will shock and amaze. It will pour over what mankind has acquired in Christian culture in such a way that it will have to be seen in its true perspective, studied from the right point of view. The proper approach will be to say: This spirituality existed; in bygone ages it constituted the spiritual culture of our Earth. But every epoch has its own mission, and that of Western culture is to drink at the well-springs of the spiritual reality behind world-existence, so that this spiritual reality is perceived behind the material world, behind what eyes can see and hands can grasp—as a revelation from the spiritual world. Men will have to understand that their mission now belongs to a different age and that they must stand firm on the ground prepared by Christianity!

That is the other picture. Men will joyfully receive what derives from olden times but will illumine it, vivify it with what the more recent, Post-Atlantean, Christian culture has imparted to the soul. Weaklings, however, will say: “We will accept spirituality from whatever source it may come, for all that interests us is a sensational vista of the spiritual worlds.” There may actually be neo-theosophists who will say: “The truth is not to be found through deep comprehension of the Christ-Principle; it lies in what has been preserved by the Chinese, coming to light again when they bring forth the Atlantean wisdom hidden in the deepest strata of their souls.” Europe might well be offered a new “Secret Doctrine” compiled from the truths of Chinese wisdom. This would imply that, after all, the proper model for modern theosophists is a much more ancient Theosophy which did not feel called upon to derive the founts of spiritual life from Christian Mysticism and Christian Love—nor, for the matter of that, to plagiarise—and even that very imperfectly—the wisdom of ancient India somewhat embellished by the wisdom of ancient Egypt! As for the weaklings, they will be just as eager for Chinese wisdom as for the spirituality which they think is opened up for them by the ancient or also by the “newly revealed” Indian wisdom. After all, to Europeans, India is almost as remote as China; and if people are told of revelations made possible in China owing to certain forces having been set free, this may well seem more credible to them than that anything of the kind should have transpired in Berlin.

If we ponder over these things, we shall find the true balance between joyful acceptance of what has been preserved from ancient epochs of culture and a firm footing on the soil resulting from evolution through the ages. That heed shall be paid to the importance of maintaining this balance, is and will remain the constant care of the Movement with which we identify ourselves. It is simply an untruth when here or there it is said that we are out to reject or ignore what is offered in the way of Indian spirituality, for example. It is an untruth, as every one who has taken part in our work well knows; and it would be grievous if such untruths were to take root in the world in connection with our Movement. Opinions that are at variance are easy to deal with; they soon balance themselves out. But inaccurate statements give rise to one misunderstanding after another ... for it is the peculiarity of misunderstanding that it constantly gives birth to fresh misunderstandings! With this in mind it must be our primary task to realise how far our own standpoint on the soil of Western spiritual life is justified in face of the other phases of human evolution. On the other hand, we must take care that everything we say about those other phases of evolution, about other forms of spirituality, is presented honestly and truthfully. Again and again it must be repeated and realised by Theosophists that even if much of the spiritual insight we have been able to gain, goes under, its influence will remain! No matter what transpires, our work must be full of sincerity, integrity and truthfulness. And if, in future times, all that people will be able to say of our particular work is that many a thing was improved, many another has not survived—nevertheless it was an example of the fact that occultism and earnest spiritual research can be entirely free from charlatanism or humbug, that the striving for occult knowledge can be true, genuine and sincere ... if that can be said of us, we shall really have done something to further the development of the occult life! And the fact that we would not admit anything of which in the future these things could not be said, may be accounted among our finest achievements.

• 1. 4th Jan. 1912. The Origin of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science. Not yet published in English.

Old Myths as Pictures of Cosmic Facts. Darkening of Man's Spiritual Consciousness. The Initiation Principle of the Mysteries.

There are many myths and sagas of the ancient Egyptians that were well-known to the spiritual-scientific world conception and are again becoming known, but are not transmitted by the external historical traditions touching on the Egyptians. Some of these myths were preserved for us in the form in which they became domesticated in Greece, for most of the Greek legends that do not relate to Zeus and his family, stem from the Egyptian mysteries. We shall occupy ourselves today with all sorts of mythical things that we can put to good use, despite the assertion of modern cultural history that Greek mythology contains little of value.

Why should we examine this other side of human evolution, the spiritual side? All that we see on the physical plane always remains an event and fact of the physical plane. But in the science of the spirit, we are interested not only in what lives on the physical plane, but also in all that occurs in the spiritual worlds. From what we have heard in our lectures we know what happens to man between death and a new birth. We need only recall that in death man enters the condition of consciousness that we call kamaloka, in which, although he has become a spiritual being, he is held fast by the astral body. This is the time when man still demands something from the physical world, when he suffers from the fact that he is no longer in the physical world. Then comes the time when he must prepare himself for a new life, the consciousness-condition of Devachan, where he is no longer immediately connected with the physical world and with physical impressions.

In order to understand how life in kamaloka differs from life in Devachan, let us consider two examples. We know that as soon as he has died, man does not lose his cravings and desires. Let us assume that during his life a person was a gourmet, taking great pleasure in choice, food. When he dies, he does not at once lose this desire for enjoyment, this craving for dainties. These wishes do not live in the physical body, but in the astral. Therefore, since man retains his astral body after death, he also retains the craving, but he lacks the organ with which to satisfy this craving, the physical body. The craving for food depends on the astral body rather than on the physical, and after death the person feels a real lust for what pleased him most in life. For this reason he suffers after death until he has weaned himself of the desire for enjoyment, until he has sloughed off all the cravings that he had cultivated through the physical organs. Throughout this period he remains in kamaloka. Then begins the time when he no longer makes demands of the type that can be satisfied only through physical organs. Then he enters into Devachan.

In the same proportion that man ceases to be fettered to the physical world he begins to develop a consciousness for the Devachanic world. This world becomes more and more illuminated, but he does not yet have an ego-consciousness there, such as he had in this life. He is not yet independent there. In the Devachanic life he feels like a limb, like an organ, of the entire spiritual world. As the hand, if it could feel, would feel itself to be a member of the physical organism, so man feels in his Devachanic consciousness that he is a limb of the spiritual world, a limb of the higher beings. He must grow toward his independence. But he already cooperates in the cosmos; he works on the plant kingdom from out the spiritual world. Man cooperates in all this, not for his own account, but as a ministering member of the spiritual world.

When we thus describe what man experiences between death and a new birth, we must not imagine that the events of the Devachanic world are not also subject to change. People are apt to believe privily that, although our earth is changeable, everything up yonder, beyond death, remains the same. This is by no means the case. When we describe the sojourn in Devachan in this way, this means only that this is approximately the way things are there at the present time. But let us remember how it was when our souls were incarnated during the Egyptian culture. Then we looked upon the gigantic pyramids and the other mighty buildings. In earlier times things looked very different on this side, on the physical side. The countenance of the earth has changed greatly since then. We need only look into materialistic science and we shall find, for example, how a few thousand years ago there were entirely different animals in Europe, how Europe looked quite different. The face of the earth is constantly changing, whence it comes that man is always entering into new conditions of existence. This is obvious to everyone. But when we describe the conditions of the spiritual world, people are prone to believe that what happened there when they died a thousand years before Christ, is exactly the same as what happens when they are reborn and die again today. Just as the physical plane changes, so do things change in the other world. When man entered into Devachan from an Egyptian or a Greek life, his sojourn there was something quite different from what it is today. Evolution occurs there also. It is only natural that we should describe the present conditions in Devachan, but these have changed. This could have been surmised from what was brought before us in the last lecture.

We have seen how, when we go back to the Atlantean time, man lived more in the spiritual world, how he moved about in the spiritual world during sleep. We found that this decreases steadily after that time. But if we go back far enough we find that man once lived entirely in the spiritual world. In ancient times the difference between sleep and death was not great. In primeval antiquity man had long periods of sleep, approximately as long as the time now consumed by an incarnation and the life after death. Through the fact that man descended to the physical plane, he became ever more entangled in this physical plane. We have shown how the Indian gazed into a high world and how, in Persia, man already attempted to conquer the physical plane. Man descended ever further, and in the Greco-Latin time there occurred a marriage between spirit and matter, between the spiritual worlds and the physical plane. The more man approached the middle of this last epoch, the more he learned to love the physical world and take an interest in it. As this occurred, everything that we call experiences between death and a new birth also changed.

If we go back to the first part of the post-Atlantean period, we find that men took little interest in the physical world. The initiates of that time could withdraw into lofty worlds, into the Devachanic worlds, and they communicated their experiences to the others. In the man who, with all his thoughts and all his senses, felt himself withdrawn into the true world, into his real home, the effect was that he took little interest in the conditions of the physical plane. But when he rose into Devachan, after having barely connected himself with the physical world, he possessed in Devachan a comparatively clear consciousness. When such a man incarnated again in the Persian culture, he felt himself more connected with physical matter, and he lost some of the clarity of his consciousness in Devachan. In the Egypto-Chaldean time, when man began to feel some affection for the external physical world, his consciousness in Devachan already became clouded and shadowy. This consciousness was still of a nature higher than that of his consciousness in the physical world, but it declined steadily in degree and became ever darker up to the Greco-Latin time. During all this time the Devachanic consciousness became ever darker and more shadowy. It was not a dream consciousness; this was never the case. It was a consciousness of which man was fully aware. In the course of evolution it became darkened.

The mysteries existed principally in order to enable man again to illuminate his consciousness, rather than have only a shadowy consciousness in the spiritual world. Let us reflect that if there had been no mysteries there would have been no initiates, in which case man would have had an increasingly vague and shadowy consciousness in the spiritual worlds. Only through the fact that, parallel with the darkening of Devachanic consciousness, initiation into the mysteries continued, together with the acquisition of certain faculties with which selected persons could look into the spiritual worlds in full clarity—only through the fact that the initiates could speak of this in myths and sagas, was it possible for a ray of light to penetrate into the Devachanic consciousness between death and a new birth. But all those who had made themselves comfortable in the physical world experienced this fading away of consciousness in the spiritual world. It was no fairy tale but plain truth, that the initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries were able to have a special experience. The principle of initiation is that, even during his life, man can ascend to the spiritual worlds and learn what takes place there. The initiate of that time was actually able to learn directly from the shades in the spiritual world. The following is really the statement of an initiate: “Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades.”¹ This statement is made out of the initiates' experience. We cannot take such things deeply enough, and we only understand them when we know the facts of the spiritual world.

Now let us bring into more concrete form what we touched upon abstractly yesterday.

Had nothing occurred other than man's descent into the physical world, consciousness between death and a new birth would have grown ever darker. Ultimately men would have entirely lost their connection with the spiritual world. Now, however singular it may appear to those who are only slightly infected with some form of materialism, what I am about to say is true. Had nothing else intervened in human evolution, mankind would have succumbed to spiritual death. But there is a possibility of illuminating the consciousness between death and a new birth, and this illumination can be achieved either through initiation or (to a lower degree) through man's participating in the spiritual world during this life, having experiences that do not die out with his bodies, but remain connected with the eternal core of his being, even in the spiritual world. This was the concern of the mysteries and of all spiritual development. It was the concern of the great initiates before Christ and, above all, of the Being whom we call Christ. All other initiates were in a certain sense forerunners of the Christ; they were harbingers who pointed to the coming of the Christ.

The advent of the Christ-figure will now be described. Let us imagine a man who has never heard anything of the Christ, who has never been able to absorb the mysteries of the Gospel of John, who has never been able to say, “I will imitate the life and work of the Christ; I will try to take his precepts into my own being.” If we add that the Christ had never approached this man, he would not be able to take with him into the spiritual world the treasure that the man of today must take with him if he is to avoid the darkening of his consciousness. What man takes with him as a picture of Christ is a force that brightens the consciousness after death, that saves man from the fate that all men would have had if Christ had not appeared. If Christ had not appeared, the human essence would have been maintained, but the consciousness after death could not have been illuminated. This is what gives real meaning to the advent of the Christ, that something was embodied into the core of man's being that has a wide significance. The event of Golgotha preserves man from spiritual death if he makes it one with his own being.

We should not think that the other great leaders of mankind did not have a similar significance. There is no question of claiming some exclusive dogma for Christianity. That would be an offense against true Christianity, for anyone acquainted with the facts knows that Christianity was also taught in the ancient mysteries. Such words as those of Augustine are profoundly true: “What is called the Christian religion today existed already among the ancients and was present with the beginnings of the human race. But when Christ appeared in the flesh the true religion, which was already in existence, received the name of Christian.” What is important is not the name, but that we rightly understand the significance of the Christ impulse. Christ was the figure that appeared at the lowest point in evolution, but Buddha, Hermes, and the other great beings were in complete possession of the prophetic consciousness that the Christ would come, that he lived in them.

We can see this clearly when we study the figure of Buddha, and we must be quite clear as to what he was. What was Buddha, in reality? Here we must touch on something that can be said only among students of the science of the spirit. It is customary for people, even for theosophists, to conceive the mysteries of reincarnation in much too simple a way. One should not imagine that a soul that is embodied today in its three sheaths was embodied in the same way in a foregoing incarnation, and again in one before that, always according to the same scheme. The secrets are much more complicated. Although H. P. Blavatsky took great pains to show her intimate pupils how complicated these secrets were, the matter is still not rightly understood today. People think simply that a soul goes into a body ever and again. But it is not so simple. Often we cannot fit a historical figure into such a scheme if we wish to understand it correctly. We must go about the matter in a much more complicated way.

Already in Atlantis we meet beings who were among men as our fellows are today, but whom man saw and learned to know when he was in the spiritual world, severed from the body. We have already pointed out how man learned to know Thor, Zeus, Wotan, Baldur as actual companions. By day he lived in the physical world, but in the other condition of consciousness he learned to know spiritual beings who were going through a stage of evolution different from his. In this primeval period of the earth man did not yet have so solid a body as today; there was as yet nothing like a bony skeleton. The Atlantean body could be seen with physical eyes only to a certain extent. But there were beings who descended only so far as to incarnate in an etheric body. Then there were beings who still embodied themselves at that time, when the air was permeated by water-vapors. When man still lived in the water-fog atmosphere, these incarnations were possible for them. Such a figure was the later Wotan, for example. He said to himself, “If man incarnates in this fluid matter, then I can also.” Such a being assumed a human form and moved about in the physical world. But as the earth condensed and man took on ever denser forms, Wotan said, “No, I shall not go into this dense matter.” Then he remained in invisible worlds, in worlds removed from the earth.

This was the general case with the divine spiritual beings. But from then on, they could do something else. They could enter into a sort of connection with men who approached them, who evolved upward from below. We may imagine it thus. Man's evolutionary course was such that he was approaching his lowest point of development. Up to this point the gods had proceeded in company with men. Now they took another path, which was invisible for men on the physical plane. But men who lived according to the directions of the initiates, thereby purifying their finer bodies, approached them in a certain way. A man who was incarnated in the flesh, if he purified himself, could do this in such a way that he could be overshadowed by such a being, who could not descend as far as the physical body. The physical body would have been too coarse for such a being. The result for such a man was that the astral and etheric bodies were permeated by a higher being, which had no other human form for itself but could enter into another being and proclaim itself through this other being.

When we are familiar with this phenomenon, we shall not regard incarnation as such a simple matter. There can perfectly well be a person who is the reincarnation of an earlier man, who has developed himself so far and purified his three bodies to such an extent that he is now a vessel for a higher being. Buddha became such a vessel for Wotan. The same being who was called Wotan in the Germanic myths, appeared again as Buddha. Buddha and Wotan are even related linguistically.

So we can say that much of what was in the mysteries of the Atlantean time continued in what the Buddha was able to announce. This is in harmony with the fact that what the Buddha experienced is something that the gods had experienced in those spiritual spheres, and that men also had experienced when they were still in those spheres. As the teaching of Wotan thus appeared again, it was a doctrine that paid little attention to the physical plane, emphasizing that the physical plane is a place of woe, and that redemption from it is important. Much of the Wotan-being spoke in the Buddha. Hence it is that stragglers from Atlantis have shown the deepest understanding for the Buddha-teaching. Among the Asiatic population there are races that have remained at the Atlantean level, although externally they must, of course, move ahead with the earth evolution. Among the Mongolian peoples much of Atlantis has remained. They are stragglers from the old population of Atlantis. The stationary character in the Mongolian population is a heritage from Atlantis. Therefore the teachings of the Buddha are especially serviceable to such peoples, and Buddhism has made great strides among them.

The world moves onward, following its course. One who can look deeply into the evolution of the world does not make choices, does not say that he has more inclination for this or that. He says that what religion a people has is a spiritual necessity. The European population, because it has ensnared itself in the physical world, finds it impossible to feel its way into Buddhism, to identify itself with the innermost teachings of the Buddha. Buddhism could never become a religion for all of humanity. For him who can see, there is no sympathy or antipathy here, but only a judgment in accordance with the facts. It would be an error to wish to spread Christianity from a center in Asia, where other peoples are still settled, and Buddhism would be equally false for the European population. No religious view is right if it is not suited to the innermost needs of the time, and such a view will never be able to give a cultural impulse. These are things that we must grasp if we want to understand all the real connections.

But one should not believe that the historical appearance of the Buddha immediately reveals all that lies within it. If I were to expound all this, I would need several hours. As yet we are far from having unraveled the complications of the historical Buddha. Something still lived in the Buddha. This is not only a being who came over out of the Atlantean time and incarnated in him who incidentally was also a human Buddha. In addition to this something else was contained in him, something of which he could say, “I cannot yet comprehend this. It is something that ensouls me, but I only participate in it.” This is the Christ-being. This had already ensouled the great prophets. It was a well-known being in the more ancient mysteries, and everywhere and always men had pointed to him who was to come.

And he came! But again he came in such a way that he accommodated himself to the historical necessities that lie behind evolution. Without special preparation he could not incarnate himself in a physical body. It was still possible for him to incarnate in a sort of subconsciousness in the Buddha. But he could incarnate to live on the earth only if a physical body, and etheric body, and an astral body were specially prepared for him. The Christ had the greatest powers, but he could incarnate only if, through another being, a physical, an etheric, and an astral body had been completely cleansed and purified. Thus the incarnation of the Christ could occur only if another being appeared who had developed himself to this point. This was Jesus of Nazareth. He had proceeded so far in his evolution that he was able, during his life, to purify his physical, etheric, and astral bodies in such a way that it was possible for him, in the thirtieth year of his life, to abandon these bodies, yet to leave them capable of life, usable for a higher being.

Often, when I have stated that a high stage of development was necessary for Jesus to be able to sacrifice his bodies, people have made a strange objection: “But that is not a sacrifice; nothing could be more beautiful! One cannot speak of a sacrifice when it is a question of turning over his bodies to such a high Being!” Yes, it is beautiful, and the sacrifice is not great when one looks at it abstractly; but only try to do the deed. Everyone would like to make the sacrifice, but only let them try it. One must have extraordinary forces if one is to purify the bodies in such a way as to leave them while they are capable of life, and to attain these forces, many sacrifices are necessary. To be able to do this, Jesus of Nazareth had to be an extraordinarily high individuality. The Gospel of John indicates where Jesus abandoned his physical, etheric, and astral bodies and entered into the spiritual world, and where the Christ-being entered into the threefold corporeality. This happened at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. At this moment something significant occurred in the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth. For the materialistic mind, what I now say is bound to be an abomination. Something special occurred in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. If we wish to understand what occurred at the moment of the baptism, when the Christ entered into Jesus, we must turn our attention to something that will appear singular, but is nevertheless true.

In the course of human evolution, the various organs have developed bit by bit, gradually working out their form. We have seen how, when the organs had reached the level of the hips, certain structures and functions appeared in man. Then, too, as the human individuality became more self-reliant, a hardening of the bony system set in. The more independent man became, the more his bony system hardened and the greater became the power of death. We must bear this in mind if we are to understand the following in the right way. Whence comes it that man must die and the body must completely disintegrate? It comes from the fact that in the human body something can be burned, even down to the bones. Fire has power over the human bone-substance. Man has no power, at least no conscious power, over his bones. This power still lies outside man's abilities. In the moment when, at the baptism in Jordan, the Christ drew into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in that moment the bony system of this being became something entirely different from what it is in other men. This was something that had never happened before and has not happened again to this day. With the Christ-being there entered into the Jesus-being something that had power over the forces that burn up the bones. Today the building up of the bones has not yet been placed within man's discretion. But this power reached right down into the bones. The conscious power of the Christ-being extended into the bones. This is part of the meaning of the baptism by John. Therewith something was implanted in the earth that can be called the supremacy over death, for death first appeared in the world with the bones. Through the fact that power over the bones entered the human body, the victory over death also came into the world. Here a deep mystery is expressed. Something in the highest degree holy entered into the bony system of Jesus of Nazareth through the Christ. Therefore it was not to be touched. For this reason the scripture had to be fulfilled: “A bone of him shall not be broken.”² That would have allowed human power to meddle in divine forces. Here we are gazing into a deep mystery of human evolution.

Here we come to a significant concept of esoteric Christianity, which can show us how this Christianity is permeated with the highest truths. We come to the remainder of what confronts us in the baptism. Through the fact that the Christ-being took possession of the three bodies in which the ego-being of Jesus formerly abode, a Being was bound up with the earth that had earlier had its dwelling-place on the sun. It had formerly been bound up with the earth until the moment when the sun departed from the earth. At that time the Christ also departed, and from then on he could exercise his power upon the earth only from outside, in the moment of the baptism, the high Christ-spirit again united himself in the full sense with the earth. Formerly he worked from outside, overshadowing the prophets and working in the mysteries. Now he was actually incarnated in a physical human body on the earth. If a being had been able to look down for thousands of years from a remote point in the universe, such a being as could see not only the physical earth but also its spiritual streams, its astral and etheric bodies, it would have seen significant events in the moment of the baptism by John, and in the moment when the blood flowed from Christ's wounds on Golgotha. The earth's astral body was profoundly changed thereby. At this moment it took up something different; it took on different colors. A new force was implanted in the earth. What earlier had worked from without, again became united with the earth, and thereby the attractive power between sun and earth will grow so strong that sun and earth will again unite, and man will unite with the sun-spirits. It was the Christ who gave the possibility that the earth can again unite with the sun and be in the bosom of the Godhead.

This is the event that occurred, and its meaning. We had to expound this in order to understand what entered into the earth with the Christ. Through this we can grasp how, through union with the Christ, man can absorb something by which his consciousness will again be illuminated after death. If we keep this in mind we shall also be able to grasp how there is evolution for the period between death and a new birth. Now let us ask for whose sake all this took place.

At first, man lived in the bosom of the Godhead. Then he descended to the physical plane. Had he remained above, he would never have achieved his present consciousness of self. He would never have received an ego. Only in the physical body could he kindle the consciousness of self in its bright clarity. He had to encounter external objects and become able to distinguish himself from the objects; he had to descend into the physical world. Only for the sake of man's ego did it happen that man descended. In respect to his ego man stems from the gods. This ego descended out of the spiritual world; it was forged on the physical body so that it might become bright and clear. It is precisely the hardened matter of the human body that has given man his self-conscious ego, that has made it possible for him to attain knowledge. But it also chained him to the earth-mass, to the rock-mass.

Before he achieved his ego, man had physical body, etheric body, and astral body. As the ego gradually evolved in these three bodies, it transformed them. We must be quite clear that all man's higher members work on the physical body. The physical body is as it is because the etheric, astral, and ego work on it. In a certain way all the organs of the physical body are as they are because the higher members have also been altered. Through the domination of the astral body, the backward beings became the different animal forms—the birds, for example. Through the fact that the ego became ever more conscious of itself, it also altered the astral body. We have already said that men separated themselves into groups. What we call the apocalyptic beasts are types, in which this or that higher member has the upper hand. The ego gained predominance in the man-form. All the organs are adapted to man's higher members. When the ego entered into the astral body and wholly permeated it, certain organs took form in man and in the animals that branched off later. Thus, for example, a particular organ may stem from the fact that an ego made its entry upon the earth. On the moon, no ego was connected with the beings in human evolution. Certain organs are connected with this development: the gall and the liver. The gall is the physical expression of the astral body. It is not bound up with the ego, but the ego works on the astral body, and from this the forces work on the gall.

Now let us draw together the entire picture that the initiate made so clear to the Egyptian. The self-conscious man has been shackled to the earth-body. Imagine the man fettered to the earth-rock, fettered to the physical body—and in the course of evolution something arises that gnaws at his immortality. Think of the functions that have called forth the liver. They have arisen through the fact that the body was chained to the rocks of earth. The astral body gnaws at it.

This is the picture that was given to the pupil in Egypt and made its way into Greece as the saga of Prometheus. We must not lay rough hands upon such a myth. We must not rob the butterfly of the dust on its wings. We must leave the dust on its wings. We must leave the dew on the blossoms instead of twisting and torturing such pictures. We should not say that Prometheus means this or that. We should try to present the real occult facts, and then try to understand the pictures that have arisen out of the occult facts and have passed over into the consciousness of man.

The Egyptian initiate led his pupil up to the point where he could grasp man's ego-development. Such a picture was intended to shape his spirit. But the pupil was not to seize the facts with heavy hands. The picture was to stand bright and livingly before him, and the initiate did not wish to press dry banal concepts into the truths he could give. He wanted to present truth in pictures. Poetry has done much for the Prometheus saga, beautifying and ornamenting it. We should add nothing to the occult facts, but leave this delicate embellishment to the artist.

We must still point to something else. Man, when he arrived on earth, was not yet endowed with the ego. Before the ego was secreted into the astral body, other forces had possession of this body. Then the light-flowing astral body was permeated by the ego. Before the ego entered therein, the astral forces of divine-spiritual beings had been sent into man from outside. The astral body was also present, but illuminated by divine-spiritual beings. The astral body was pure and bright, and it flowed around what was present as the rudiments of the physical and etheric bodies. It flowed around and through these, and was quite pure. But egoism entered with the advent of the ego, and the astral body was darkened and lost its golden flow. This was lost more and more, until man had descended to the lowest point of the physical plane in the Greco-Latin time.

Then men had to consider how they could win back the pure flow of the astral body, and there arose in the Eleusinian mysteries what was known as the search for the original purity of the astral body. One aim of the Eleusinian mysteries, and also of the Egyptians, was to recapture the astral body in its pristine golden flow. The quest for the Golden Fleece was one of the probations of the Egyptian initiations, and this has been preserved for us in the wonderful saga of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. We have seen the development. When the form of the lower organs still resembled the boats of which we have spoken, the astral body in the water-earth still had a golden sheen. In the water-earth, man's astral body was permeated with golden light. The search for the astral body is portrayed in the voyage of the Argonauts. In a refined and subtle way we must bring the quest for the Golden Fleece into connection with the Egyptian myth.

External historical facts are linked with spiritual facts. One should not believe that this is mere symbol. The voyage of the Argonauts actually took place, just as the Trojan War actually took place. Outer events are the physiognomy for inner events; all these are historical events. For the Greek neophyte the historical fact took place anew inwardly: the journey after the Golden Fleece, the achieving of the pure astral body.

This is what we wanted to bring before our souls today. On this basis we shall become acquainted with other things from the mysteries, and then we shall find how the Egyptian mysteries are connected with the life of today.

• 1. These are the words of Achilles in Book XI of the Odyssey.
• 2. The reference is to the Gospel of John, XIX:36.

The particular details of the things we discussed yesterday are complicated and difficult to follow. But we can nevertheless come to some general conclusions by reviewing the picture they form as a whole. No doubt you have already concluded that the twelve senses with which we have become acquainted are not formed solely in accordance with the principles of regular evolutionary progress. The ahrimanic and luciferic principles have also participated in their development. From this we can see that it is necessary to be much more objective about these luciferic and ahrimanic elements than is frequently the case, for the simple reason that they have played such a decisive role in the formation of the collective human constitution. Now, we should remind ourselves that Lucifer and Ahriman only create hindrances for human development when they are displaced and appear where they are not supposed to appear. So it is also easy to imagine that when, as we saw yesterday, the ahrimanic principle influences the upper end of the series of the senses, and the luciferic principle influences the lower end, they are not acting legitimately and in accordance with the evolutionary roles allotted to them. And various human aberrations then arise as a consequence. The aberrations must be possible, as otherwise a human being could not determine his path in the cosmos through the use of his own free will. Finding the right path for our development depends precisely upon learning to maintain our sovereignty against the ahrimanic and luciferic influences. It depends on constant struggle to maintain our balance between these two powers, so it is inevitable that the things that only the power of Lucifer and Ahriman can give us, also make it possible for us to go astray.

Many things would be clarified by a further elucidation of truths such as those that were sketched yesterday, for they contain the key to countless riddles of life which confront present-day humanity. But it is not possible at present to speak about these consequences, even though they follow from entirely objective, spiritual-scientific considerations—not even in our circles. What we want to discuss now are the life forces, the impulses of life which we have described as a kind of internal planetary system. We can view the seven life processes just as we have viewed the twelve regions of the senses.

Breathing, warming, nourishment, secretion, maintenance, growth, reproduction—those are the seven life processes which make up the inner human planetary system and which contrast with the inner zodiac formed by the twelve senses. But luciferic and ahrimanic influences have distorted these seven life impulses—just as they have distorted the zodiac system of the twelve senses—to produce something other than would have been produced if evolution had proceeded along its rightful course. Again we can say that the outermost three life processes, those which have more to do with bringing a person into relation with the outer world, are subject to ahrimanic influence; and the life impulses that have more to do with the internal life process are subject to luciferic influence. Only in the middle is there a kind of balance—in excretion, which tends of itself, because of its natural structure, to remain in balance.

Breathing involves something that can be described as follows: We do not breathe as we would breathe if only regular, progressive, divine-spiritual impulses were active in the breath—the impulses mentioned at the beginning of the Old Testament; more than the power of Jehovah is active in our breathing. For, during the Atlantean period, ahrimanic forces caused our breathing system to be modified and these modifications now affect the way we breathe. Thus, we not only breathe, we consume our organism. And we experience this consumption as a kind of feeling of well-being. It is a fact that, during the course of our life between birth and death, we use our breathing process more energetically than was intended. The consumption of our life forces is very closely connected to this ahrimanic influence. One can say, broadly speaking, that if it were not for this ahrimanic influence we would not inhale as much oxygen in a given period of time, and the consumption of our organism associated with the process of ageing would not be as intense as it now is—I mean ageing in the sense that it involves something that can be seen and not just the passage of years. This is related in many ways to ahrimanic influences on the process of breathing.

Because of ahrimanic influences in our organism, things are burnt up more quickly than a regular evolution would dictate: consumption is a kind of incineration. We actually burn ourselves up.

Through ahrimanic influence, nourishment includes the forming of deposits, so that our nourishment is not merely processed, but is also stored away in our organism as virtually foreign matter. The most familiar process involved here is the production and storage of fat.

The process of getting fat has to be explained here by referring to its ahrimanic side. Of course it also has its luciferic side, but that is a different matter. So storage, the possibility of accumulating food we have eaten so that it remains with us and is stored in our organism as virtually foreign matter, can also be traced to ahrimanic influences: consumption, combustion and storage.

Secretion is, in a sense, a special case; it is an exception.

Maintenance has undergone luciferic influences. All forces are modified by our inner process of maintenance, and the result of this is very similar to the process of storage. All our predispositions towards cyst-formation, towards becoming ossified and sclerotic, belong in this category. We harden our organism during the course of our life. This happens through luciferic influences and is connected with luciferic interventions. Until these processes of hardening exceed a certain degree and manifest as sclerosis and other symptoms of illness, we experience them as a kind of underlying feeling of organic well-being. We only cease to experience it as a feeling of well-being when matters go beyond a certain point; then it becomes an illness-as sclerosis, as glaucoma, or some other, similar illness.

The process of growth has also suffered from luciferic influences. Without these, a person's growth would be a continuous process between birth and death. Without luciferic influences there would be no particular discontinuities in the process of human growth. But the luciferic influence manifests itself immediately and powerfully during the first stages of growth. There it turns the process of growth into a process of maturation. Maturation, sexual maturation, is a luciferic modification of straightforward processes of growth. Everything that is associated with it shows that this discontinuity is not in accordance with the original evolutionary disposition, which would lead to a continuous process of growth. Everything that is connected with the sexual maturation of a man or woman, all the various modifications right down to the change of voice, are connected with this luciferic influence.

Luciferic influences have turned reproduction into procreation, into the possibility of external, physical propagation. In accordance with the original, progressive, divine-spiritual powers, a human being should only be able to reproduce himself. And we must reproduce ourselves continuously, must we not? In order for us to grow, an inner process of reproduction must take place, new parts must constantly be forming. It is due to luciferic influences that external reproduction has been added to this. As you know, this latter luciferic influence on growth and reproduction, in particular, is also described in very clear terms in the Bible. One only has to turn to the Bible. There you will find powerful, titanic pictures which truly show the very things I have been describing.

So you see that we are dealing, once again, with a collaboration between Lucifer and Ahriman.

 1 Breathing—Consumption Ahrimanic 2 Warming—Combustion 3 Nourishing—Conservation 4 Secretion 5 Maintaining—Sclerosis Luciferic 6 Growing—Maturation 7 Reproducing—Procreation 

Surveying what has been said about the twelve zones of the senses and the seven life processes—about the human being's inner zodiac and inner planetary system—you will have to confess that knowledge that is capable of bringing such things to light must be pursued differently from what is usually called knowledge today. Today's knowing, today's knowledge, only touches the outermost surface of things, so to speak. But we must achieve ideas and concepts that are capable of reaching to the threshold of the spiritual world. One does not have to be in the spiritual world, all one has to do is to try, through spiritual science, to formulate ideas which are truly appropriate to the threshold of the spiritual world. Then one will feel how this leads to a knowing and a knowledge that is much more active and inwardly intense, and that is actually capable of penetrating to what is active within a being—in the present case, to what is active within the human being himself. It is not enough to station ourselves opposite the cosmos as mere observers, content to watch how its outer surface affects us; to a certain extent we must participate in the cosmos. One must participate in the forces at work within a being, in what lives and weaves within it. Spiritual science does not only lead us to further knowledge, it leads us to a different kind of knowing. As a typical contemporary anatomist or physiologist it will be impossible for you to distinguish what is ahrimanic in the process of breathing from what is, so to speak, regular, since all of these naturally occur at the same time and it is necessary to slip into the very process of breathing and experience it. Then one does indeed experience the interplay of both forces, of both impulses. This manner of submerging oneself in the world is one of the things that our present age has lost, especially in our present-day sciences, where it has been lost many times over. As I have often pointed out, it is so easy to believe that this active, inwardly engaged manner of knowing either never existed, or that it has long since been lost to humanity—this way of knowing which submerges in the being of things and leads one beneath the surface to the real forces. But that is not so. Actually, it was not even so very long ago that men lost it. You only have to go back a little way in the course of the centuries. You will discover this inwardly active knowing persisted into times not long past.

Consider the life process. To begin with, it forms the whole out of which we are composed—indeed, we are constituted by this life process. But it is really an inner planetary system composed of seven interacting impulses. As I said before—just remember what we have been considering this week—if one wants to have real knowledge, one must accustom oneself to some paradoxes.

I said that what occurs in a human being, and what today's materialistic Darwinism is trying to discover in the human being, will not provide an explanation for what happens in man. Rather will it explain the macrocosm, the universe. And the reverse is also true: the explanation for what is within the human being will be found in the large-scale astronomical processes of the external world. To do so, however, it is necessary to submerge in the world processes and live within them. One cannot merely gaze at the world process from outside. How Sun, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, travel across the heavens is something that can be observed superficially, from the surface. But in order to experience the effect they have as they pursue their course through the cosmos, it is necessary to participate in the differentiated forces which emanate from them. In other words, one must livingly experience the differentiated forces that are at work in the universe. A distinctive force radiates from each planet.

But if you can entertain the thought that what exists within us is explained by what is to be found in the universe, you are not far removed from a further thought, one that is quite correct: a really living acquaintance with the powers that reside in the planets makes human life understandable. The spiritual science of the present seeks to understand human life on the basis of what the universe tells us about it. Such knowledge once existed. It is not necessary to go very far back into the Middle Ages to discover some extraordinary sayings that found their way into print. Nowadays, either they are not understood, or they are explained superficially. But these sayings show that there was a living understanding of these matters just a few centuries ago, even though it was an atavistic understanding:³²

O Sun, of this world thou king,
All thy race fair Luna doth sustain
And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage,
Though all in vain lacking Venus' patronage.
As chosen man Mars sets his face,
Sustained for you is Jupiter's grace
That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.

There you have one of these sayings, one that points to the inner, living being of the planets. It refers to the forces that are revealed when the regions of the planets are not just considered externally and superficially. This saying expresses the powers that live in the whole of the planetary system, but it expresses them so as to show how they manifest in the human sphere.

What do such sayings express? Here is a paraphrase of what is expressed: Between birth and death we live here in a physical body. This depends, by and large, on forces the Sun gives to the Earth. But other forces are also necessary to the existence of humankind. Man needs to do more than just manifest his completed form through the forces of the Sun. Humanity must be able to procreate and maintain itself and, for this, forces that emanate from the Moon are required:

All thy race fair Luna doth sustain

Furthermore, the forces that emanate from Sun and Moon are united by Mercurial impulses:

And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage

And so the whole process already begins to become more spiritual. Our physical being—the very fact that we possess a human form—is dependent on the Sun. Thus, the Sun, taken as a physical being, is the king of this world. The Sun also exists spiritually for us, but only because the Christ has descended from the Sun to the Earth. But, taken in the first place as a physical body, it is the Sun that makes it possible for us to live as physical men on the Earth.

All thy race fair Luna doth sustain

makes the transition to the spiritual. It goes still further in that direction with:

And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage

and still more so with:

Though all in vain lacking Venus' patronage

which is saying that the Venus impulses must radiate through the whole and warm it through, as it were, until it glows. The Venus impulse, in its turn, needs support. It needs to be connected with forces that originate in Mars. What issues from Jupiter is even more spiritual, but in a physical sense: ‘Jupiter's grace’. And only through the constant influence of the Saturn forces can a man finally make his appearance as a member of the human race. This oldest of the powers now works from the outermost periphery; it works from out of the realms of soul and spirit, enabling them to wholly penetrate the physical human constitution. Through the agency of Saturn we are not mere flesh and blood; rather are we flesh and blood that is warmed by the soul and spirit streaming through it. The most ancient of the powers in us, the power of Saturn, ‘old and grey’, enables the soul to be manifested in us:

That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.

For our soul-spiritual nature is physically expressed by the colour of our skin. And all the colours are actually contained in this colour.

That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.

These stiff, clumsy old verses preserve an ancient wisdom. Such wisdom once existed; it has been lost in our present-day superficiality and now we must try to find it again. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward, as the fourth post-Atlantean period came to an end, the stream of this old atavistic wisdom also ran dry. It was replaced by purely physical wisdom, which stays on the surface of things instead of entering into them. Through spiritual science we must once more seek a wisdom that enters into the nature of things. Once people spoke as we spoke yesterday and today, attempting to characterise the twelve zones of our senses and the seven impulses of life, the seven life-movements, and to show how they participate in the spiritual forces that rule the cosmos. A lost wisdom will thus begin to re-emerge; but, as this lost wisdom emerges it must be grasped in full consciousness, not as it was grasped during the period of these verses, when men were not fully conscious. The people who knew these old verses had learned them from old traditions. And if you had asked those who really felt the power of these verses within themselves how they had come by this knowledge, they would have said, ‘It is true that we know this verse, “O Sun, of this world thou king, all thy race fair Luna doth sustain ...” and that if you understand it, you understand the human life processes. But we have no idea how one comes to understand such things.’ That is how they would have answered you.

In ancient times spiritual beings taught such things. This came about through a process that was not fully conscious. The divine inspirations that descended to Earth from the spiritual world were written down in verses. The concepts and ideas of the verses preserved an ancient wisdom. This is also the reason why the loss of understanding for the spirituality of speech ran parallel to the process by which wisdom and knowledge were materialised. If we could go back to the truly historical period of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries—not to that fable convenue that passes for history these days—we would find that people knew that speech is related to processes in the spiritual world. They did not express it in the way we have just expressed it, especially not in Europe. They did not say that the ability to speak is the result of a process that diverges from the progressive direction of evolution and is subject to ahrimanic and luciferic influences. But they had a subconscious feeling for it, knowing that human beings do not really have the right to possess speech as it is ordinarily used. Speech had to be ennobled before high spiritual truths could be compressed into holy verses. And the verses were regarded as holy. That is precisely why the truths were formulated in such verses. I have chosen a clumsily shaped verse, one that could still have been found in the late afterglow of the fourth post-Atlantean period. Nevertheless, the verse is shaped so that its very clumsiness lends it a certain festive air. The ahrimanic influences were paralysed, so to speak, by what was poured into the mould of such verses. The feeling of holiness which these verses conveyed countered ahrimanic influences with a feeling which paralysed them. Thus there is a balance. The ahrimanic that comes from without was held in balance from within by a feeling, a feeling of holiness. This led to the extraordinary attitudes toward speech that were held in ancient times, attitudes which have been lost entirely because they had to make way for an external relationship with speech and the spirit of speech.

The heralds of modern materialism appeared a short time after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In earlier times, speech had been regarded as a kind of gesture, a gesture that pointed to reality but is not in itself real. I have frequently attempted to clarify what this actually means. If one says, ‘dog’ or ‘wolf’ or ‘lamb’, one is using a linguistic expression. Contemporary speech theorists are unable to come to terms with these expressions because they believe that they do not refer to anything. For when we encounter one four-footed creature we call it a dog, and if some other four-footed creature of the same kind comes along, we also call it a dog. The word designates them both as dogs; the word ‘dog’ is applied to one dog and to all. People of today experience a split: words seem to hang in thin air. They no longer see the spirit in things—for them, the spirit is a non-entity—so that the things signified by the words have also become non-entities. I made this clear when I said that people claim words are merely names—that ‘lamb’ and ‘wolf’ are nothing but words. But if one pens up a wolf and feeds it with nothing but mutton—in other words, with matter from sheep—until all of its original matter has been exchanged, one can prove for oneself that these are not merely words, merely names. For now none of the original matter would be present in the wolf. But has the wolf become a thorough-going lamb? Certainly not! There is more to the ‘wolf’ than just matter. Materialistic views really are so foolish that it is very easy to disprove them. For observations such as I have just described really do quite effortlessly knock materialism out of the ring. It ceases to be possible to come to terms with words, however, when one is no longer able to consider what the wolfness of the wolf is, and the lambness of the lamb.

Nevertheless, the initial task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch was to develop materialism. To a certain extent, it was necessary for materialism to be introduced. Therefore, this fifth post-Atlantean epoch requires one to really wrestle with the inauguration of materialism—or, better said, the initiation of the world into materialism and into materialistic thinking, feeling and experiencing. That had to come from two sides. In the first place, people had to be convinced that the salvation of humanity lay in materialism and in treating the world as nothing but matter—naturally, it was only salvation for the materialistic streams of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but it always was presented as being universal. In the times when people still remembered these old verses, the world was not treated as if it were nothing but matter. In those times, as is expressed in such verses, it was still possible to experience oneself as participating in the living reality radiating from the whole life of the planetary system. And such verses can be understood. But in order to do so, humanity must acquire something it has not had before: it must be able to deal with the external, mechanical, materialistic world in order to discover the next, central task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. For, from the present time onward, spiritual science must begin to play a role in this epoch. But, as you will be able to judge from the resistance which it encounters, it will not establish its validity quickly and will only realise its full significance during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. That is how things stand. For everything materialistic will continue to be a source of essential opposition during the whole of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. That is one aspect.

Another aspect is the way in which speech is misunderstood. Words are treated as if they have nothing to do with reality unless they directly refer to properties perceivable by the senses, and nothing else. At some time mankind had to be faced with this. Mankind had at some time to confront the assertion, ‘There are words in your language that have nothing to do with reality; in past times one thought they had, but this was the result of superstitions and unfounded preconceptions. In truth, it is necessary for you to free yourselves from the content of words, for words refer to idols.’ Thus did Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, introduce the misunderstanding of speech into our newly-arrived, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Under the direction of the spiritual world, he began to drive out mankind's old feeling that language can contain the spirit. He referred to all substantial concepts and all universal concepts as idols. And he distinguished various categories of idols, for he went about his work very thoroughly.

Firstly, he said, there are certain words that have simply arisen out of people's need to live together. Men believe that these words designate something real. These words are idols of the clan, of the people, idols of the tribe. Then, once men start to understand the world, they attempt to mix an erroneous spirituality into their way of seeing things. The knowledge mankind obtains arises as though in a cave; but to the extent that he hauls the external world into this cave, man creates words for what he would like to know. These words also refer to something unreal. They are the idols of the cave: idola specis. There are still other kinds of idols—words, that is—that designate non-existent entities. These arise out of the fact that men are not just gathered together into races or peoples by virtue of their blood relationships, but because they also form associations in order to manage one thing and another—and, indeed, more and more is being managed, so that ultimately everything will be managed. Soon a person will not be able to walk about in the world without having a doctor on his left side and a policeman on his right to see that he is thoroughly ‘managed’. Is that not so? Bacon says that other unreal entities, along with the words that express them, have arisen because of this. These unreal entities stem from our living together in the market-place; they are the idols of the market-place: idola fori. Then, there are yet other idols which arise when science creates mere names. Naturally, there are frightfully many of this kind. For if you were to set all our lecture cycles before Bacon, with all they contain about spiritual matters, all the words referring to spiritual things would be idols of this kind. These are the idols that Bacon believes to be the most dangerous, for one feels especially protected by them, believing that they contain real knowledge: these are the idola theatri. This theatre is an inner one where mankind creates a spectacle of concepts for itself. The concepts are no more real than are the characters on the stage of a theatre. All the idols expressed in words are of these four kinds.

And learning to see through these idols is to provide the salvation of human knowledge-this was inaugurated by Bacon of Verulam. The idols must be understood, their idol-like character, their character of unreality, must be recognised, so that we can at last turn our attention towards reality. But if all these species of idols are removed, nothing remains but the five senses. Everyone can prove this for themselves. Notice has thereby been served on humanity of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch: although we need the idols and the words that express them as a kind of common currency, they are only seen in the correct light when we recognise their character as idols, their unreal character. We need them as currency for the tribe, or for individual knowledge, or the market-place we share. We even need them for scientific investigations, for the inner theatre. But only that which the hands can grasp and the eyes can see is to be accepted as real—only what can be investigated in the chemical laboratory, in the experiments of the physicist, in the clinic. The important book which gave Bacon of Verulam's doctrine of the idols to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch inaugurated this way of looking at the world; it is the classic source. And such a book shows us how the very thing that, from a certain point of view, must be resisted, nevertheless can make its appearance in the world in accordance with the rightful cosmic plan. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch had to develop materialism. Therefore the programme for materialism had to be introduced from out of the spiritual world. And the first stage of the programme of materialism is contained in the doctrine of the idols, which did away with the old Aristotelian doctrine that words refer to categories which have real significance.

Today, humanity is already very advanced along the course of regarding anything that is not perceivable by the senses as idols. Bacon is the great inaugurator of the science of idols. Why, then, should the spiritual world not employ the same head that was intended to draw mankind's attention to the idol-like character of speech, to introduce also the practical details of what more or less appears to be a materialistic paradise on earth? In any case, it was essential to present it in a light that would seem paradisiacal to the materialistic frame of mind that had to emerge in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This age needed some corresponding practical ideal. An age which had these views on language was bound to respond to the idea or applying its mechanics to neighbouring spheres of the heavens. Thus the ideals of the materialism of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch are born from the same head that gave us the doctrine of idols. One of the not-yet-fulfilled ideals that you can find in Bacon is the idea of artificially-created weather. But that will come! This ideal from Bacon's Nova Atlantis will also be fulfilled. In Bacon we encounter for the first time the idea of airships that can be guided, and the idea of boats that can submerge. This far we already have progressed in the intervening time. For Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, the great inaugurator, was also a practical materialist, capable of conceiving of these practical mechanisms that are appropriate to our fifth post-Atlantean period.

One can always discover impulses that are intruding, as though from the substrata of the world, when one is trying to strike the fundamental character of a particular period of time. Inventions for controlling the weather, for sailing in the air, for sailing under the sea, belong with those of the theory of idols. Those are ideas and ideals that belong together, and so it is that they appear in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. These things must be judged objectively. One needs to see clearly that words can be employed differently without either viewing them as idols or by turning them into idols. There is a plan behind human evolution. Gradually, according to plan, various impulses appear in the course of evolution. Now that the theory of idols and all that is contained in Nova Atlantis has made its appearance, the last remnants of the great atavistic spiritual theories, views and experiences have been extinguished. So this ground must be recaptured by a newly-appearing spiritual science, proceeding now in the full light of consciousness. During the fourth Atlantean Epoch, someone formulated the ideas that introduced materialism into the ancient Atlantean period. This is described in my writings. Just as it was necessary, in the fourth epoch of Atlantis, for the materialism of Atlantis to be formulated in the head of an old Atlantean, so the fifth post-Atlantean epoch needed its Nova Atlantis, which has a similar function for this epoch. These things cannot be grasped unless they are considered in the light of spiritual science. A person who can observe the fine details of history will find these deeper connections. But today a foundation in spiritual science is necessary. For ordinary history is just a fable convenue; it only says what the various nations, races, peoples and citizens want to hear. Real history has to be obtained from the spiritual world.

Personalities like Lord Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, more or less set the tone of an age. In the case of such persons, the biography is of much less importance than what is revealed by their place in the entire process of developing humanity.

• 32. ‘O Sun, of this world thou king ...’
  
  This verse is to be found among a series of similar verses in texts attributed to the fifteenth century author, Basilius Valentinus. They have been published repeatedly since the seventeenth century. The version used by Rudolf Steiner agrees with that in Basilius Valentinus, Chymische Schtiften, Hamburg, 1717, p.144.

At the close of our last lecture we were able to point out what the specifically Christian and the later Christian-Rosicrucian initiation first gives us in a great and significant symbol. We have indicated the meaning of this symbol, this initiation picture which is also described as the Son of Man who has the seven stars in his right hand and the sharp two-edged sword in his mouth. We saw that this initiation enables a person to have a certain high degree of vision while within his “I” and astral body and outside the physical and etheric bodies. We shall now consider all this still more closely.

Initiation enables a person to attain that which can only be observed with spiritual vision, with spiritual eyes, which is only clear to super-sensible perception, and only in this way can this be really seen and known. Now one of the first and most important things a candidate for the Christian initiation has to know is the development of humanity in our period, so that he may understand the tasks of man to a higher degree. All that higher knowledge and higher perfection gives to man is connected with the question: What am I and what is my task in this age? The answering of this question is of great importance.

Every stage of initiation leads to a higher standpoint of human observation. Even in the first lecture we were able to point out that man progresses step by step, first to what we call the imaginative world, where in the Christian sense he comes to know the seven seals, then to what we call inspired knowledge, when he hears the “trumpets.” and finally to a still higher stage where he is able to understand the true significance and nature of the spiritual beings, the stage of the so-called vials of wrath. But let us now turn our attention to one particular stage of initiation. Let us imagine that the pupil has reached the stage of initiation where he experiences what was described at the close of our last lecture. We shall imagine him just on the border, between the most ethereal beings of our physical world and the one above it, the astral world, where he is permitted to stand as if on a high peak and look down. What can the pupil see from this first pinnacle of initiation?

In spirit he sees all that has happened since the Atlantean flood destroyed ancient Atlantis and the post-Atlantean man came into existence. He sees how cultural periods follow one another up to the time when our epoch also will come to an end and give place to a new one. Ancient Atlantis came to an end through the waters of the Atlantean flood. Our epoch will come to an end through what we call the War of All against All, by frightful devastating moral entanglements.

We divide this fifth epoch, from the Atlantean flood to the mighty war of All against All, into seven consecutive ages of civilization, as shown in the diagram below.

At one end we imagine the great Atlantean Flood, at the other the great world war, and we divide this into seven sub-ages, seven periods of civilization. The whole epoch containing these seven sub-ages is again the seventh part of a longer period; so that you have to imagine seven such parts as our epoch between Flood and War, two after the great war and four before the flood. Our epoch, the post-Atlantean, is then the fifth great epoch.

When the pupil rises to a still higher pinnacle of initiation he surveys these seven epochs, each with its seven sub-divisions; he sees them when he arrives at the boundary of the astral and of the spiritual or devachanic world. And so it goes on step by step; we shall see later what the still higher stages are.

Now we must bear in mind that the pupil is first able to rise to a peak at which the wide plain of the seven ages of civilization of the post-Atlantean epoch became visible as if from a mountain-top. We all know these seven cultural ages. We know that when the Atlantean flood had swept Atlantis away, the ancient Indian civilization came as the first, and that it was succeeded by the ancient Persian civilization. This was followed by the Assyrian-Babylonian-Chaldaic-Egyptian-Hebrew civilization, this by the fourth age of civilization, the Graeco-Latin, which was followed by the fifth, the one in which we are now living. The sixth, which will follow ours, will be in a certain sense the fruit of what we have to develop in the way of spiritual civilization. The seventh age of civilization will run its course before the War of All against All. Here we see this terrible devastation of civilization approaching, we see also the small group of people who have succeeded in taking the spiritual principle into themselves, and are rescued from the general destruction which comes through egoism.

As we have said, we are now living in the fifth of the sub-ages. Just as from the summit of a mountain, towns, villages and woods appear, so do the results of these ages of civilization appear from the pinnacle of initiation described. We perceive their significance. They represent what has taken place in our physical world as human civilization. For this reason we speak of ages of civilization, in contradistinction to races. All that is connected with the idea of race is still the remains of the epoch preceding our own, namely, the Atlantean. We are now living in the age of cultural epochs. Atlantis was the age in which seven great races developed one after another. Of course the fruits of this race development extend into our epoch, and for this reason races are still spoken of today, but they are really mixtures and are quite unlike those distinct races of the Atlantean epoch. To-day the idea of civilization has already superseded the idea of race. Hence we speak of the ancient Indian civilization, of which the civilization announced to us in the Vedas is only an echo. The ancient and sacred Indian civilization was the first dawn of the post-Atlantean civilization; it followed immediately upon the Atlantean epoch.

Let us recall once more how man lived at a time which now lies more than eight or nine thousand years behind us. If we speak of the actual periods of time, then these figures hold good. The civilization of which we are now speaking was directly under the influence of the Atlantean flood, or the great glacial epoch, as it is called in modern science. The engulfing of Atlantis by the flood was a gradual process, and there then lived upon the earth a race of men of which a part had worked up to the highest stage of development possible to be attained. This was the ancient Indian people, a race which then dwelt in distant Asia, and lived more in the memory of the ancient past than in the present. The greatness and power of the civilization of which written descriptions such as the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita are only echoes, lies in the fact that the people lived in the memory of what they themselves had experienced in the Atlantean epoch. You will remember that in the first lecture of this course we said that most human beings of that epoch were capable of developing a certain dim kind of clairvoyance. They were not limited to the physical sense world; they lived among divine spiritual beings; they saw these divine spiritual beings around them. In the transition from the Atlantean to the post-Atlantean epoch man's vision was cut off from the spiritual, astral and etheric worlds and limited to this physical world. In the first post-Atlantean age of civilization men were possessed by a great longing for what their ancestors had seen in ancient Atlantis, on which, however, the door had closed. Our ancestors saw the ancient wisdom with their own spiritual eyes, though dimly. They lived among spirits, they had intercourse with gods and spirits. Such was the feeling of those who belonged to that ancient sacred Indian civilization; they longed with all their might to look back and see what their forefathers had seen, and of which the ancient wisdom spoke. And thus the land which had just appeared before the physical vision of man—the rocks of the earth, which had just become visible, which previously had been seen spiritually—all this external world seemed of less value to them than that which they could remember. All that the physical eyes could see was called Maya, the great illusion, the great deception, from which they longed to escape. And the most advanced souls in that first age could be raised to the stage of their ancestors by the method of initiation of which a few remnants remain in Yoga. From this proceeded a fundamental religious mood which may be expressed in the words, “That which surrounds us here in external sense-appearance is a worthless and vain deception, the real and true is above in the spiritual world which we have left.” The spiritual leaders of the people were those who could transpose themselves into the regions in which man formerly lived.

That was the first age of the post-Atlantean epoch. And all the ages of this epoch are characterized by the fact that man learned to understand the outer sensible reality more and more, so that he came to say: “What surrounds as here and is perceptible to our outer senses, is not to be considered as a mere appearance, it is a gift of the spiritual beings, and the gods have not given us senses to no purpose. That which forms the foundations on earth of a material world culture must gradually be recognized.”

What the ancient Indian looked upon as Maya, from which he fled, from which he longed to escape, was looked upon by those who belonged to the second age as their field of action, as some-thing upon which they had to work. Thus we pass to the ancient Persian age, which lies about five thousand years back, that age of civilization in which the earth around man at first seemed something hostile, but no longer—as formerly—an illusion from which he had to flee; he looked upon it as a field of work upon which he had to imprint his own spirit. The Persian considered the earth ruled in its material character by evil, by a power opposed to the good, by the god Ahriman. He controls it but the good god Ormuzd helps man, when man puts himself in his service. When he fulfils the will of Ormuzd he changes this world into arable land of the upper spiritual world, he imprints into the sensibly real world what he himself knows in the spirit. In the second age of civilization the physically real world, the sensibly real world, was a field of work. To the Indian the sense world was still an illusion or Maya; to the Persian it was indeed ruled by evil demons, but it was nevertheless a world out of which man had to drive the evil and bring in the good spiritual beings, the servants of Ormuzd, the god of Light.

In the third age man comes still nearer to the external sensible reality. It is no longer merely a hostile power which he has to overcome. The Indian looked up to the stars and said: “All that is there, all that I can see with external eyes, is only Maya, illusion.” The Chaldean priests saw the orbits and positions of the stars and said: “When I observe the positions of the stars and follow their courses it becomes to me a script from which I know the will of the divine spiritual beings. From what I there see I recognize what the gods intend.” To them the physically sensible world was no longer Maya but, as the writing of a human being is the expression of his will, so that which was visible in the stars of heaven, which lived in the forces of nature, was to them a divine script. And with love they began to decipher nature. Thus arose the wonderful star-lore of which mankind to-day no longer has knowledge; for what is known as astrology has originated through a misunderstanding of the facts. In the writing of the stars a deep wisdom was revealed to the ancient Chaldean priest as Astrology, as secrets of what his eyes beheld. He considered this as the revelation of something inward and spiritual.

And what was the earth to the Egyptians? We need only point to the discovery of Geometry, when man learnt to divide the earth according to the laws of space, according to the rules of Geometry. The laws within Maya were investigated. In the ancient Persian civilization they ploughed up the earth, the Egyptians learnt to divide it according to the laws of space, they began to investigate the laws. Still more; they said: “The Gods have not left us a writing in the stars to no purpose, not for nothing have they announced their will to us in the laws of nature. If we wish to accomplish salvation through our own work, then in the arrangements we make here we must produce a copy of what we can discover from the stars.” If you could look back into the laboratories of the Egyptian initiates, you would find a different kind of work from that in the realm of science to-day. At that time the initiates were the scientists. They investigated the courses of the stars, they understood the laws of the position and the orbits of the stars and the influence of their aspects upon what took place below on the earth. They said: “When this or that constellation appears in the heavens, this or that must take place below in the life of the State, and when a different constellation arises, something else must take place. In a hundred years' time certain constellations of a different kind will appear,” so they said, “and then something corresponding to these must take place.” It was predetermined for thousands of years in advance what was to happen. In this way originated what are called the Sibylline books. That which is contained in them is not foolishness; after careful observations the initiates wrote down what was to happen for thousands of years, and their successors knew that this should be carried out, they did nothing which was not indicated in these books for thousands of years according to the courses of the stars. Let us say some law was to be made. They did not at that time vote, as is the case with us; they consulted the sacred books in which was written what should happen here on the earth, so that it might be a mirror of what is written in the stars. They carried out what was written in the books. When the Egyptian priest wrote those books he knew that his successors would carry into effect what was written, for they were convinced of the necessity of law.

Out of this third epoch of civilization developed the fourth. But a few remnants of this prophetic art of the Egyptians have been preserved, such a remnant can still be seen. When they wished to exercise this prophetic art in ancient Egypt, they divided the next age into seven parts and said: “The first must contain this, the second that, the third that,” etc., and this was the plan which succeeding generations carried out. That was the chief characteristic of the third age of civilization.

The fourth contained but faint echoes of it. You may still recognize these in the story of the origin of the ancient Roman civilization. Aeneas, the son of Anchises of Troy, a city which flourished in the third age, set out on his wanderings and came at length to Alba-longa. This name indicates a place where an ancient sacred priestly culture flourished; Alba-longa or the long Alba, the place from which a priestly culture, the culture of Rome was to proceed. We still see the remains of this in the vesture worn by a Catholic priest during the celebration of the Mass. A sevenfold age of culture was sketched out in advance by the priests. The reigns of the seven Roman kings were outlined beforehand. The historians of the nineteenth century have been the victims of a bad joke as regards these seven reigns. They came indeed to the idea that in the secular material sense there is no truth in the story of these Roman kings; but they were unable to discover what lay behind, namely, that this is really a sketch taken from the Sibylline books, of a civilization prophetically drawn out in advance according to the sacred number seven.

This is not the place to go into details regarding the several kings. You would be able to see how the several kings, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, etc., correspond exactly to the consecutive cultural epochs according to the seven principles which present themselves in such different domains.

In the third age man had been able gradually to penetrate Maya with the human mind. This was completed in the fourth age of civilization, the Graeco-Latin, when in the wonderful works of art man produced a perfect image of himself in the outer material world, and portrayed in the drama of Aeschylus, pictures of human fate. Observe on the other hand how in the Egyptian civilization men still sought the will of the Gods. The conquest of matter such as we see in the Greek age signifies another stage, in which man made a step further in love of material existence; and finally in the Roman age he completely entered into the physical world. One who understands this knows also that in this age we must recognize the full appearance of the principle of personality. Hence in Rome first appears what we call the conception of justice, and man as “a citizen.” Only a confused science is able to trace jurisprudence back to all sorts of previous ages. What was previously understood as equity was something quite different. The old law is much more correctly described in the Old Testament in the Ten Commandments. What God commanded belonged to the ancient idea of law. It is absurd in our age to try to trace back the ideas of law to Hamurabi, etc. True equity and the idea of man as a citizen, was first actualized in Rome. In Greece the citizen was still a member of the municipal body. An Athenian or a Spartan counted for much more as an Athenian or a Spartan than as an individual. He felt himself part of the municipality. It was in Rome that the individual first became a citizen; only then had he reached this stage. This could be proved in detail. What we now call a testament or will did not exist in this sense before Roman times. A will or testament in its present meaning first originated at that time, because only then did the separate human being become determinative in his egoistic will, so as to impose his will upon his successors. Previously other impulses than the personal will were present which held the whole together. Thus it could be shown by many examples how man then entered into the physical world as an individual being.

We are now living in the fifth age, when culture has descended even below the level of man. We are living in an age when man is actually the slave of outer conditions., In Greece the mind was employed to spiritualize matter; we see spiritualized matter in the form of an Apollo or a figure of Zeus, in the dramas of a Sophocles, etc.; there man has emerged as far as to the physical plane but has not yet descended below the level of man. Even in Rome this was still the case. The deep descent below the sphere of the human has only just come about. In our age the mind has become the slave of matter. An enormous amount of mental energy has been used in our age to penetrate the natural forces in the outer world for the purpose of making this outer world as comfortable a place as possible for man. Let us compare our age with former ones. In those ancient times man beheld the vast writing of the gods in the stars; but with what primitive means were the attainments of the civilization of that age, the Pyramids, the Sphinxes, produced? How did man in those days procure his food? Think of all the conveniences of civilization man has achieved up to the present day. What an enormous amount of spiritual energy has been expended to invent and build the steam engine, to think out the railway, the telegraph, telephone, etc.! An enormous force of intellect had to be used to invent and construct these purely material conveniences of civilization—and to what end are they used? Does it make any essential difference to the spiritual life, where in an ancient civilization a man crushed his grain between two stones, for which naturally very little mental power was needed, or whether to-day we are able to telegraph to America and obtain thence great quantities of grain and to grand it into flour by means of ingeniously constructed machinery? The whole apparatus is set into motion simply for the stomach. Try to realize what an enormous amount of spiritual life-force is put into purely material culture. Spiritual culture has not yet been advanced very much by these external means. For example, the telegraph is very seldom used in anthroposophical affairs. If you were to make a statistical comparison between that which is used for the material culture and that which benefits the spiritual life, you would understand that the spirit has plunged below the human level and has become the slave of the material life. Thus we have a decidedly descending path of culture, up to our age, the fifth age of civilization, and it would have descended ever more and more deeply. For this reason humanity had to be preserved by a new impulse from slipping completely into matter. The earth-being has never before descended so deeply. A stronger impulse, in fact, the strongest, had to come to the earth. This was the appearance of Christ Jesus, who gave the impulse to new spiritual life. We owe to the mighty impulse which came through Christ Jesus such upward impelling forces as existed in the spiritual life during the descent. There were always spiritual impulses present in this descent into matter. Christian life is only now gradually beginning to develop. In the future it will rise to a transcendent glory, because only then will humanity understand the Gospels. When these are fully understood it will be seen what an enormous amount of spiritual life they contain. The more they are disseminated in their true form, the more will it be possible for humanity, in spite of all material culture, to develop a spiritual life and rise again into spiritual worlds.

Now that which develops from age to age in the post-Atlantean epoch is represented by the writer of the Apocalypse as being expressed in small communities. These small communities, divided in space in the external world, represent to him these cultural epochs. When he speaks of the community or Church at Ephesus he intends the following: “I assume that at Ephesus there was a community which accepted Christianity in a certain sense; but as everything develops only gradually, there is always something remaining from each cultural epoch. In Ephesus we have indeed a school of initiates, but the Christian teaching is there coloured in such a way that we can still recognize every-where the ancient Indian civilization.” He wishes to show us the First Post-Atlantean Age. Hence this first age he represented by the community at Ephesus, and that which is to be announced is to be communicated by letter to the community at Ephesus. We must represent it approximately thus: The character of that remote Indian age of civilization of course remained; it continued in various streams of culture. We find something of this character in the community at Ephesus, which comprehended Christianity in such a way that it was still determined by the typical character of the ancient Indian civilization.

Thus in each of these letters we have a representative of one of the seven post-Atlantean ages of civilization. In each letter it is said: “Ye are so and so. This and that side of your nature is in accordance with Christianity, but the rest must become different.” The writer of the Apocalypse says to each cultural epoch what may be retained, and what no longer harmonizes and should become different.

Let us see whether the seven consecutive letters really contain something corresponding with the character of the seven consecutive cultural epochs. Let us try to understand what the tenor of these letters would have to be if they were to correspond with what has just been said. The writer thinks: In Ephesus is a community, a church; it has accepted Christianity but colours it with the tone of the first cultural epoch—strange to external_ life, not filled with love for that which is the real task of post-Atlantean humanity. The one who directs this letter to the community is satisfied that they had put away the worship of gross sensuality and turned to the spiritual life. We know what the writer of the Apocalypse means from the circumstance that Ephesus was the place where the Mysteries of the chaste Diana were cultivated; he indicates that the turning away from matter specially flourished there, the renunciation of the sensual life and the turning to the spiritual; but, “I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love,” the love which the first post-Atlantean site should have, which expresses itself in looking upon the earth as the field in which the divine seed must be sown.

How, then, does he who dictates this letter characterize him-self? He describes himself as the forerunner of Christ Jesus, as the leader of the first cultural epoch. Christ Jesus speaks as if through this leader or master of the first age of civilization, that age when the initiates looked up to the spiritual world. He says of himself that he holds the seven stars in his right hand and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are nothing else than symbols for the seven higher spiritual beings who are the leaders of the great ages of civilization. And of the seven candle-sticks we are expressly told that they are spiritual beings who cannot be seen in the sense world. Reference is also made to these in clear words in the Yoga initiation; but he also shows that man never works according to evolution if he hates external works, if he ceases to love external works. The community at Ephesus forsook the love for external works. So it is quite rightly said in the Apocalypse, “Thou hatest the works of the Nicolaitanes.” “Nicolaitanes” is nothing else than a designation for those who express life merely in a material sense. In the time referred to in this letter there was a sect called the Nicolaitanes, who considered the external fleshly sensual life of primary importance. “This you shall not do,” says the one who inspires the first letter. “But do not forsake the first love,” says he also, “for inasmuch as you love the external world you vivify it, you exalt it to spiritual life.” “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear; to him that overcometh will I give to eat not merely of the perishable tree, but of the tree of life.” That is, he will be able to spiritualize the life of the senses and so elevate it to the altar of the spiritual life.

The representative of the second age of civilization is the community or church at Smyrna. The leader of humanity addresses this one through his second ancestor, the inspirer and master of the ancient Persian civilization. The mental attitude of the ancient Persian was as follows: “There was once the God of Light who had an enemy, external matter, the dark Ahriman. At first I was united with the Spirit of Light, who first was there. Then I was membered into the world of matter, into which the backward and hostile power, Ahriman, instilled himself; and now, in conjunction with the Spirit of Light, I shall work upon matter and embody the spirit in it. Then, after the evil Deity has been conquered, the good Deity, the Spirit of Light, will reappear.” “I am the first and the last, who is killed in material life and made alive again in the spiritual resurrection.” So we read in the second letter, “I am the First and the Last, Which is, and Which was, and Which is to come, He who has become alive again” (Rev. I, 8). It would lead too far to go through every sentence in this way, but we must consider more closely the sentence which describes minutely how a person stands as a member of the community at Smyrna when he transforms it into the Christian principle. There we read that man gives life to dead matter, that he spiritualizes it. He is not destroyed by it. If he were, then death would be an event loading him to a spiritual life in which the results of this earthly life could have no place. Let us take a person who has not lived his life in such a way that he can gather its true fruits. He takes no fruits with him into the spiritual life. But only from these fruits can he live in the spiritual world. If, therefore, he brought with him no fruits he would experience the “second death.” By working in this earthly field he is saved from the “second death.” “He who hath an ear, let him hear what the spirit saith. He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death” (Rev. ii. 11).

Now we shall pass on to the community at Pergamos. It is the representative of the age when humanity came down more and more to the physical plane, when man saw in the starry script something that his spirit could understand, something that was given him in the third age of civilization. Man works by means of that which is within him. Through his having an inner being he can investigate the outer world. Only because he was gifted with a soul could he investigate the courses of the stars and invent geometry. This was called “exploration by the word,” and is expressed in the Apocalypse by the “ sword of my mouth.” Hence the one who caused this letter to be written, points out that the power of this age is an incisive word, a sharp two-edged sword. It is the Hermes word of the old priests, the word by which the powers of nature and the stars were explored in the old sense. That was the civilization gained primarily by means of the inner astral soul-forces of man in the physical world. If it were still achieved in that old form, it would verily be a two-edged sword, for then wisdom would be perilously near the edge between white and black magic, between that which leads to blessedness and that which ends in destruction. Therefore he says he well knows that where the representatives of this age dwell, there also is Satan's seat. This indicates all that could lead astray from the really great purposes of evolution; and the teaching of Balaam is none other than the teaching of the black magicians. For that is the teaching of the devourers of the people. The devourers of the people, the destroyers of the people, are the black magicians who work only in the service of their own personality and therefore destroy all brotherhood, they devour everything which lives in the people. But the good side in this civilization consists in man's beginning to purify and transform his astral body. This is called the “hidden manna.” That which is merely for the world, transformed into the food of the gods, that which is only for the egotistical man transformed into the divine, is called the “hidden manna.” All the symbols here indicate that man purifies his soul so as to make himself into the pure vehicle of Manas or the Spirit Self. To this end, however, it is still necessary to pass through the fourth age of civilization, for then the Saviour appears, Christ Jesus himself.

The community at Thyatira. Here he announces himself as the “Son of God,” who has “eyes like flames of fire and feet like brass.” He now announces himself as the Son of God. He is now the leader of the fourth age of civilization, when man has descended to the physical plane, when he has created his image even in the media of external culture. The period has now come when the Deity himself becomes man, becomes flesh, becomes person; the age in which man descended to the stage of personality, where in the sculptures of the Greeks the individualized Deity appears as personality, where in the Roman citizen personality comes into the world. At the same time this age had to receive an impulse through the Divine appearing in human form. Man, who had descended, could only be saved through God Himself appearing as man. The “I Am” or the “I” in the astral body had to receive the impulse of Christ Jesus. That which previously only existed as a germ, the “I” or the “I Am,” was to appear in history in the outer world. The Son of God may therefore, as the leader of the future, say, “And all the churches shall know the ‘I Am,’ which searches the minds and hearts” (Rev. ii. 23). Stress is here laid upon the “I Am,” upon the fourth principle of the human being. “As I have received from my Father; and I will give him the morning star” (Rev. ii. 28). What does the morning star mean? We know that the earth passes through the conditions of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. That is the way it is usually expressed, and it is quite correct. But I have already pointed out that the Earth-evolution is divided into the Mars period and the Mercury period on account of the mysterious connection existing in the first half of the earth-evolution between the earth and Mars, and in the second half between the earth and Mercury, so that in the place of Earth (the fourth period of evolution) we some-times put Mars and Mercury. We say that the earth in its evolution passes through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. And the most potent stellar force in the second half of the earth is seen in Mercury. Mercury is the star representing the directional force, the upward tendency in which man must be enveloped. Here I come to a point where a little secret, so to say, must be unveiled, one which may only be divulged at this point. The teachers of spiritual wisdom have always had what might be called a mask for those who would only have misused it, especially in bygone times. They did not express themselves directly, but presented something which was intended to conceal the true state of affairs. Now the esotericism of the Middle Ages resorted to drastic measures and called Mercury Venus, and Venus Mercury. In truth if we wish to speak esoteric-ally, as the writer of the Apocalypse has done, we must speak of Mercury as the morning star. By the morning star he meant Mercury. “I have given the direction upwards to thine ‘I’ or ego, to the morning star, to Mercury.” You may still find in certain books of the Middle Ages which describe the true state of affairs, that the outer stars of our planetary system are enumerated thus: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, and then comes, not as it is now, Venus, Mercury, but the reverse, Mercury, Venus. Therefore it says here, “Even as I received of my Father. And I will give him the morning star” (Rev. ii. 27, 28).

And now we have come to our own epoch, the one to which we belong and have to ask: Is this Revelation fulfilled right into our own age? Were it to be fulfilled, he who has spoken through the four preceding ages would have to speak to us, and we should have to learn to understand his voice and become familiar with our task for the spiritual life. If there is to be a spiritual movement and if it is to understand the mysteries of the universe, then, in so far as it is to agree with the Revelation of John, it must fulfil what the speaker, this great Inspirer, demands of this age. What does he demand and who is he? Can we know him? Let us try. (Rev. iii. 1): “And unto the Angel of the Church in Sardis write.” (We must feel that we ourselves are spoken to here.) “These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars.” What are the seven Spirits and the seven stars?

In accordance with the concept of the writer of the Apocalypse, man as we know him is an outer expression of the seven human principles we have enumerated. These are the principle of the physical body, of which the external physical body is the expression, the principle of the life body whose expression is the etheric body, the principle of the astral body. This last when transformed yields Spirit Self, the transformed etheric body, Life Spirit, and the transformed physical body, Spirit Man; in the centre is the “I”-principle. These are the seven spiritual constituents in which the divine nature of man is displayed as in the members of a leader. According to the technical expression used in occultism these seven principles are called the seven Spirits of God in man. And the seven stars are those from which we understand what man is to-day and what he is to become in the future. The consecutive stars of the incarnations of the earth, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, are the seven stars which make the evolution of man comprehensible. Saturn gave to man the plan for his physical body, the Sun that of his etheric body, the Moon that of his astral body, and the Earth has given him the “I” or Ego. The next three—Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan—develop the spiritual being of man. If we understand the call of the spirit who has these seven stars and the seven Spirits of God, the sevenfold nature of man in his hand, then we shall be studying Anthroposophy in the sense of the writer of the Apocalypse. To study Anthroposophy is to know that the writer is here referring to the fifth age of human evolution in the post-Atlantean epoch, to know that in our age, when man has descended most deeply into matter, we are again to ascend to spiritual life by following the great individuality who gives for our guidance the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars, in order that we may rightly proceed on our path.

And if we follow this path we shall bring into the sixth age the true spiritual life of wisdom and of love. The spiritual wisdom we have acquired will become the impulse of love in the sixth age, which is represented by the community expressing itself even in its name, the community of brotherly love, or Philadelphia. All these names are carefully chosen. Man will develop his “I” to the necessary height, so that he will become independent and in freedom show love towards all other beings in the sixth age, which is represented by the community at Philadelphia. In this way the spiritual life of the sixth age will be prepared. We shall then have found the individual “I” within us in a higher degree, so that no external power can any longer play upon us if we do not wish it; so that we can close and no one without our will can open, and if we open no opposing power can close. These are the Keys of David. For this reason he who inspires the letter says that he has the key of David: And to the Angel of the community in Philadelphia write: These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth and no man openeth. ... Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it” (Rev. iii. 7)—the “I” that has found itself within itself.

In the seventh age those who have found this spiritual life will flock around the great Leader; it will unite them around this great Leader. They will already belong so far to the spiritual life that they will be distinguished from those who have fallen away, who are lukewarm, “neither cold nor hot.” The little flock which has found spirituality will understand him who may then say, when he makes himself known, “I am he who contains in himself the true final Being towards which everything is steering.” For this final Being is described by the word, Amen. “And unto the Angel of the church of Laodicea write: Thus saith the Amen, he who in his being presents the nature of the end” (Rev. iii. 14).

So we see that in the Apocalypse of John is presented the contents of an initiation. Even the first stage of this initiation, where we see the inner progress of the seven post-Atlantean ages, where we still see the spirit of the physical plane, shows us that we are dealing with an initiation of the Will. For this book can inspire our will at the present time when we know that we ought to listen to the inspirers who teach us, when we learn to under-stand what the seven stars and the seven Spirits of God signify, when we learn that we ought to carry the spiritual knowledge into the future.

This is the 6th of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, in the Autumn of 1908 through the Spring of 1909. The title of the series of lectures is: Spiritual-Scientific Anthropology/Knowledge of Man.

Today we will consider some things already known to you from a certain side. But in all theosophical questions, we only fully penetrate them when they are illuminated from different aspects. And within the theosophical stream here in our central European regions, things are discussed which are drawn from the most advanced occult investigations, and which can thus be easily misunderstood. On the other hand, however, we should not advance if we did not venture for once to speak about such things quite plainly. Just call to mind that if we go back in human evolution, through the various epochs of the post-Atlantean age, as far back as Atlantis, and then back to the older periods even in Atlantis—that then, if we turn our spiritual gaze on the events of that time, we find quite different forms of humanity.

In the last third of the Atlantean epoch the etheric body was still, to a certain extent, outside the physical body. The head of the etheric body was not yet united with the forces of the physical body, which are the forces of the ego, of self-consciousness. If we observe the process lying behind this we can say: progressive evolution consists in the widely extending etheric head withdrawing into the physical head. If we see a horse today, then the etheric head of the horse extends beyond the physical head. I have also told you what a gigantic organization the etheric parts of the elephant form, which stretch far, far beyond the physical body—quite a house, so to say. So, with man, too, in the Atlantean age, the etheric body was still outside, and gradually entered in more and more. Such an entry of a more rarefied member into a denser one brings about, at the same time, a densification of what is physical. The physical head of man before the last third of the Atlantean age thus appeared quite different from what it did later. And if we went still further back into the last Lemurian times, then one would see spiritually very little of the physical head. It existed first in a quite soft, transparent matter. Only through the gradual entry of the etheric head, through the gradual assimilation of substances, parts of the head become densified, and thus separated from their environment. Even in the later Atlantis man was still endowed, to an extraordinary degree, with what has been retained—but as a pathological state—as water on the brain, as a watery brain. In addition to this we have to think of a softening of the bones, a complete softening of the upper members of man. That sounds terrible for modern man. That which today forms the human head, and surrounds it, hardened out of this watery substance. The comparison I sometimes give is not altogether inept: the crystallizing of salt from a salt solution, in a glass. It gives a fairly correct idea, this crystallizing from a watery salt solution. What thus took place as regards the head at a later time, occurred with the rest of man at a much earlier time.

All the other members gradually developed out of a soft mass, so that we can say: Where was the human ego then, in reality? Where was the present ego? It was not really within man at that time but still in his environment. We can say: the upper members of man harden through the entry of the egos. Because the ego was outside man, it was still endowed with a quality which later became different. Through entering the physical body, the ego was enabled to become an individual I, whereas before it was still a kind of group soul.

I will here give a picture of the facts of the case. Imagine a circle of twelve men are sitting somewhere. These twelve men are sitting in a circle. Through evolution as it is today, each of these men has his ego within himself. Thus twelve egos are sitting in this circle. Let us consider such a circle of men in the Atlantean age; then the physical bodies sat thus around, but the ego is only in the etheric body which is still outside. The ego is thus to be found in front of each one. This ego, however, has another characteristic. It is not so centralized. It develops, as it were, its forces and unites with the egos of the other men so that they form a ring which again sends its forces towards its centre. Thus we have here an etheric circular body which forms a unity in itself, and within it, the egos. Thus there is a circle of physical bodies, and within an etheric circular surface, which forms a unity because the egos are caught up in it, and the single ego is enclosed. Through this image we come to a pictorial idea of the group souls.

If we go further back, then we can keep this image, but we must not imagine such a regular circle of men; these human beings can be scattered in the world in the most manifold way. Let us imagine one in west France, another in the east of America, etc.—that is to say, not sitting together. Where the laws of the spiritual world are in question the egos can still be connected, although the human beings are scattered over the world. These human beings form, then, this “round.” That which is formed through the flowing together of their egos is not indeed such a beautifully formed etheric body, but still it is a Unity. Thus a group of people existed at that time, who were united because their egos formed a unity—and indeed, there were actually four such group egos. You must imagine these human beings in accordance with the laws of the spiritual world. The group souls of the four groups passed into each other. They were not inwardly united, but passed into each other. One calls these four group souls by the names of the apocalyptic beasts: Bull, Eagle, Lion, Man. The Man, however, was at another stage of evolution than the man of today. The names are taken from the organization of the group souls. Why could one call them thus? I should like to make that clear today from another aspect.

Let us place ourselves as vividly as possible in the early ages of Lemurian life. The souls which today are incarnated in human bodies had not yet descended as far as the physical bodies. They had not yet the tendency to unite themselves with physical matter. Even the bodies which later were to become human bodies were very, very animal-like. The most grotesque physical beings were on earth, which would even seem grotesque compared with what we should call today the most grotesque creatures. Everything was still in a soft, slippery form—seething, watery, or fiery—human beings, as well as the environment. Among these grotesque forms were already, of course, the ancestors of the human physical bodies, but these were not yet taken possession of by the egos. The four group souls, whom we have already characterized as four group souls before the entry of the spirit into the physical organization, actually represented four egos who waited to incarnate—such egos as were adapted to quite special forms, which were down there below. One category was adapted to enter the organizations already existing physically, in quite definite shapes, another category to enter another. The forms which were below must correspond in their formation, in a certain way, to the kinds of egos which waited. There were forms existing which were especially adapted to receive the Lion egos, others the Bull egos, etc. That was in a very early age of earth evolution. Now consider that the group soul we have called the Bull soul enters quite definite forms which are there below. These have a quite definite appearance. Similarly, the Lion soul was drawn to other special forms.

Thus what is physical on earth shows us a fourfold picture. The one group especially develops the organs whose functions coincide more with those of the heart. They were organized one-sidedly in the heart nature; an especially aggressive, courageous, attacking element was in them. They were courageous, self-assertive, sought to overcome the others—were, as it were, already conquerors, born as conquering natures even in their form. They were those in whom the heart, the seat of the ego, had been made strong. In others, the organs of digestion, of nourishment, of procreation, were especially developed. In the third group, it was especially the organs of movement. In the fourth group, these tendencies were equally shared—both the courageous, aggressive, and the tranquil—which comes through the development of the digestive organs. Both were developed. The group in which the aggressive quality belonging to the organization of the heart was specially developed, formed the human beings whose group soul belonged to the Lion. The second group was that of the Bull. The third group, with the mobile element that does not wish to know much of the earth, belongs to the group soul of the Eagle. They are the ones who can raise themselves above what is earthly. And those in whom these things were held in equilibrium belonged to the group soul “Man.” Thus we have, in due form, the projection of the four group souls into the physical. At that time, a quite peculiar sight would have offered itself to the observer. One would have found one kind of race, of which someone with a prophetic gift could have said: Those are physical beings who remind one somewhat of the lion, who reproduce the character of the lion, even though they looked different from the lion of today. They were lion-hearted people, aggressive human germs. Then again there was a group of bull like people, everything adapted to the physical plane. You can easily complete for yourselves the third and fourth races. The third race was already strongly visionary. While the first were combative, while the second cultivated everything connected with the physical plane and working it over, you would have found the third class of people, who were very visionary. As a rule, they had something which, in relation to the other bodies, was misshaped. They would have reminded you of people who have much psychism and believe in visions, and because they do not bother much about the physical, have something dried up, something stunted compared with the abundant force of the other two groups. They would have reminded you of the bird nature. “I will hold back my Spirit,” that was the tendency of the eagle men. The others had something which, as it were, was mixed out of all the parts. Something else must be added to this.

If we go so far back as to meet with these conditions on the earth, then we must also bear in mind that everything that happened in the course of earth evolution, occurred in such a way that the affairs of the earth were regulated from out of the spiritual world. Everything was a detour in order to arrive at the man of today. One who could have seen more deeply into these things, could have made the experience that these lion natures (who reminded one of what we see today in quite another way in the lion body) developed a special attractive force for the male forms of the etheric bodies. These felt themselves especially drawn to the lion men, so that these were beings who had outwardly a lion body—inwardly, however, a male etheric body. There was a powerful etheric being with a male character, and a small part of this etheric being densified itself to the physical lion body. The bull race, however, had a special attractive force for the female etheric body. Thus the bull body had the special force to attract the female etheric body and unite with it. And now think further—the etheric bodies go on continually working, penetrating and transforming. The relation of the lion-like men to the bull-like was especially important in older times. The others come less into consideration. The male etheric bodies which crystallized a physical lion body out of themselves, had the power of fructifying the physical lion body itself, so that the procreation of humanity was especially cared for by the lion-like race. It was a kind of fructification from out of the spiritual, a non-sexual procreation. The bull race, however, could also bring about the same thing. That which had become physical worked back here on the female etheric body. In the course of evolution, the process fashioned itself differently. Whereas the lion nature retained this mode of procreation, since the fructifying force came from above, out of the spiritual, whereas here this process intensified, the other process was drive more and more back. The bull humanity became more and more unfruitful. The result was that on the one side there was a humanity which was maintained by fructification, on the other side, another half which became more and more unfruitful. The one side became the female sex, the other the male. The modern female physical nature has in fact a male etheric body, whereas the etheric body of the man is female. The physical body of the woman has proceeded from the lion nature, whereas the physical bull-body is the ancestor of the male body.

The spiritual in man has a common origin, is neutral, and first entered the physical body when the sexes had already differentiated. Only then was the spirit taken hold of, and only then the head hardened. The etheric body of the head united for the first time with the physical body; it was all the same to it whether it joined on to a male or female body, since both sexes were the same for it.

We must say that woman, so long as we look away from what in general transcends this differentiation, has, through her evolution, something lion-like in her nature. One will certainly find this hidden courage. The woman can develop inner courage; e.g. in war, in the care of the sick, in order to work in the service of humanity. The male physical body has that which in the true sense we can call the bull nature. That is connected with the fact that the man, as he is usually organized, has more of the activity based on physical creation. Occultly regarded, these things reveal themselves precisely thus, even if it sounds extraordinary. You thus see how these group souls have worked together. They so work that the lion and bull group souls cooperate in their work. These divine beings cooperate and, in the man of today, the labours of the different divine group souls are concealed.

These pictures which I have here put before you, in outline, will certainly have their effect. If you follow humanity ever further back, to the time when no procreation was yet possible, then we must say: The external physical female body changes into something which was lion like, whereas the male body was bull-like. Such things, however, must be taken in a holy, earnest sense, if we will understand them aright. It would be easy for those who have studied human anatomy, to deduce the anatomical differences between the physical bodies of man and woman from these lion- and bull-natures. Physical science will be utterly fruitless and only describe external facts as long as it does not penetrate into the spirit of these facts. Now it will no longer appear so strange to you that once a race of people existed who had a lion-like body. These took up the ego nature, and through this the lion nature was changed more and more into the female body. Those who received nothing of this spiritual element changed in quite another way; i.e., into the modern lion, and what is related with it. We will deal another time with the reason why these animals too are bisexual. Those who shared nothing of spirituality formed the modern lion, whereas those who did so developed the modern female body. In the course of time many, many other aspects of these things can be shown. Theosophical learning is not like the mathematical. First it was shown, for instance, that there exist four group souls of which only the names are at first given. Then some or other aspect is chosen, and the matter is illuminated from outside. And so we approach continually from another side. We go around what is first presented, and illuminate it from the most diverse aspects. Whoever grasps this will never be able to say that theosophical matters contradict each other. This is also the case, even in the greatest things we consider. The differences come from the various standpoints from which one observes the matter. Let us take with us from this gathering what one might call inner tolerance. May we succeed in our special theosophical stream in bringing this inner spirit of tolerance into the theosophical movement. Let us take that with us as a content of feeling and try and work externally in such a way that this spirit of the most inner understanding may become effective.

We have followed the evolution of mankind back as far as Atlantis and will now proceed to the study of Lemuria and speak of the Lemurian human forms. These human beings are the first representatives of real men with bodies permeated by souls. Let us first consider the structure of the Lemurian continent and the type of human being who lived on it.

In the Lemurian age everything was filled with the kind of watery mass, out of which emerged islands which were all of a volcanic kind. Typical for Lemuria is the manifold change in Nature, in the forms and in life. The single forms and species underwent a rapid transformation. The Atlantean soul-characteristics were in the case of the Lemurians, still more strongly marked, especially the will, which also had the greatest influence on the form of the physical body. This consisted only of gelatinous, transparent substances, into which the present bones and muscles had still to be built in. An organ which plays a very great role to-day was then in its very first beginnings. This is very significant, for with the development of the lungs is connected the fact that man was endowed with a living soul.

This installment did not happen in a moment, but lasted throughout long epochs of time.—How was the human soul connected with the body, before giving life to this body which, according to present-day concepts was very misshapen? It was the same connection which now exists during sleep: the soul was outside the body, it soared above it and drew it with it to an earth which was at that time still permeated by powerful streams of life.

The Lemurian constantly lived in a sleep-like condition which may be compared with our dream-consciousness in which a living image-world appears. He could only perceive in this manner and he knew the meaning of the single images, thus recognizing the soul-aspect of things.

An important moment in evolution was when he first used his body for the purpose of perception. The human being moved about in swinging, soaring movements. For this purpose he had a special organ in his bodily cavity, a kind of swimming bladder. The lungs developed out of this bladder, under the influence of the soul that soared above the body. The soul entered the human body in the same measure in which man began to breathe through his lungs. He actually breathed in his soul, with the air he breathed. This process too is described with literal accuracy in Genesis, in the Six Days' Creation, with the words: And God breathed his breath into man and he became a living soul ...

At that time man had the outward appearance of a very soft-bodied dragon (the designation of snake does not quite correspond to the reality); his companions were toads, fish, frogs, etc., in short, a primeval world of reptiles and amphibians, though their present-day descendants can in no way be compared with them; for they are quite degenerate descendants. At that time there were no mammals. To-day no remains can be found either of these reptiles or of the human beings of that age.

How should the relation between animal and man be tought of? The theory of man's ascent from apes may be considered as obsolete, for it is based upon a false train of thought. Think of a morally degenerate and of a highly ethical man. The assertion that man is descended from apes is like saying that the perfect man descends from the imperfect one. They need not descend from one another at all, but they may have a common father and be brothers! The one developed upwards, the other became decadent. Also the relation between ape and man may be viewed in this light. On Atlantis, the human form was still ape-like. During the Lemurian age the sole possession of a body which was even less perfect. This body then took an upward course of development. But the ape-like forms have partly degenerated and have become the apes of to-day. The apes are therefore the degenerated bodily brothers of man.

In the Atlantean age the human race branched out; the one main stem to an ascending development and became the human being of to-day, whereas the other descended and became the ape of to-day. All animals which live among us are consequently human beings who were expelled and condemned to degeneration. The ascent of certain beings is only possible through the fact that others sacrifice themselves. The higher expels the lower, in order to rise still higher; later on there will be a compensation for those who were expelled.

In this connection we must speak of a cosmic event of greatest importance, without which the soul could never have incarnated. This is the exit of the moon from the earth. The moon severed itself from the earth and formed a secondary planet. Formally, moon and earth were one planet. Thus the evolution of the Earth and the evolution of man are closely connected. What the astronomer sees of the moon, is not the whole moon, for everything in the world also has a soul. So also the moon has its soul. The moon went out of the earth with all its forces, with its whole aura, or its astral part.

This event stands in closest connection with everything which one calls fecundation and procreation. The ancient Greek Mysteries still knew this. In the Lemurian age the sexes began to separate; before that time the human beings were hermaphrodites. There was no act of fecundation and conception; procreation took place in a manner which has been preserved in certain lower living beings. The separation of the sexes coincided with the separation of the moon. This applies to all living beings. At that time, certain forces were eliminated from the earth, which had given man the possibility to bring forth descendants without the aid of another being. These forces were eliminated through the exit of the moon. At that time earth plus moon circled round the sun. But the moon maintained the old movement of the earth-moon planet, for it does not turn around its own axis as does the earth. Even as the moon of to-day always turns the same side to the earth, its “sun” and never the back side, so at that time the earth-moon planet always turned the same side to the sun.

Sun, moon and planets are also inhabited by beings. In a still earlier time, sun, moon, and earth were one body, and everything which now exists in the form of human beings, animals and plants, still lived together with sun. At that time man still had a quite etheric form of a very fine substance and he lived a kind of plant-existence. Animal forms and human forms arose much later, for at that time everything still stood at one stage of planned-existence.

These sun-plants were of course entirely different from the plants of to-day. Nevertheless when they say with their blossom they strove towards the center of the planet, i.e. the sun, and that their roots stretched upwards. When the sun severed itself from the earth, the plants turned completely around and again turned their blossom to the sun. From that time onwards the blossom stretched upwards and the root downwards. the animals only made a right-angle turn, when the moon left the earth.¹ Man made a complete turn, so that he is a reversed plant, even as the plant is a reversed human being.

The life-soul passes through the three kingdoms of Nature. Plato therefore says that the world-soul is nailed on to the cross of the world. Also the human soul hangs on that cross, by passing through the three realms of Nature. This is the significance of the Cross in the ancient Mysteries.

From the world-historical aspect, the whole process of development exists for the sake of man. Life can only arise out of life, but life eliminates the lifeless. Everything lifeless has arisen out of life. The minerals are deposits of living substance. But life comes from the spirit. The spirit is consequently the first original source, from which everything descends. And man is the first-born of creation. He has thrown out animals, plants and minerals; the lower always comes from higher.

To-morrow we shall speak of the development of man towards higher stages of knowledge.

• 1. See in this connection: Rudolf Steiner: “Goetheanismus, ein Menschen-Umwandlungsimpuls und Auferstehungsgedanke” 1st Lecture: Die Antwort der Geistwissenschaft auf die wichtigsten Fragen der Zeit. (Philes.Anthrop.Publish. Company, Dornach)

A seer such as the writer of the Apocalypse can already see the future evolution of humanity in the astral world. What will enter into evolution after the war of all against all is already being prepared. Those human beings called to carry evolution into the future, beyond the war of all against all, are already being prepared through the wisdom taught in Theosophy. In far-reaching ways, the spiritual stream of wisdom will become increasingly effective.

When the clairvoyant can observe the modern human being, it sees the etheric body extending a little bit beyond the upper part of the physical body. The etheric body of a man is feminine and the etheric body of a woman is masculine. The astral body, on the other hand, is a flowing structure, variable in terms of color and form, changeable according to the inner life. If we raise our hand the impulse to do so comes from the astral body. When we walk, when we cry or laugh—that is caused by an impulse in the astral body having influence over the physical body. However, what has the most essential influence on human beings is their I. The I works in an altogether roundabout way through the astral body.

In ancient Atlantean times and in the Lemurian age, human beings were not only able to stretch out their different bodies, but they could also extend and “puff” them up. At that time the physical body was only a very small inclusion; on the other hand, the etheric and astral bodies were gigantic. The astral body might look like one kind of animal but was constantly changing and soon resembled another. Human beings constantly changed their physical form according to the desires and impulses living within them. The air then was filled with thick foggy mists much thicker and water-filled than our mountain fog. The human physical body had the most varied colorings and forms; one could already see in its gelatinous substance indications of the physical organization, for example the blood system and the skeleton. Toward the end of Atlantis the air was cleared of thick watery masses. Only then could human beings become the creatures of air and earth that we are today. Atlanteans did not see the sun at all the way it is seen today; it was seen as the mighty ring of the sun. Because the air was never free of water, there were never any rainbows. Only after the separation of water and air were rainbows possible. The entire process of the Atlantean flood is portrayed in the story of Noah and the rainbow. (Genesis 9:12–17)

It was also necessary for the beings on the earth to pass through their stages of evolution at very different times. If a portion of humanity in the early stages of Atlantis had not wanted to descend into a “densified” physical body, then the human form would have remained as it was—with all the instincts, desires, and passions still expressed in the physical form. However, there were beings that became solid, hardened at that time. Animals are nothing more than beings that entered into a hardened, dense condition too early. What the human being carries in the astral body today in terms of desires and passions has come to expression in the physical body of the various animals. Each of the groups of animals developed a particular instinct, and is “congealed” or solidified in it. During the Lemurian age it was the mammals; they are human passions that have congealed into a rigid form. What we carry within ourselves presents itself as a picture in the various animals. With human beings, the instincts have been gradually refined and we can hide them in our heart. The lowest instincts of the human being were first to fall into the physical world during eruptions of natural forces in the earlier times of Lemuria. The apes represent, so to speak, the last lower instincts to fall or be pushed into physical matter before the soul of the human being was itself hardened in matter. With some animals, horses for example, we still find today as a peculiarity the etheric body of the head extending beyond the physical head. That was the case with Atlantean human beings. A certain point in the human etheric body moved into the corresponding part of the physical body only in the last third of the Atlantean age. Only then were human beings able to develop a physical form appropriate for the spirit.

There are sixteen groups of human instincts and passions and so too, are there sixteen groups of animals. Zoology will one day understand how these sixteen groups were gradually “precipitated out” of the spiritual world. We can easily say how the various parts of the mammal groups were created. The formation of hoofs, for example, occurred when, in a very special way, animal nature closed off from the outer world. Claws were created through aggression. The hoofed animals express a very different stage of evolution than animals with claws. We see just such a contradiction expressed in the forms of the centaur and the sphinx.

This is portrayed in the second part of Faust, a very important book from the occult point of view. The Sphinx encounters Mephistopheles and laughs at him because of his horse hooves, which are a sign of a hardened nature, a nature that has egotistically closed itself off from the world.

If we cut our finger we feel pain; this shows us the bearer of feelings, the astral body. Earlier, when the human being's entire nature was still soft, the hair growth was also permeated by astral forces. We are told of Esau that he was covered with hair; he was still retarded in his development and in his power of judgment. For this reason Jacob could trick him, because Jacob had already come further in the development of his power of judgment, of his I. There are forces again working outward in human beings today. The more the I has mastery over the astral body, the more the physical body can also be molded and transformed. Today we have our karma within us like a life account, with a balance of everything we have prepared in our various incarnations. But because the human being's physical nature expresses very little of the I, we carry our karma inwardly and unmediated. But later it will show itself on the human face. Humankind will evolve in the future so that its karma is carried on the countenance. No longer will the fact that a human being is born into a specific race or in a specific climate be decisive for external appearances. There will be rather a class of good people and a class of evil people. Let us understand Paul correctly, who said: “I live, but it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me.” (Gal. 2:20) What is called “receiving the Yahweh-Christ being” will later show itself in human beings externally. Today it is still possible to be a rogue and yet hide it; but in the future, human beings will carry the mark of their inner life on their foreheads.

Let us look at the human being after the war of all against all. We can think of him or her as someone with radiant, good features and a noble benevolent expression. This will become the fate of those who have taken in spiritual impulses at the right time. All moral, intellectual, and spiritual forces will, in the future, confront us visibly in the external features of a human being. What is taken in today will be sealed into souls. After the seventh age, after the war of all against all, they will be unsealed.

That is what the writer of the Apocalypse sees in the seven seals that will gradually be broken. The book with the seven seals is not intended to be like our books or like ancient scrolls. What is intended is a succession of events. The succession of epochs is the concept of the Apocalyptic “books” as, for example, the Evangelist Matthew speaks of the succession of generations, of the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth. Orders of succession are created in this way. The book tells us that the power of the lamb can break the seals.

That gives us an idea of what is intended with the seven seals.